The Vietnam War did not end for thousands of soldiers who came back to the States and had difficulty fitting in due to PTSD, nightmares, and a hostile society, many of which were strongly against the war and saw them as murderers, not just kids themselves thrown into deadly battle scenarios. As a result, the transition was incredibly difficult and led to a whole group of people living as outcasts in their own country for being forced to do their patriotic duty. These films brilliantly deal with the PTSD of returning Vietnam War vets and their struggles once they got back home.
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6 Combat Shock
Troma Entertainment
This gritty, nasty, low-budget shocker deals with both the Vietnam War and its after-effects, as we follow a former soldier who suffers from severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He walks around in a daze, not working, not really doing anything but walking and observing the terrible world he lives in. He can’t pay the bills, and he can’t support his wife and their Eraserhead-type monster baby. He sees crime, violence, prostitution, heroin use (in one of the most disturbing scenes in the film), and more vice and brutality in Combat Shock.
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He ends up killing a bunch of local low-level gangsters, realizing that there is no hope for the characters, no way out of their situation. Combat Shock is incredibly grim, one of the most nihilistic movies ever made about the costs of war on the fragile human psyche. The whole movie is tragic and ugly, and the protagonist seems to be trapped in Hell, with horrible memories of the war; there is no humor here, and there is no hope.
5 Rolling Thunder
American International Pictures
In Rolling Thunder, Charles Lane (William Devane) comes homes from the Vietnam War after seven years of service, much of it as a tortured prisoner in a Prisoner of War camp. As soon he returns, he starts isolating himself, talking only with his friend and similarly troubled war buddy Johnny (Tommy Lee Jones). His wife, believing him to be dead, has moved on to another man, but Lane accepts everything stoically, or so it seems.
His luck seems to turn when a big ceremony is held for Lane as a POW survivor, and he is given a large sum of money by a local bank, but a bunch of rotten scumbags invade his house and steal all of it. They shoot him and cut off his hand, which he later replaces with a hook, and murder his son in front of him. When Lane later discovers where the criminals hang out, he and Johnny go there for the purpose of some major payback. Devane’s Lane is a good man in a world brimming with evil, and his time in Vietnam pushes him over the edge into getting some hardcore payback. The film was co-written by Paul Schrader, who also wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.
Like many films dealing with Vietnam or PTSD, Rolling Thunder is bleak; it was so dark that at test screenings “the audience actually got up and tried to physically abuse the studio personnel present among them,” as William Goldman writes in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade. Devane even said that at one test screening, the audience tried to set the theater on fire. Studio heads actually screened the film for psychiatrists to try and understand why test audiences reacted so violently, and would’ve massively cut the film if the creatives didn’t pull it from Fox and take it elsewhere.
4 Jacob’s Ladder
TriStar Pictures
While serving in the Vietnam War, a platoon smokes some marijuana laced with a version of LSD that makes the user violent and aggressive, and mayhem ensues in Jacob’s Ladder, one of the most atmospheric horror movies of all time. The film then moves to the present, 20 or so years later, and all the surviving members of the platoon are having nightmares about a massacre. Tim Robbins plays Jacob, who returns to America after the war and has a terrible time adjusting.
He sees dead people and grotesque images everywhere, and he is losing his mind. Faceless monsters stalk him everywhere. He finds himself sliding into confusion and insanity, so he tries to track down his former platoon mates but still can’t find out what exactly happened that one night when they smoked and everyone got murdered and butchered. Is he the victim of an experimental drug? Is he dead? Is he being haunted or followed? This exciting and terrifying movie contains some amazing images and a nightmarish look at the world that would make Hieronymus Bosch feel at home. Jacob’s Ladder is a brilliant film in every way, worth watching more than once after its ending that changes everything. It is a visually and psychologically horrific movie that perfectly deals with the mental aspects of war trauma.
3 Born on the Fourth of July
Universal Pictures Film
Born on the Fourth of July was directed by Vietnam War veteran Oliver Stone, based on the true story of Ron Kovic, who goes to Vietnam as an enthusiastic patriotic volunteer but returns bitter and confused after he becomes a paraplegic with loss of sexual function. In one of the best Tom Cruise movies, Cruise got his first Oscar nomination for playing Kovac. His character arc is fascinating; he always stands up for what he believes in, but he changes as he learns that he had been taught a bunch of lies about America, communism, the Vietnam War, and the so-called domino effect. He is unable to get along with his family when he gets back, and there are intense arguments as his mother continues to support the war effort while his younger siblings have changed their beliefs.
So Kovic makes a road trip to Mexico where he first seems to find a new identity. He gets involved in making social change, leading up to a disruption at the 1972 Republican Party Convention, where Nixon was easily elected. In one of the most thematically poignant storylines, Kovic is also facing the fact that he shot one of his own men in a friendly fire situation, where it was not possible to see who is a friend and who is a foe, an apt allegory for a former patriotic supporter of the war now questioning America, the military-industrial complex, and who are the feal allies and enemies. Kovic eventually visits the family of the American he shot in order to seek forgiveness, in a powerful scene from a powerful film.
2 First Blood
Orion Pictures
In First Blood, John Rambo returns home as a badly damaged Vietnam Vet who had been trained to survive, kill, and thrive under any circumstances, like a war machine. When Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo appears in the Midwest searching for his friend from the war, he is looked down on as a drifter and a troublemaker in a supposedly virtuous crime-free town. After a violent confrontation with some bad cops and a painful Vietnam flashback he disappears into the woods and the chase is on.
There are dozens of men but just one John Rambo, and when “they drew first blood,” he goes to war against the entire town, which realizes they are in over their heads and ask for help from the federal government. At the end of the film, Rambo makes a heart-wrenching speech about how people would spit on him and treat him like garbage after returning from serving his country. First Blood remains one of the best movies about survival, which mastered the ‘one man against many’ action trope.
1 Taxi Driver
Columbia Pictures
Travis Bickle (played perfectly by Robert De Niro) is a dangerous and disturbed man whose life takes a dive into the dirty filth of the worst neighborhoods of New York in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. He defines himself by his loneliness and his inability to connect to anyone on a personal level. The fact that he is a returning Vietnam War vet is only touched on, such as when he initially applies for his taxi job, but it is the tacit catalyst for his downward spiral into violence, and there is a silent indication that the scars which cover his back are a result of being physically tortured.
He turns to camouflage, healthier food, and rigorous exercise in order to transform himself into what he perceives to be a hero for our time. He writes letters to his parents full of lies about the secret work he does for the government. He trains himself as a warrior and goes on an assassination attempt that goes wrong and leads to one of the most intense killing sprees ever caught on camera. The film is a shattering exploration of life for people who returned from Vietnam with PTSD and other problems, and one of the greatest cinematic meditations on deteriorating mental health and violence.
If you or someone you know is suffering from PTSD and would like to get help, you can contact the Veteran Affairs’ National Center for PTSD.
