A FilmReference.com article noted that American filmmakers "appeared more confident to put Vietnam combat on screen for the first time" during that era.
One stereotype was thinly disguised versions of the real Lieutenant William Calley, notorious as the officer responsible for the My Lai massacre of 1968, the so-called "psycho vets” who were portrayed as bloodthirsty psychopaths who wreak havoc upon their return to the United States.
[2] (B-movies that feature Vietnam veterans with an emphasis on action, violence, and revenge, belong into the exploitation subgenre called "vetsploitation.
[2] The character of Nick Chevotarevich in The Deer Hunter, a once promising young man who as a result of his war experiences is reduced to obsessively and hopelessly playing Russian roulette for the amusement of sadistic Vietnamese gamblers in Saigon, despite the manifest dangers to himself, is one of the best known examples of the "wounded vet" stereotype.
[4] Chevotarevich was drafted into the Army in 1968 and throughout the film is portrayed as a victim, a man who was just incapable of overcoming the damage done to his soul by the war.
[5] Another example of the "wounded vet" archetype was the embittered and paralyzed veteran Luke Martin in the 1978 film Coming Home, whose suffering is redeemed by his winning the love of a good woman, Sally Hyde, the wife of a Marine.
[5] The first half of the film concerns training at Parris island, where an inept and overweight trainee, Leonard Lawrence, is brutally bullied, humiliated and hazed until he snaps, murders the drill sergeant, and then commits suicide.
[8] Muse wrote: "These movies portray the Land of Nam as a cruel, brutal landscape, littered with mutilated bodies and booby-traps, a place where even the women are rigged with explosives.
The absorption of the Amerasian children of war into America argues against any residual charge of American racism, cruelty or heartlessness".
[14] In Vietnam, like all of the other nations of Southeast Asia, the huaren (ethnic Chinese) made up a disproportionate number of the middle-class people, and were widely disliked for their success in business and the professions.
[15] Marchetti wrote: "However, these dramas do not deal with the real problems of the Indochinese diaspora...Ironically, these stories do not use the Vietnamese refugee as a central protagonist.