When I came back the country was in a really sorry state. Virtually everyone from my generation that didn't go into the military, was against the military. Fortunately my basic antisocial attitude meant that I really didn't give a sh@t. But a lot of other people did. And I have buried too many friends from the effects of alcohol and drugs.
I don't know the percentage, but a lot of them are gone.
Truthfully, we didn’t know ourselves. About 6 months ago someone asked, and our members started digging for the numbers. All of those in post-8 came directly from DOD or DVA, or from the Institute of Medicine data.
All of that infromation is open sourced, and one of our members was a quality control engineer and quite familiar with statistical analysis.
From what we’ve found lately, the rate of death is accelerating among veterans who served in the Vietnam area of operations, as opposed to those who served elsewhere at the same time.