You got out in 1969, the year that Nixon took office, Carter took office in 1977, years after the Vietnam withdrawal and even the formal end of the war.
I don’t know how you think that the Vietnam vets were leaving the military in 1977 instead of 1973 and 1974.
Carter killed the auto industry too, but some of that was self-inflicted, some of that was the result of bad Nixon-Ford policies. But I remember the Carter malaise quite well.
I commuted from Indy to Kokomo every day in the summer of 1980 to work a commercial construction job. We were the only construction job in Kokomo that summer. Every day, laid off auto workers would come by looking for any type of work and got turned away. The local electricians on the job worked as slow as they could; they knew when that job was done, there wasn’t another one waiting.
The locals didn’t care much for us Indy folk being there taking jobs they thought they should have.