The psychological adjustment of normal people during a year's tour in Vietnam

Conclusion and summary

Much of what has been said is not new, or at least does not come as a surprise to many readers. Nevertheless, there has been a rather neglected need to view each person's adaptation to powerful affectual issues of separation and abandonment, fears of death and disfigurement, and the experience of frustration in the continuum of the person's earlier adaptive experiences. We are trying to see the ways people in Vietnam continually have to buttress themselves against the waves of strong internal reactions to external stresses which have presented themselves to us from early on in life.

The writer has offered a general framework for thinking about the way that these major issues come into play. Ordinarily, we study the pathological to gain better understanding of the normal. In this essay we have examined the normal with the hope that it may shed further light on the pathological symptoms of stress which develop in people serving a tour in Vietnam.