Fighting the Post traumatic stress, fighting the negative views and thoughts that would have been imposed on them during the war. It would be hard for any of them to just forget hat happened once they returned home.

The soldier themselves were not sure what was going on. This may have been the case because soldiers were constantly being replaced due to injuries or death, so new replacements were clueless. This was a subject of protest, not only protest at loss of innocent life, but protest regarding US military tactics, and how using naive soldiers to fight a war was inevitably going to fail. It also shows that many soldiers simply 'followed the crowd' while in battle - they may have been taught at home that it was wrong to kill, yet their unsureness meant they were more susceptible to peer pressure (or perhaps used it as an excuse)

The average age in WW2 was 25, according to the song. This serves to show the strong contrast between WW2 91939-19450 and Vitnam War around 20 years later, suggesting that soldiers were drafted at a muh earlier age in Vietnam than ever before, and this sparked protests.

This is to shock the public of the average age of a soldier in the Vietnam War -nineteen. The average age of soldiers was one of the ethical issues that sparked protests, especially student sit-ins because they were around that age.

Not every member of the public knew what troops were doing in Vietnam, it seemed like such a far, out of the way country; however, in the context of the Cold War, the us was protecting South Vietnam from Communist North Vietnam, as the us, ever sine the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, antagonized communism and wanted to ensure that other Asian countries didn't fall to what had been deemed 'the domino effect'. Vietnam was 'another foreign war' and not well known about by public at home in 1965 because some events in the war were not fully documented by the media, as, although media was starting to become less propaganda based by 1965, it would be until 1968 that media coverage becomes way more controversial. Yet controversy about Vietnam in 1965 was present, and this line suggest thing.