 Michael
Cunningham
Chicago, Illinois
General manager, Café Ba-Ba-Reeba! - He volunteered to go to Vietnam in May 1969, serving as an Army combat military policeman
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 "The main thing that was disturbing about being over there was what was happening back home because that would always filter in, the demonstrations and everything back home. That was hard to stomach and that was hard to understand. … I’d hope you could imagine being in Vietnam and taking a year to a year and a half out of your life to be over there, and then seeing a picture of Jane Fonda on an anti-aircraft gun in North Vietnam at the same time."
Several days after he arrived back in the U.S., he went to a party. "A few people asked in a group of about 10, where I’d been. When I told them I went to Vietnam, I just remember the room going silent. And it was a very uncomfortable feeling to me and I can still remember that. It wasn’t a good silence. The people weren’t looking at me; there was no acknowledgment of, ‘Oh, you went to Vietnam’ or any discussion of it. … You did not freely discuss that you were in Vietnam and that didn’t change probably until probably ’74 and ’75. … It wasn’t a badge of honor or anything that you were in Vietnam. You didn’t discuss it. That made it hard because you were gone a year and a half, and all the feelings and emotions had to stay bottled up."
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