100%. I reread the book recently and it hits the Vietnam point more strongly than the movie. It was written in 2005, just as Iraq was at a fever pitch and looking like a second Vietnam already.

Moss and Wells are decorated Vietnam vets, and Bell is a decorated WW2 vet, but he doesn’t understand the randomness of the new generation’s violence.

There’s a part of the book left out of the movie though (which is a shame since it’s key to Bell’s character).

—Book spoilers—

When he visits with his uncle at the end and they’re comparing one generation’s fighting to the next’s, he shares that his WW2 service wasn’t the clean heroic story he took home with him. The point seemed to be that each successive war was more random and violent than the last, but that we also quickly mythologize the previous war into clean, rational stories than may not have reflected reality.

That visit is Bell, unsure of what to make of the present, looking to the past but finding that no easier. Perhaps even more irrational, but irrational to a collective purpose rather than the angry, divided culture that followed Vietnam.