Man spends 5.5 years as a prisoner of war - returns home to find his wife was cheating on him. She takes his kids, house, car, pension and child support.

Many troops came home to a shower of boos and rotting fruit,

No, they really didn't... not at the time.

There were a few incidents, and in certain areas of the country (chiefly in and around Berkeley & SF Bay area) that they were treated rather shabbily. But largely this is an "urban myth" that Hollywood* subsequently latched onto, sensationalized and exaggerated (made it bigger and more dramatic with each subsequent re-telling).

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/04/30/debunking_a_spitting_image/

Now, they also didn't come home to a "ticker tape parade" -- but the plain truth is that THAT really only happened after WWII.

Because despite what you may have learned in your (warped, propaganda filled) school history books, most other wars were (at best) ambiguously supported by the general public, and many of them had rather significant "anti-war" protests -- plus the US veterans of those other wars (whether the Civil War, WWI, Korea, etc) also often came back home to a rather ambiguous and sometimes unsympathetic public.

with illiterate hippies holding banners proclaiming "Baby Killers".

This is even funnier. Most of the hippies were far from being illiterate, in fact the majority of them were middle-class (and often upper middle class) college students (and the chief motive for their anti-war protesting was personal -- the fear of being drafted themselves*).

And the "illiterate" accusation is especially ironic given how you have gotten virtually every point there all so horribly contorted and mixed up.

*Both of the asterisk points are related -- it was largely artsy & political-science major types (the kind of students who are, shall we say "mathematically challended", and who hence had a ridiculously inordinate fear of and later exaggeration of the lottery-based draft) -- and they were mainly in California, and especially the Berkeley/SF Bay area... which is (not surprisingly) the group that a lot of the subsequent 1980's era "Vietnam" filmmakers came from. Per example most people don't realize that the plot/characters & main story underlying "Apocalypse Now" was the fictionalized novel by Joseph Conrad, entitled "Heart of Darkness", which was published in 1899 and was about the Belgian Colony of "The Congo" in central Africa -- that story (rather obviously) had NOTHING to do with 1960's era Vietnam War (other than in the fervent, and some would say propagandistic or even drug-addled minds of the filmmakers).