The former did obtain in the late 70s, though I doubt there are too many people in service today who remember those days.  Duty oficers in my unit had to be armed with a .45 and live rounds - against their own troops - and even then there were no-go areas in the barracks.  (One 2LT got boxed into a wall locker and tossed out a 5th floor window onto a spiked iron fence for walking into the wrong room in his barracks.)  OTOH, I think the latter has come to pass.

I really caught this today, listening to a ballgame while on the road.  Everything is about "honoring their service" and not about the original meaning of this holiday (I'm old enough to remember when it was celebrated on May 31, not some random Monday, too.).  For those who may have forgotten, it's to remember and honor the dead.  Unfortunately, the all-volunteer military has divorced the average person from any comprehension of the cost of war, hand-in-hand with the overwhelming advantages we have in both protecting soldiers and getting them evacced when they are wounded.  Were it not for the latter, we probably would have had 3 or 4 times the dead in the past decade-plus of war.

But the family with a dead son, a framed flag, and some pictures and letters is now both the oddity and an isolated rarity, and the cost never hits home.  Not in the way it did in Vietnam when we were losing 250 or 350 a week every week and several times that in wounded.  And we are then susceptible as a society to the jingoism and pro-war propaganda that will give us another one just as soon as we finish this one.

I remember, as a kid, watching the honor guard from the local VFW making the rounds of cemeteries on Memorial Day wearing their WWII and Korean (and a few WWI) garrison caps and their ceremonial Springfields and blanks and flags, to volley the dead buried in them.  What I didn't realize until many years later was that the set of those men's faces came not (only) from soldierly pride, but more because the guys they were saluting were their brothers, cousins, and childhood friends. And they were clamping down their emotions.

Those veterans went along with Vietnam for lots of reasons, probably the biggest being that they felt - from their own wartime experience - that their government had played straight with them before and was therefore playing straight with them now.  When the reality of the deceit behind that war and its cost became apparent, the loss of faith was profound.  And the shenanigans we're involved in today had to wait until 90 percent or more of the WWII generation is dead, and the Vietnam generation is rolling into retirement age with mostly good memories of their service.