No, Griff wasn’t sent home after the incident he was stuck in Vietnam ( in the manga , its Iraq in the anime ) after he got
banana fish’d.
I have been looking at early volumes of the manga and found something interesting….
This scene in Vol. 01 and this bit with Dino and Ash ( the money part was cut from the anime but I think it explains a few things on the topic of how Ash got to Griff )
We knows Dino keeps tabs on Ash and his movement but Ash hasn’t been making trouble for him yet at this point so I think Dino didn’t look into what Ash was spending his money on ,Ash is defensive about this and here is why.
Later in Vol.01
Ash saves Girff from the veteran hospital ( that was probably in the U.S ) , because by now its almost been 10 years and most people aside Max and Ash have forgotten about Griff.
( Otherwise I have no idea what strings Ash would have to pull or how much of Dino’s money he had to spend to get Griff to the U.S if was still in Vietnam )
So Ash finds his brother and he does so recently and he takes him to get examined and looked at by Dr. Meredith.
So Grif was transferred from the nut house ( asylum ) in Saigon ( were he was sent after he was banana fish’d. ) to a veterans hospital somewhere in the U.S and I don’t think Ash’s dad even knew of Griffs condition since we never get a confirmation of that in the manga and even if he did I don’t think Ash would have wanted him involved with Griff and he just wanted to take care of his older brother the best way he would.
Vol.2
My guess is that they told Max and the other soldiers that Grif was sent home but that was a lie, I am guessing this was Abraham’s doing ,he wanted to hide any evidence of Griff and hoped nobody would ask too many questions.
When Max came home to the states and looked for Grif no wonder he couldn’t find him since Griff was still in Vietnam….and sometime around the next 10 years Griffin does get send to the states and Ash finally finds him in a veterans hospital.
I see some anime only people freaking out over him showing up in only two anime episodes and judging his whole character based on that and I am siting here like ?????
The “Islands in the Stream” reference was way more powerful in the anime but its not like I expect them to look that up and I really don’t wanna drop any spoilers unintentionally.
To me there is no Blanca drama because most of these people haven’t see everything Blanca as a character has to offer, as somebody who has read the manga a few times and Private Opinion, to me Blanca is one of the best characters in the series, he is morally gray and complex and there is way more to him then what we see on the surface.
Moonlit Spires 
