[hijack] I remember in the director’s cut of Apocalypse Now, there was a dinner scene at the estate of some holdout French (but presumably Vietnam-born) landowners – narrative says there are many such families scattered across the countryside here and there – who were still trying to maintain their French identity and culture, but, “They weren’t French anymore, and they’d never be Vietnamese.” I always wondered if that was Truth In TV, and, if so, what ever happened to all those French holdouts after the war? [/hj]
Um - did you do any follow-up like Googling Jerry Lembcke before making such bold, broad, and incorrect proclamations like
I made no comment on the story, I presented it to you in your request to be shown such a story since you insisted no such stories ever aired. Apparently you were even aware of said story before you made such bold, broad, and incorrect proclamations. I like you 'luci, but you get heated up on this topic to the point of overstepping a bit about it.
Jerry Lenpcke is a radical activist who pretends to be a scholar.
His book has been pretty thoroughly discredited on several occasions.
I’d recommend people read either Coming Home or Ron Kovic’s Born On The Fourth of July(in which, amongst other things he chronicles his treatment by anti-War activists both before and after he became one).
One of the things that I think is telling is that all of the stories and articles supposedly discrediting “the spitting myth” are traced back to his rather sloppily researched, poorly written book, written decades after the War ended.
When I’m talking about stories airing, I’m not so much talking about years after the fact, but in the immediate. Would such a story be suppressed? A whole bunch of times, over and over again? A story that “hot”, and one that fits so neatly with with a widely shared agenda? Not even the right wing press? C’mon, they would have been all over it! Its not like we were widely beloved and admired.
Did you read what I linked to? The story has holes. And its one, count 'em, one! story. Where’s all the rest of them?
When I think of disgraceful treatment offered returning Viet Nam vets, first thing crosses my mind is stories of local VFW’s refusing them admission. Not all, mind, nor even a majority. But that one happened, and you can look it up because its there.
And you can damn sure betcha the VFW wasn’t dominated by anti-war hippies!
No, that’s not remotely true. Most of the stories of such hostility didn’t take place at airports.
Have you actually read Coming Home, or did you just make judgements on the stories based on Lembcke’s The Spitting Image?
I’m not asking to insult you, because it’s obviously a very personal issue for you but you’re using almost word for word Lembcke’s arguments.
I really hope you’re not under the impression one had to be a Vietnam Veteran to be a member.
This seems to be a really bizarre statement. Vietnam Veterans who became anti-War activists and opposed the war were a district minority. In fact, polls showed most supported the war and polls taken years later, well after the war was clearly a disaster showed this.
They were chronicled in the book Working Class War.
Respectfully, you’re complaining about people believing in myths, but you seem to be believing one yourself.
Ok, so which was greater?
The number of Vietnam Veterans who joined the VFW or those that joined the VVAW?
A person being intelligent does not change the fact that memories are highly malleable and can’t always be trusted. People, even intelligent people, will recall things as happening to them that were in fact stories they heard about other people; will conflate stories; will remember things as real that they saw on television or read in books, and all manner of things.
The primary point I was making, as a kid just a little too young to have been sent over there, is that the kids who volunteered and even those who were drafted grew up watching John Wayne WWII movies and others about the heroic exploits of American soldiers. They received massive celebratory parades, were nationally honored, were considered the greatest heroes of their time. When you’re 17 and 18 years old you really do believe in that stuff, and (again I’m putting myself in the shoes of someone else here) when you come home and don’t get any of that, I can see where bitterness comes in. I wasn’t claiming anyone was spit upon or etc, but if anyone wants to contest that Vietnam veterans weren’t essentially gravely disrespected then I’m sorry but you must have lived through a very different 1970s than I did. Even among the conservative Americans I remember the desire was to essentially pretend Vietnam veterans did not exist, as they were an embarrassing reminder of the conflict.
Haven’t the slightest idea. If I had to guess, I imagine the greater majority didn’t join either. You have a point?
But aside from the “bitterness” issue, I think the POW in Vietnam issue is mostly part of a larger conspiracy theory culture that hit massive proportions from the 1960s through til now. We’ve had belief in crazy government and non-governmental conspiracy theories since, basically forever if you read history. But just based on unscientific observation it seems like we’ve really hit a veritable boom in conspiracy theories in the latter half of the 20th century up through the present time.
In that short time you’ve had moon landing conspiracies, alien coverup conspiracies, assassination conspiracies (for JFK/RFK/MLK and lesser knowns), all kinds of conspiracies about CIA activities (some true, many not) and etc.
I’ve known a lot of people who believed Vietnam was still holding a significant number of POWs. The single most common theory I hear, and the one I believe was repeated in both Rambo and Uncommon Valor (the movie referenced in the OP in which one of the characters wears a grenade around his neck) was that in the ending of the war right after the Paris peace agreement but before the fall of Saigon some agreement was made by the U.S. to either the North Vietnamese or the Viet Cong to give them X amount of money once this was all said and done. Once we evacuated the U.S. reneged on the deal and as a response the NVA refused to return our POWs. The reason they continue to hold them is a hope they can get the money promised to them.
It has all the classic elements of a conspiracy theory (evil government being involved in some secret dealings with an enemy state, then backing out of the deal because the evil government did not value the lives of a few hundreds POWs), but scant factual support.
Want to bet?
http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo/wwii/reports/
There are actually more unaccounted MIA from WWII than Vietnam.
Well, where did they take place? You seem to have a ample supply of authoritative pronouncements, you must have the facts right at your fingertips.
No, I read the part where you declared it debunked, based, as best I can tell, on his unacceptable political position.
Well, that certainly settles that, I’m surely not going to accept the word of some radical! Gasp!
Funny you should mention that. No. The local chapter met in my living room for a while, one of my roomies was active. And the issue came up, of people pretending to that status without fact. And they couldn’t decide what to do about it, nobody wanted to grill somebody else for details. Finally, they decided to just shrug it off. As good a decision as any, I guess. Anyway, no, you’re hopes are realized, I have no such impression.
Never said otherwise.
Equally respectfully, backatcha.
Lempcke’s a good example. When he examined the evidence twenty-five years after the fact, by his own admission he found several media accounts from the time which reported veterans being spit on by anti-war protesters.
Lempcke found this didn’t fit in with what he thought happened. So he interpreted the reports. He says that the reporters must have all been mistaken - it must have been pro-war protesters who were spitting on anti-war protesters and the reporters got their facts confused. Because Lempcke didn’t think it was believable that anti-war protesters had spit on veterans twenty-five years before. But he did think it was believable that pro-war protesters would spit on anti-war protesters.
Dozens of veterans contacted Lempcke and said that they had been spit on or had personally witnessed veterans being spit on. But Lempcke doesn’t believe people spit on veterans. So he’s decided that all these witnesses must be confused about what they remember.
Does anyone think this sounds like genuine scholarship?
Did someone interrupt you? You stopped a bit short, were you just getting to the “proof” part?
You must have missed it. My proof is the witnesses who said they were spit on or personally witnessed a veteran being spit on.
And your proof that this didn’t happened is…what exactly? All you’re saying is you don’t believe it because you don’t find it believable.
Yes, there were MIAs. There are always people missing after major wars–a point which has been made several times in this thread (in between all the posts about the “protestors spitting on soldiers during the Vietnam War” sidetrack). But we could be sure that the Axis powers (or for that matter the Confederate States) weren’t secretly hiding those MIAs after the war, because the enemy had been utterly defeated and placed under U.S. military occupation. So, anyone missing after those wars was just…missing. Lost at sea, bodies off in the underbrush someplace, hastily buried in a mass grave, but not still being held in some secret Nazi/Japanese/Confederate POW camp, waiting to be rescued by Rambo.
Heck, thanks to advances in DNA technology which have vastly increased our ability to identify the remains of the missing, we don’t even have an “Unknown Soldier” from Vietnam anymore because it’s no longer possible to find the bones of some poor guy “known but to God” in order to bury them.
But, for various reasons people remain convinced there are still POWs left behind in Vietnam: As noted, a lot of this is because we lost; I also agree it’s probably partly because of the rise in Conspiracy Theory thinking (which, to be fair to the public, is surely in turn in part due to actual conspiracies and government wrongdoing–Watergate, the CIA giving LSD to people without their knowledge or consent, government negligence involving fallout and radioactive waste from nuclear tests and weapons production, and other examples of official wrongdoing and hanky-panky that have come to light over the years).
I know you said so, and I don’t doubt that you believe it, but damned if I can see where you proved it. What witnesses?
I teleported from Portland, Oregon to Albuquerque, New Mexico and back last Thursday. My proof are the witnesses that saw me do it.
According to Eric Haney, author of inside delta force (Delta force is the army equivalent of the navy’s seal team six, which killed bin Laden) there was a plan to rescue the vietnam POWs who were being kept in Laos. However higher ups in the military kept leaking details to the press in the hopes of stopping the mission (supposedly for fear that the public would be outraged that people were left behind in Vietnam).
According to Haney the Vietnamese figured out there was a secret mission and killed the POWs. I don’t know the timeline for this stuff though.