This and your previous post describe the situation well. You didn’t seem to be part of the literal spitting crowd. And I share that feeling that they were figuratively spit on, and ignored. I remember a Gerald Ford speech where he essentially said Vietnam was something to put behind us and forget about. These soldiers came home feeling betrayed by their country, sent to die for an unworthy cause, and then having their service dismissed as an unpleasantry not to be discussed.
There was the Son Tay raid.
Completely true. I just don’t choose to believe that* that many *collective memories are that malleable in my experience of the recollection of them. There’s too much corroboration from people I trust(ed).
Bottom line is that it was as shitty of a war as Iraq was (is? and I have relatives that served in that one too) with nebulous purposes and goals that were never realized. I don’t know what to say. All I can say is that to a man, everyone I knew that fought in that war had stories about the hostility that was directed towards returning soldiers (yes elucidator, ONLY in airports, cuz that’s the only prong of attack!) wherever they were. No, it wasn’t necessarily spitting, but snide comments, asides, outright angry belligerence and the like.
That shit happened. Nobody is making it up. Why would they?. There’s too many instances recounted for it all to be a dream (meme).
So, where does that take us? Are you suggesting an orchestrated, coordinated effort? Suppose you wanted to, suppose you had people willing to do it, then what? We all pile into a VW van and just go hang around the airport until we find somebody traveling in uniform? That makes sense?
Violent reprisal is a damn sure bet, isn’t it? Incident like that going to make the local papers. Especially when you remember that incidents like that fit a narrative dear to the hearts of the people who hated our guts. Of which there were…several. Would they have suppressed the story out of consideration for our cowardly and disloyal feelings?
Then it follows, does it not, that there must be a bunch of those stories in newspaper archives. Lots of them, yes? Because there would have been violence on any number of occasions, and a story like that gets attention, it sells newspapers. Any paper would have printed it, a “hawk” newspaper would have put it on page one! So where are they?
And why would anyone do such a thing? People don’t hate us enough already, we got to crank it up to eleven so we can get beat up more often? Huh? If you are determined to believe that we were that hateful and sick, well, you’re going to, and nothing I’m gonna say will change that.
It is a classic urban legend, people believe it and they all say what you said, it must be true, because people I love and trust say its true. And they heard it so many times, from so many people, well, it must be true.
But nobody has details. Nobody can say here, here’s all the newspaper clippings reporting such incidents. You can do that for lynchings. Lynching is a wretched fact of our history, terrible, hard to believe people did things like that. Wouldn’t take you ten minutes to find stories in local newspapers from the time, with pictures. Dozens of them.
This argument is old, and that challenge has been laid down many, many times. To my knowledge, it remains unanswered. Everyone who believes it knows for sure that it happened, but no one seems to have any specifics. Doesn’t that strike you as rather odd? If this happened a thousand times, wouldn’t there be at least a hundred solid, verifiable reports? What have we been offered here? One. And the reporter who checked it out, did his homework, found that some of the details were shaky, this guy Pickett changed his story
Its a classic Disturbin’ Legend, like the whole MIA thing. The people who believe are totally sure, but not one of them can give you reliable details. Its like a bunch of people may grudgingly admit that maybe they were wrong, but will never admit that we were right. And they’ll never forgive us for it, either.
And so it goes.
NM
That was in 1970 while the Vietnam war was still active, the aborted delta force mission was in 1981 I believe.
Why are you taking this personally? Nobody’s accusing you of being abusive to Vietnam veterans. But at the same time, I find it really hard to believe that nobody ever was. I mean, Vietnam was before my time. The war’s been over for almost 40 years now. But I don’t think human nature’s changed that much, and there are always going to be people who take out their frustration at something by attacking people who participate.
I think a lot of things are getting conflated here. There’s a myth that there were numerous incidents of people spitting on returning soldiers. You can find thousands of vets who will say itl happened to them. Questioned in detail, they’ll often admit it didn’t happen to them personally, but it definitely happened to some guys they know. There isn’t any real evidence that this happened as often as it is said, that there was any organized or widespread effort to spit on soldiers, that this was an acceptable means of expression to any known group, or for that matter that it actually happened even once. But it wouldn’t be surprising if some moron actually spit on a soldier somewhere and there was no one around to take a picture of it. Such an exception wouldn’t satisfy to turn the myth into fact.
It was hardly a myth. Lots of Vietnam Veterans have said they were hassled in a variety of different ways by anti-War types when they got home which took a variety of different forms. For example on a documentary of the 60s aired back in the 90s showed anti-war activists at a veterans rally holding up signs saying “Lyndon Johnson’s hired killers” and others calling the men Nazis. Obviously in some cases this involved spitting and since spit doesn’t show up on the film of the time, it wouldn’t show up.
It was a different time and people had different feelings. The father of a friend of mine freely admitted that most of the anti-War students at Columbia(where he went to school) viewed most Vietnam Veterans, with the exception of the tiny, tiny minority who joined the anti-War movement, were viewed as either chumps or criminals.
Ron Kovic, who was one of the more famous anti-War activists of that period and a Marine paralyzed in Vietnam has told of the negative treatment he received when he came back and how he received a fairly negative welcome home by activists though he eventually joined the movement. He also later wound up being spat on by a Republican activist while campaigning against the War.
For some reason, people who insist that no veterans were spat on usually accept Kovic’s story of how he was treated at the 1972 Republican convention and how he was treated when he became treated by Republican activists while ignoring the part of his book talking of the same thing happening to him at a parade by anti-War activists before he became an anti-War activists. Incidentally, his book was written in 1974, long before the 80s where, according to Eluci the “spitting stories” started.
For that matter, until relatively recently nobody ever really decided that the Vietnam Veterans who claim this happened were lying.
Most of the criticisms of this so-called “urban myth” date back to Lembcke’s The Spitting Image, a book by an anti-War activist, leader of of the VVAW, an organization which compared the US involvement in Vietnam to Nazi Germany’s actions in WWII.
In short, accepting his book would be like accepting a book written by the President of the NRA which purported to prove that gun control was ineffective.
You’ll notice that even many of the arguments on this thread(I.E. most of the stories taking place at airports, the stories not starting until the 80s) come from the book and have been fairly thoroughly discredited.
You even allude to one by demanding where are the pictures. As was pointed out, spittle didn’t show up on film in the 60s and early 70s so obviously there aren’t pictures though you can find pictures of protesters yelling at Veterans at parades, having insulting posters and making obscene gestures at them which is fairly consistent with spitting incidents.
Lembcke also made such foolish statements as claiming "“no returning soldiers landed at San Francisco Airport,” and also that most of the incidents involved women spitting on soldiers(no, most didn’t) and that these stories were clearly false because women didn’t spit on people.
As already mentioned, spit didn’t show up in photos back then so it wouldn’t matter. That said, just because there aren’t pictures of Ron Kovic being spat on by Republican activists in 1972 or anti-War activists earlier is no reason to believe that he’s a liar.
Yes, well I agree it could have happened in some incidents. But it is certainly exagerrated, and that calls the majority of such claims into question. Following that, investigations haven’t shown much evidence that this did happen. As I’ve said before, we did figuratively spit on the returning soldiers, as an entire nation, not just some group of war protesters, and that should be far more important than this silly argument about literal spitting.
Also, I don’t know who Lemcke is, nor do I have a copy of Kovic around to comment on their words.
Fair question deserves a fair warning: I suck at sincere, but here goes…
They are my people. I have danced at their weddings and mourned their funerals. Roughly a dozen of them are still the dearest people in my life, old wine is nothing compared to old friendship. Hearing them slandered, hearing us slandered…chaps my hide.
And besides, I’m most likely going to bitch about something, might as well be something I care about.
“Obviously”? How, exactly, is that “obvious”, unless we already accept what you are trying to prove?
Oh, did he? Well, that certainly settles that! And he freely admitted this? Well, hell, it must be true. I freely admit that Spiro Agnew was a thermonuclear asshole.
As to this Lempke guy, I have’t read his book either, but articles and arguments about him, which tend to be more informative. I think he had a relatively small but telling point to make, the paucity of solid evidence and a case made of interlocking assumptions. But that’s ten pages worth, not a book. Padding is usually a very bad idea.
And you know this, how? You have an overview, you can assure us of pertinent facts like the gender breakdown? How did you come by this information?
Er…what are you challenging. Are you claiming that spittle actually showed up in pictures from that time period?
Ok, please explain why you think Ron Kovic is a liar.
I assume you know who he is.
So then you’re admitting that your reason for insisting that all the Vietnam Veterans, including those like Ron Kovic who detested the war who told such stories were lying because you have friends in the anti-War movement and therefore you refuse to believe the anti-War movement did anything wrong.
By such logic, then one should assume that all stories of atrocities committed by American troops in Vietnam are false if one had a number of friends who were in the Vietnam War.
I nearly pissed myself laughing at this. It’s quite a silly comment coming from someone who rather foolishly insisted that most of the spitting stories occurred at airports without a single citation and got extremely hostile when it was pointed out this was false.
With all due respect, by your own admission you seem to be operating more on emotion then on logic on this issue.
Making statements like that, as well as your insinuations that the anti-War movement was largely fueled by Vietnam War veterans does little to inspire confidence in your understanding or analysis of this time period or the events surrounding it.
**
[quote=“TriPolar, post:70, topic:613888”]
Yes, well I agree it could have happened in some incidents. But it is certainly exagerrated
[QUOTE]
**
I don’t think anyone disputes that there are many exaggerations regarding that time period.
For example, lots of people think the majority of soldiers who died over there were draftees whereas most were volunteers.
However, that hardly means we shouldn’t recognize that a sizable number of people did behave in ways that many of us would now find shameful and it’s silly to pretend otherwise.
One thing that has happened is that many tend to conflate the modern anti-War movement which doesn’t have large numbers of people hostile to Veterans and who openly support the Taliban or Al Quaeda.
By contrast, a large number of anti-War protesters during the Vietnam War era not only objected to the War but openly supported the NLF(more commonly known as the Viet Cong). You’ll notice that at every large war rally, large numbers of people were brandishing flags of the NLF and one of the most popular chants at college campuses was “HO, HO, HO CHI MINH, THE NLF IS GONNA WIN!”
Can anyone imagine for two seconds people at a rally against either the Iraq or Afghanistan wars large numbers of people parading around holding aloft pictures of Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or glorifying the Taliban or Al Quaeda?
For that matter, if we met people who actually thought Al Quaeda or the Taliban were the cats’ meow or who believed Saddam Hussein was a hero, does anyone think that such people wouldn’t utterly hate and despise people who fought in those wars. Yes, perhaps they’d admire “the good ones” who turn against the war, but from their point of view everyone who engaged in the war was evil unless they rejected it.
What’s surprising about the idea that people who openly supported the NLF/Viet Cong, which killed vastly more people than Al Quaeda committed at least as vicious atrocities as the Taliban would hate people who fought against them and that people who thought Ho was a hero would react to Vietnam War veterans the way people who loved Saddam would react to Iraq War veterans?
And calling them “baby killers” was a term of endearment?
Yes, I grant that the term was probably originated with that “Hey, hey, LBJ,” chant which I’m sure you remember. But it’s absolutely true that the temr was also applied to grunts in uniform as well, the saintly image of war protestors in elucidator’s mind notwithstanding.
In Homecoming, Bob Greene assembles 63 newspaper clippings that report spitting on returning vets stories.
I have no dog in this fight, and I am inclined to believe that someone, somewhere spat on a returning soldier. However, there are more reports of alien abductions than protestors spitting, so I’m not sure you want to go with *this *particular argument.
I believe that out of about 1000 replies the author received, 63 of them(not articles but personal letters) were claims of first-hand experience of being spit on be protesters. In the book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, author Jerry Lembcke claims that he did a further check on those 63 claims and says that most of them turned out to be “friend-of-a-friend” stories and not first hand accounts.
You are continuing to point out that it could have happened, not providing any further evidence that it did. You are also describing a wide spread anti-war movement by only it’s most radical members. It reduces the argument to a petty disagreement about saliva and political sidetracks. I’d rather not rehash the same old arguments in that vein.
I said that? Don’t remember saying that. If you’re not too busy researching the semantic distinction between “letter” and “article”, could you take the time to substantiate this claim?