The right wing extremists who created the LIE that Americans opposed to the war planned to deface the Vietnam Memorial were able to (finally) get a small group of folks together in a counter protest. The TRUTH is that no one wants to gather and march to support the Iraq War....so if more "counter protests" are planned in the future look for "new lies" in order to try to get someone to show up.
My friends who went to the march told me they had actually been spit upon, some were physically threatened....and all were verbally abused with heaps of obscenity pouring down upon them. So much for a peaceful march with a group of right wing extremists who seem to hate anyone or anything that doesn't conform to their agenda.
Here's a news story about an American Patriot, Charlie Anderson, who served honorably in Iraq. I first met Charlie when he was living in Virginia Beach. He is a dear soul and he's wanting to save more of his buddies so he joined the Iraq Veterans Against the War. As you will hear, those folks who hate so much and call themselves Eagles also spat on my friend Charlie.
24 comments:
Too many Vietnam Vets have given first person accounts of poor treatment upon their return from Nam for it to be a myth. In Born Fighting Jim Webb described an anti-war criminal law professor who used his name on a final exam to pose a hypothetical about a war crime committed by Lt. Webb's platoon and the smuggling by "Lt. Webb" of illegal drugs from Vietnam to the US in the corpses of his dead men. Offensive, appalling and probably deeply wounding.
You talk about developing a "calm center" right after calling the other side "rightwing slobs", "trousered apes", and "fascist pigs". Way to reach across the aisle. Demonization of opponents results in polarization and offensive conduct such as the GofE people are engaging in and can only be counterproductive.
I've met some of the counter-protester types. Some of them are flaming morons and some of them are vets themselves who are desperate to believe that their sacrifices and the sacrifices of their comrades was not in vain. Their rage at the anti-war crowd is really their fear that it was all for nothing.
This isn't about trying to figure out which side is the "evilest". It's about making the point and getting people on board. There are always going to be those who act offensively and become abusive. Some of them happen to be anti-war activists and some are pro-war activists. I would no more condone the crap I've seen from the self-styled revolutionaries than I would the bile spewed by the GofE crowd. But there will also be others who will one day see the truth or at least be able to understand our opposition.
Hmmm, should I put on my Zen Buddhist hat or my Tibetan Buddhist hat here. Oh heck, Zen Buddhist. From a calm center (not a passive center) in Zen, one is prepared for peace or war, for ambushes or handshakes. One also calls a spade a spade. Those who spit on and openly insult others have already crossed the line of civility, so certain animal images do come to mind. No inconsistency there. From a calm center one can then deal with said misanthropes judiciously, not too weakly or too strongly, and if said recalcitrants want to return to civility, then they will get a handshake. In the depths they are still God playing a role, so they really do know better, but such wretched roles are hard to escape from.
For us when we march, having developed a calm center is far better than being caught unawares and flipping out. I know hot-heads who would point blank shoot someone for spitting on them. That would be excessive, which is why true martial arts is really well-mannered, for it teaches restraint.
Regarding the 60s myth, specifically, of the spit-upon Vietnam Vets, I listened to an interview some time back with a journalist, whose name escapes me, who searched in vain, for a book or article he was writing, for examples of this, but he could find none. I was in the Marines and later the Navy from 1975 on, at the end of Vietnam, a little late for the most confrontational years, but I never heard of this happening from any vets, because, I think, antiwar protestors were usually trying to win vets to their cause, not alienate them. Perhaps someone tried to spit on Lt. Calley or a campus recruiter, but I have never heard of it. The most negative responses I would personally get myself were not in America, but in Spain from Spaniards who used to give me the Nazi salute in ridicule. Meanwhile in France, French gangs used to attack sailors and beat them up for kicks.
I agree with much of what you are saying catzmeow....I do believe you can find offensive "oafs" in any crowd and I believe some of the present day vets (the few who really support the war) are simply dealing with the situation the best they can and just have difficulty facing anything that would say that the sacrifice was nothing but oil and money for big corporate capitalists....and that's why they are so defensive (and offensive to the point of spitting in a vets face who wants the US to pull out of Iraq asap.)
It is sometimes hard to hold my tongue ....b/c the underhanded tactics that have been deployed by the right go beyond the pale and I have not seen the left using the same type of underhanded tactics (for example lying in order to get a crowd to show up to counter protest the war....or FIRING US prosecutors to protect the "elite" criminals. However, if a "progressive" was guilty of such tactics I would call them on it also....
buzz...buzz...
buzz...buzz...
Rick Atkinson, Pulitzer Prize winner and former assistant managing editor at The Washington Post, writes in his book, "The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966," of Captain Tom Carhart's return from Vietnam, pp. 324-5:
"Still in uniform, he was strolling through the O'Hare terminal in search of a telephone when a group of hippie girls darted up and spat on him. The shock and pain could have been no more intense if they had slashed him with knives. Reeling with surprise and uncertain what to do, he did nothing. His assailants scampered off through the airport crush as Tom wiped the saliva from his face, now aflame with humiliation. That night he got into an argument about the war with his friends' daughter, who was home from college. This is great, he told himself sardonically. I'm back less than twenty-four hours, I get spat on, then I get hassled by my countrymen over a cause for which I got myself shot twice. Welcome home, Johnny."
Yeah, and although this post doesn’t mention people like me, I was a red-hot leftist (marxist) revolutionary back then, and I did spit on a couple of returning vets. From the safety of a crowd, behind a barricade and a police line.
I was an America-hating asshole and a coward. I’ve learned better, and I’ve learned to feel regret for my shameful actions then. Can’t say the same for the current crowd of shameless, cowardly, America-hating leftist jerks, though. (Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds).
-Bill Quick
Daily Pundit
http://dailypundit.com/?p=24230
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"After a year of unbelievable hell in Vietnam, I was at the "repo depo" in Long Binh awaiting my flight out. The last thing I was told by the sergeant in charge as we boarded the aircraft was not to expect any welcome home committees when we got off the plane.
I arrived at Oakland Air Force Base on April 14 (my mother's birthday), 1970. I had sat near the front of the plane, and therefore was one of the first to get off. As I looked out toward the terminal, I noticed a large crowd, maybe 200 or so people, on the far side of a cyclone wire fence. In front of them, on our side of the fence, were MPs, wearing ponchos. As we started to file out of the plane, the MPs shouted to us to move quickly, and began holding up their ponchos.
We were in khaki short-sleeved uniforms, and I was surprised that it would be raining in California. As I got closer to the MPs and the crowd, I still could not make out what they were yelling. Then the first egg landed near my foot. At first, like a fool, I looked up in the air, still not putting together what was going on. As my ears popped, adjusting to the change in pressure, I began to hear for the first time the chant: "How many babies did you kill today?"
Several of them were leaning against the fence, spitting at us and at the MPs blocking their view. Others were heaving eggs over the fence and into our midst. The MPs were covered with spittle and eggs, which explained the ponchos. They were obviously used to this ritual. The fellow behind me said, "Jesus, I wish I had brought my M-16!," and my stomach dropped as I realized for the first time what was going on.
I stopped to ask one of the MPs who these people were, and as I did so a woman about forty years old, not a teenager by any stretch of the imagination, leaned back and spit on me with all her strength. It landed on my shirt pocket, near the ribbons that I was wearing for the first time. "Bull's-eye!" she yelled. An MP lieutenant took my arm and said, "Go inside, son, and ignore them.""
David McTamaney; Newburgh, New York, pp. 21-23
Bob Greene, "Homecoming: When The Soldiers Returned From Vietnam", 1989
"When I got back to the U.S. I had what they called burial detail. That's when you have to escort a person's body back to his next of kin and represent the U.S. and tell them their son, husband, or whoever had given his life for his country and you had to stick around until he was buried -- you were there to make sure the next of kin was okay.
Well, I had to take this fellow's body to his wife -- she was nineteen years old. It was in 1966 and his home was in Sacramento. ...
But to get to the bad part, I was helping the mortician take the casket out of the hearse. Of course, I was in my dress uniform, medals and all that, and the American flag was over the casket and some guy walked by when we had it out about halfway and the fool spit on it and said, "Good, he deserved to die.""
Tony J.; San Francisco, California, pp. 26-27
Bob Greene, "Homecoming: When The Soldiers Returned From Vietnam", 1989
"It happenned to me, and it was no joke.
In September of 1967, I was called to active duty with the U.S. Army Medical Corps. I was a neurosurgeon then (as I am now), and had recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley. I was fortunate during my military service (two years of active duty) to be stationed at a large hospital facility stateside -- although I did not actually go to Vietnam, I was responsible for the treatment of a large number of wounded Vietnam soldiers.
I was stationed at Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco, and I commuted between the hospital and my home in Berkeley. ... In any case, when I would come home from the hospital (of course wearing my uniform, which was required), I would receive many negative comments from other residents of Berkeley. One afternoon a youngster, approximately twelve years old, who lived across the street from us, literally spat on me as I got out of my car. He shouted, "How many did you kill today?"
You can imagine how I felt -- especially since I had spent that day trying to reconstruct the skull of a Vietnam soldier who had suffered severe shrapnel wounds, and who had recently been transferred back to the United States for surgery."
Dr. Robert A. Fink; Berkeley, California, pp. 26-27
Bob Greene, "Homecoming: When The Soldiers Returned From Vietnam", 1989
By the way, I was at the March on the Pentagon and took these photos:
http://conprotantor.blogspot.com/2007/03/vietnam-vets-face-down-moonbats.html
Enjoy!
Tantor
Looks like I may have stuck my foot in my mouth a little on this one about spitting on GIs being a myth. Captain Carhart's story, assuming it's true, is the first time I've heard someone actually state that it happened to him, although there is something a little weird about this scenario of the sprinting hippie chicks. However, if true, was his experience a rare occurrence or part of an onslaught of saliva? I still say that in reality, this is a myth of Texas Pete proportions.
I used to go to school at UC Berkeley during the war years, so I was somewhat privy to what was happening in radical circles and out on the streets. It was unavoidable for most students, and I never saw or heard anyone plotting or planning to spit on a serviceman, never saw it mentioned in a radical newspaper, or any newspaper for that matter, never heard it talked about or laughed about. Nada, zilch. Most of these radicals considered themselves serious revolutionaries and would consider the whole concept juvenile. Granted that there weren't very many uniformed officers or non-coms walking around Berkeley, but they were all over the place in nearby Oakland. I never saw any confrontations between GIs and hippies or militants and I was in Oakland regularly. There were the massive protests against the Recruiting Center, but that was still cops and sheriff's deputies vs protesters.
I witnessed many of the Berkeley riots, even getting gassed because they gassed everyone in their big sweeps, and was quite used to hearing kids and students calling the cops pigs, but the cops were also beating up on them rather regularly, so curses and insults were common. I saw some heavy beatings by cops and we did have one guy shot and killed in an upper story or rooftop by them, can't remember the details. Everything was badly polarized in Berkeley at that point and emotions were quite raw.
There were a lot of Vets who were with the students. Lots and lots of them, usually with longish hair, sideburns, maybe a moustache, often wearing an old uniform jacket or shirt. They were in heavy solidarity with themselves and the Peace Movement. Lot's of hippie women were dating them.
I do remember, me in my crewcut after returning from active duty training, getting into an argument with two hippie chicks that gravitated toward Amercan soldiers dying and they also said they'd deserved it, which set me off. However, as for them personally messing with me, I was probably nastier to them then they were to me. They were really pretty lame.
I also used to walk up and down Telegraph Avenue a lot, not in uniform, which would be like waving a red flag at a bull on that strip, but still sticking out like a sore thumb. I was a little paranoid, but never got hassled.
When I was out and about at a bar or wherever, I was asked more than once if I was a Nazi by women. No, I'm in the Marine Reserves I replied. Oh, they'd say, and would walk away. Somewhat depressing. You'd have to drive north to Richmond, San Pablo or beyond to feel you were fitting in better with the natives, but the natives in the night spots out there were also pretty lethargic and alcoholic. Honky-tonk women and cowboy ways.
But now I've got to tell Tanner something about the Oakland Air Force Base story he pasted, because I hate to say it, Bud, there is no Oakland Air Force Base and never has been, unless they had one in the days of biplanes. There is only an Oakland Army Base and Recruiting Center. There used to be a Naval Air Station at Alameda, but there is no way in Hell Naval Security would allow 200 hippies armed with eggs to get anywhere near an aircraft. I used to work there in a Heavy Helicopter Squadron, so I would know. The entire story is wildly implausable. Throwing debris on an Air Force tarmac is the biggest taboo there is at an airbase, becaue it can get sucked up into an engine and cause a crash. So security would go absolutely hermatile.
So I think, Tanner, you have been had. That story is a myth. Your referencing Bob Greene's book Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam also made me very curious, so I did some digging. Here is what I found, first from http://www.slate.com/id/1005224/ :
press box: Media criticism.
Drooling on the Vietnam Vets
Jack Shafer
Posted Tuesday, May 2, 2000, at 7:49 AM ET
"Last week, both the New York Times and U.S. News & World Report reprised the horrific accounts of Vietnam War protesters spitting on returning servicemen. In a piece about West Point's post-Vietnam mood (April 28), timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Times reporter John Kifner writes:
Much has changed since Lt. Col. Conrad C. Crane ('74) watched on television here as the war wound down, a time he remembers as "almost a siege mentality" at West Point, when cadets could not wear their uniforms off campus for fear of being spat on.
Amanda Spake of U.S. News quotes (May 1) Terry Baker of the Vietnam Veterans Association about the disgraceful behavior:
"When the WWII guys came back," Baker adds, "they were able to talk about the war. With Vietnam, vets had to change their clothes in the bus station because people would spit on them."
Although Nexis overflows with references to protesters gobbing on Vietnam vets, and Bob Greene's 1989 book Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam counts 63 examples of protester spitting, Jerry Lembcke argues that the story is bunk in his 1998 book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (click here to buy it). Lembcke, a professor of sociology at Holy Cross and a Vietnam vet, investigated hundreds of news accounts of antiwar activists spitting on vets. But every time he pushed for more evidence or corroboration from a witness, the story collapsed--the actual person who was spat on turned out to be a friend of a friend. Or somebody's uncle. He writes that he never met anybody who convinced him that any such clash took place.
While Lembcke doesn't prove that nobody ever expectorated on a serviceman--you can't prove a negative, after all--he reduces the claim to an urban myth. In most urban myths, the details morph slightly from telling to telling, but at least one element survives unchanged. In the tale of the spitting protester, the signature element is the location: The protester almost always ambushes the serviceman at the airport--not in a park, or at a bar, or on Main Street. Also, it's not uncommon for the insulted serviceman to have flown directly in from Vietnam. In the most dramatic telling of the spitting story, First Blood (1982), the first installment of the series about a vengeful Vietnam vet, the airport is the scene of the outrage. John Rambo, played by Sylvester Stallone, gives a speech about getting spat upon. Rambo says:
It wasn't my war. You asked me, I didn't ask you. And I did what I had to do to win. But somebody wouldn't let us win. Then I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport. Protesting me. Spitting. Calling me baby killer. ... Who are they to protest me? Huh?
Of course, the myth of the spitting protester predates the Rambo movies, but how many vets--many of whom didn't get the respect they thought they deserved after serving their country--retrofitted this memory after seeing the movie? Soldiers returning from lost wars have long healed their psychic wounds by accusing their governments and their countrymen of betrayal, Lembcke writes. Also, the spitting story resonates with biblical martyrdom. As the soldiers put the crown of thorns on Jesus and led him to his crucifixtion, they beat him with a staff and spat on him.
Lembcke uncovered a whole lot of spitting from the war years, but the published accounts always put the antiwar protester on the receiving side of a blast from a pro-Vietnam counterprotester. Surely, he contends, the news pages would have given equal treatment to a story about serviceman getting the treatment. Then why no stories in the newspaper morgues, he asks?
Lastly, there are the parts of the spitting story up that don't add up. Why does it always end with the protester spitting and the serviceman walking off in shame? Most servicemen would have given the spitters a mouthful of bloody Chiclets instead of turning the other cheek like Christ. At the very least, wouldn't the altercations have resulted in assault and battery charges and produced a paper trail retrievable across the decades?
The myth persists because: 1) Those who didn't go to Vietnam--that being most of us--don't dare contradict the "experience" of those who did; 2) the story helps maintain the perfect sense of shame many of us feel about the way we ignored our Vietvets; 3) the press keeps the story in play by uncritically repeating it, as the Times and U.S. News did; and 4) because any fool with 33 cents and the gumption to repeat the myth in his letter to the editor can keep it in circulation. Most recent mentions of the spitting protester in Nexis are of this variety.
As press crimes go, the myth of the spitting protester ain't even a misdemeanor. Reporters can't be expected to fact-check every quotation. But it does teach us a journalistic lesson: Never lend somebody a sympathetic ear just because he's sympathetic."
And this is an article by Lembcke himself:
Debunking a spitting image
(http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/04/30/debunking_a_spitting_image/)
By Jerry Lembcke | April 30, 2005
"STORIES ABOUT spat-upon Vietnam veterans are like mercury: Smash one and six more appear. It's hard to say where they come from. For a book I wrote in 1998 I looked back to the time when the spit was supposedly flying, the late 1960s and early 1970s. I found nothing. No news reports or even claims that someone was being spat on.
What I did find is that around 1980, scores of Vietnam-generation men were saying they were greeted by spitters when they came home from Vietnam. There is an element of urban legend in the stories in that their point of origin in time and place is obscure, and, yet, they have very similar details. The story told by the man who spat on Jane Fonda at a book signing in Kansas City recently is typical. Michael Smith said he came back through Los Angeles airport where ''people were lined up to spit on us."
Like many stories of the spat-upon veteran genre, Smith's lacks credulity. GIs landed at military airbases, not civilian airports, and protesters could not have gotten onto the bases and anywhere near deplaning troops. There may have been exceptions, of course, but in those cases how would protesters have known in advance that a plane was being diverted to a civilian site? And even then, returnees would have been immediately bused to nearby military installations and processed for reassignment or discharge.
The exaggerations in Smith's story are characteristic of those told by others. ''Most Vietnam veterans were spat on when we came back," he said. That's not true. A 1971 Harris poll conducted for the Veterans Administration found over 90 percent of Vietnam veterans reporting a friendly homecoming. Far from spitting on veterans, the antiwar movement welcomed them into its ranks and thousands of veterans joined the opposition to the war.
The persistence of spat-upon Vietnam veteran stories suggests that they continue to fill a need in American culture. The image of spat-upon veterans is the icon through which many people remember the loss of the war, the centerpiece of a betrayal narrative that understands the war to have been lost because of treason on the home front. Jane Fonda's noisiest detractors insist she should have been prosecuted for giving aid and comfort to the enemy, in conformity with the law of the land.
But the psychological dimensions of the betrayal mentality are far more interesting than the legal. Betrayal is about fear, and the specter of self-betrayal is the hardest to dispel. The likelihood that the real danger to America lurks not outside but inside the gates is unsettling. The possibility that it was failure of masculinity itself, the meltdown of the core component of warrior culture, that cost the nation its victory in Vietnam has haunted us ever since.
Many tellers of the spitting tales identify the culprits as girls, a curious quality to the stories that gives away their gendered subtext. Moreover, the spitting images that emerged a decade after the troops had come home from Vietnam are similar enough to the legends of defeated German soldiers defiled by women upon their return from World War I, and the rejection from women felt by French soldiers when they returned from their lost war in Indochina, to suggest something universal and troubling at work in their making. One can reject the presence of a collective subconscious in the projection of those anxieties, as many scholars would, but there is little comfort in the prospect that memories of group spit-ins, like Smith has, are just fantasies conjured in the imaginations of aging veterans.
Remembering the war in Vietnam through the images of betrayal is dangerous because it rekindles the hope that wars like it, in countries where we are not welcomed, can be won. It disparages the reputation of those who opposed that war and intimidates a new generation of activists now finding the courage to resist Vietnam-type ventures in the 21st century.
Today, on the 30th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam, new stories of spat-upon veterans appear faster than they can be challenged. Debunking them one by one is unlikely to slow their proliferation but, by contesting them where and when we can, we engage the historical record in a way that helps all of us remember that, in the end, soldiers and veterans joined with civilians to stop a war that should have never been fought."
Jerry Lembcke, associate professor of sociology at Holy Cross College, is the author of "The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam."
Tantor...whoever you are.
I think you should establish your own blog since your numerous comments are more like multiple posts....I was around during the 60's and MY experience is that no one I was affiliated with (nor myself) would have ever spit on a veteran....or any human being for that matter.
this "spit" on the veteran acts have been debated ad nauseum....and there's been no hard proof to establish that it ever happened....But I can "see" that it is possible that it may have happened. Some "whacko" may have acted that way....there's at least one whacko in every group. So IF a whacko every spit on a veteran than it's not something I support...and from what I know of the folks blogging here none of us support spitting on other people.
I myself have been spit upon by a marine and I know of multiple instances on this last march alone where numoerous folks (including veterans) were spit upon, shoved, pushed, and verbally and physically threatened.
Sound like we can both agree that it's never "right" to spit on another person. Buzz...Buzz...
"When I got back to the U.S. I had what they called burial detail. That's when you have to escort a person's body back to his next of kin and represent the U.S. and tell them their son, husband, or whoever had given his life for his country and you had to stick around until he was buried -- you were there to make sure the next of kin was okay.
Well, I had to take this fellow's body to his wife -- she was nineteen years old. It was in 1966 and his home was in Sacramento. ...
But to get to the bad part, I was helping the mortician take the casket out of the hearse. Of course, I was in my dress uniform, medals and all that, and the American flag was over the casket and some guy walked by when we had it out about halfway and the fool spit on it and said, "Good, he deserved to die.""
Tony J.; San Francisco, California, pp. 26-27
Bob Greene, "Homecoming: When The Soldiers Returned From Vietnam", 1989
"During August of 1966, while I was assigned for duty in the Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C. I was spat upon by a complete stranger while returning from lunch.
I was in Class A uniform, a CWO in the Army, walking along the street when I passed this man in casual civilian dress. As he passed he spat and made a remark: "You dirty (obscenity) killer."
I didn't realize he had spit on me at first, and decided not to cause a scene over what he had said. But I noticed his spit on my tie shortly after. His only possible provocation was my being a soldier in the uniform of my country.
He was not a hippie. He could have been a tourist, and both he and I were walking alone walking in different directions. I had never seen the man before.
As a result of this instance and to avoid other problems, our commanding officer encouraged us to wear civilian attire to work instead of our uniforms."
Claude A. Smith; Gaithersburg, Maryland, p. 31
Bob Greene, "Homecoming: When The Soldiers Returned From Vietnam", 1989
"In June 1969, the LST I was on sustained implosion damage from the grenades used to ward off 'zappers.' The damage required dry docking, and the ship was sent to Japan. I had been overseas for 19 months already, and the majority of that time was spent in Vietnam. I got lucky and was able to get a hop all the way from Yokota, Japan, to Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, which was great, considering home was a suburb of Cleveland.
I was sitting in a chair in the Columbus airport talking to some of the infantrymen who had hopped in with me, passing time. We had some girls come over to us and one or two hippies had a word to say, but we ignored them (not the girls, of course). ...
Shortly thereafter another hippie-type person came over to us, stood directly in front of where I was sitting and, in language flowered with the best vernacular of the day, was pointing at our service ribbons and other accoutrements, and calling us sarcastically 'war heroes.' He then proceeded to spout a line I had not heard before, but I would live to hear over and over: He called us 'baby burners.' At that point he spat on me. I'm sure he never expected the response he got. As a reflex action, I sprang up and put his lights out. It was the proverbial two-hit fight.
Before I even realized what I had done, one of the local constabulary had grabbed me and was escorting me to the Security Room, despite the objections fo the other servicemen present. The person I hit was not detained even a moment. He was helped to his feet, asked if he was okay, and summarily dismissed. They didn't even ask him if wanted to press charges. ... I think the only reason they did, in fact, let me go was because they had neglected to have the guy sign a complaint or press charges. ... Looking back on things, it is obvious to me now that the guy who spit on me was performing for the others nearby."
George M. Householder; Painesville, Ohio, pp. 35-36
Bob Greene, "Homecoming: When The Soldiers Returned From Vietnam", 1989
In January 1969 I joined the Army due to a draft declassification back to 1A while attending college at Texas Wesleyan in Fort Worth. ... Aprile 1970 and I am at the airport in Dallas on my way to Nam. The airport Bible flippers wouldn't even approach you because of the uniform. I think 'Mother fuckin' baby killer' was the favorite line we heard. In Frisco, we had to change flights with a one hour wait. I was spit on twice -- once by a female hippie-type who smelled as bad as she looked and secondly by a well-dressed young business type who would be called a 'yuppie' today. Him I flattened with a left hook in the gut and a right to his big mouth. My fellow officers and I were escorted to our plane by security and held there until the plane left. The average American in the airport only called us names without any physical violence threatened. Terms such as 'Murderer,' 'Baby killer,' 'Mercenary asshole,' 'Rapist,' and 'Fucking Bastard War Monger' were the parting words from our fellow Americans we were getting ready to die for.
These taunts came form men and women, young and old. ...
Vietnam was Vietnam. I came back on a stretcher with seven bullet holes in me, 57 combat decorations (two Silver Stars), and spent two years in an Army hospital due to my service.
Some of my friends that didn't come back on military Medevac told me the name-calling and spitting got them again in Frisco and other major airports. We all resolved this in our future assignments by not wearing our uniforms in public. This worked well, because the Army was letting us wear our hair longer and we purchased civilian-type luggage and did not use the bags issued to us by the military. As long as you didn't look like military, you were left alone. ...
If we ever do go to war again and I decide to participate if the Army will have me, I'll shoot every SOB who curses or spits on me for defending our country."
Lou Rochat; Universal City, Texas, pp. 37-39
Bob Greene, "Homecoming: When The Soldiers Returned From Vietnam", 1989
"The circumstances of my being spat on were somewhat different than the stereotype, and, frankly, I never realized that there were other veterans complaining of similar occurrences.
I served in Vietnam during the height of the war, September 1967 to September 1968. If you recall, the war sentiment at the time was such that when I went to Vietnam I was still considered by many to be a patriot. By the time I was ready to return home, the United States had experienced the Chicago Democratic Convention, the riots in Detroit, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the riots in many cities -- and Haight Ashbury in San Francisco had blossomed. Frankly, I felt safer in Vietnam.
When I returned from overseas duty, I was to leave the Army and 'outprocess' in San Francisco. My girlfriend, who became my fiancee in San Francisco and now has been my wife for eighteen years, met me upon my arrival. One day while simply touring San Francisco, in uniform, a rather nondescript man on the street spit at my uniform because he was obviously in disagreement with what it represented at the time. Nothing was said, but the incident saddenned and confused me. I took off my uniform later that day and never put it on again during the rest of my stay in San Francisco.
What bothered me the most about the incident was that, having been born in 1944, I grew up with World War II movies which made soldiers heroes, and always showed them coming home to ticker-tape parades down Fifth Avenue. If there is any aspect of the war I have trouble coping with, it was trying to understand spitting on a uniform. I was an officer involved in covert intelligence work in Vietnam, so I did not experience some of the horrors of the infantrymen who were in the heat of battle every day. The only 'mental scar' that remains with me today was the unwelcome display of that man in San Francisco.
I had effectively put the incident out of my head to the point that I do not remember anything about the man except that he was not a hippie. Until now, I always thought my experience was somewhat isolated."
J. Leonard Caldeira; Chicago, IL, pp. 40-41
Bob Greene, "Homecoming: When The Soldiers Returned From Vietnam", 1989
"I attended a military reunion in New York in 1968. I was standing in front of the Waldorf waiting for a cab when a young girl walked up to me and spat. She said something and walked away. The doorman told me that it was not a 'good idea' to wear a uniform in New York."
M. Tierny; Las Vegas, Nevada, p. 41
Bob Greene, "Homecoming: When The Soldiers Returned From Vietnam", 1989
"Yes, I am a Vietnam veteran who was spat upon -- literally and figuratively. By hippies? I don't know. In the airport? Yes. San Francisco International Airport on October 11, 1971 at 3:15 p.m., and yes, I was still in uniform. To be exact, it was the same uniform that I wore during the last Fire Support Mission I was involved in, just 36 hours before landing in San Francisco Airport. No, I didn't have mud, dirt, or gunpowder on my uniform. A very kind Vietnamese woman at the Transit Company washed and ironed it for me so that I could come home to the country I love looking nice. This was one hell of a lot more than I received upon arrival.
If I were the only one to be spat upon, the score would be : not spat upon, 1,999,999, spat upon, 1. Of course, I know this score to be wrong. Literally because I saw others spat upon, and figuratively because to spit on one Vietnam veteran is to spit on them all.
The person who spat on me was wearing a shirt that said 'Welcome Home Baby-Killer.' ...
About that image of a burly Green Beret walking through the airport and being spat upon by a war protester -- let's also remember that most war protestors or hippies or whatever name you want to attach to them were also becoming very aware of their rights as U.S. citizens, and they knew that if this burly Green Beret did nothing they (protesters) had won, and if the burly Green Beret retaliated, they (protesters) still won. How could they lose?"
Robert E. McClelland; Massillon, Ohio, pp. 41-43
Bob Greene, "Homecoming: When The Soldiers Returned From Vietnam", 1989
"I am a female veteran of the U.S. Air Force -- 1967, 1968, 1969, and 1970. I was in Southeast Asia though not actually in Vietnam. I returned to the States in 1970 through Travis Air Force Base, and from there I visited a friend for a week and then flew back to the Midwest through O'Hare. I worked at a vegetable canning factory and at a local ski resort before returning to college at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the fall of 1971. This is where my spitting story takes place.
I had joined a veteran's group called Vets for Peace. We were active in anti-war protest marches in Milwaukee, Madison, and Chicago. We usually marched with a group of veterans from Chicago called Vietnam Veterans Against the War. It was in Madison, on Veterans Day, 1971, as I was walking to the Capitol building from campus (all alone). I was wearing my Air Force overcoat and my Vets for Peace hat when a man about 19 or 20 years old looked me in the face and spit right into my face. He was a normal looking man, nothing to distinguish him from a thousand other people. But I will never forget what he did to me."
Rose Marie McDonough; Green Bay, Wisconsin, pp. 43-44
Bob Greene, "Homecoming: When The Soldiers Returned From Vietnam", 1989
"I am a retired Catholic chaplain who served the Air Force community for twenty years. I had two tours in Vietnam (Phan Rang and Bien Hoa). I left Bien Hoa on November 18, 1968, flew military contract aircraft to Philadelphia, and then on to New York for two weeks' leave.
While I was leaving the JFK airport to catch a bus to the city, a lady (around 43 years old) told me that 'I napalm babies' and she spit on me. I didn't take her for a 'hippie' though.
Needless to say she ruined my two weeks' leave."
Father Guy Morgan; Fort Collins, Colorado, p. 44
Bob Greene, "Homecoming: When The Soldiers Returned From Vietnam", 1989
"I think the date was March 7, 1972. I was in the San Francisco airport. I had just showered and put a fresh uniform (Air Force) on for my first leg home. Walking out to my gate I passed a 'hippie' who spat upon me and continued walking in the opposite direction, without a word.
I made nothing of the incident for two reasons:
(1) I was happy to be going home after 367 days in Thailand, and didn't want anything to screw it up, and
(2) Officers who get in public fights, while in uniform, are dealt with in a fairly severe fashion."
Chris Ramel; Denver, Colorado, p. 37
Bob Greene, "Homecoming: When The Soldiers Returned From Vietnam", 1989
"Late at night in mid-August 1969, I was spat upon in the San Francisco airport by a man in his early twenties. I had just returned from my tour of duty in the Republic of Vietnam, processed through the mess at the Oakland Army Depot, and was waiting at the airport for an early morning flight to my Denver home. The man who spat on me ran up to me from my left rear, spat, and turned to face me. The spittle hit me on the left shoulder and on my few military decorations about my left breast pockets. He then shouted at me that I was a "mother-fucking murderer." I was quite shocked and just stared at him, probably with a stupid look on my face.
The spitter then called me a "mother-fucking chicken-shit." He was balling up his fists when he yelled this. A cop or security guard then showed up and grabbed the man from behind. I did not see where he came from, nor do I have any notion of how much time went by between the spitting and the cop's arrival, though it could not have been too long. A pretty good struggle went on between them for a few seconds, and then two more cops showed up. All the time the man who spat on me was calling me (and, I suppose, the cops) names, indicating we lacked bravery.
Having talked to other servicemen during the remainder of my service, I found two other young men who told me that they had similar experiences, one in an airport, the other in a bus station. I have no reason to doubt them. I also related my experience that same night to the man at the San Francisco airport who was running the USO center there. He confirmed what the police had told me: that a number of similar confrontations had occurred there recently."
Douglas D. Detmer; Farmington, New Mexico, pp. 83-4
Bob Greene, "Homecoming: When The Soldiers Returned From Vietnam", 1989
Wow, Tantor, why don't you just download Bob Greene's entire book. Actually, there are only 63 instances out of the scores and scores that Greene investigated that he thought were legitimate accounts of "luggies". I already debunked one of these remaining 63, which was set in a fictitious airport, and Jerry Lembche couldn't corroborate these 63 accounts after investigating (of course he might be one of the evil ones too), so what are we left with? Perhaps a few true accounts and Tanner, in obsessive compulsive fashion, regurgitating what pyschologists would call the "I'm a victim" syndrome over and over.
Here's what, Tanner, after you run out of Bob Greene's stories, you can develop your own, compile them into a novel and market it. Call it "How the Hippies Spit America to its Knees". Good luck.
Actually, you've only debunked it to yourself. Oakland was one of the airports which received returning vets via a military terminal. This young GI returning from Vietnam mistook it for an Air Force Base. You're simply picking nits.
The spitting has not ended either. There is video of the leftists protestors spitting on a wounded Iraq War vet during a demonstration last winter in DC. During the next demonstration, the Washington Post videotaped a Code Pink protestor attempting to spit on a counter-protestor and posted it on their online edition.
However, I welcome your attempt to rewrite your shameful history. That gives us more opportunities to show what liars you are and the shameful abuse you heaped on the military, then use those deceptions to destroy the credibility of the Left.
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