"Diversity is not our strength": Cincy's own Ramaswamy 2024!

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(08-09-2023, 10:17 PM)Dill Wrote: Could very well be. The question of whether such things happened is often raised in college history courses on the '60s. From my memory, protestors and hippies and the like were more worried about being beaten up by gung ho active duty types. I do remember returning vets being largely welcomed into protests movements, which many eagerly joined. They became one of the most important constituents of the anti-war movement. 

As far as the myth of the spitting protestors, it seems to have emerged in the '90s. 
 
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/opinion/myth-spitting-vietnam-protester.html
“So where do these stories come from?”
The reporter was asking about accounts that soldiers returning from Vietnam had been spat on by antiwar activists. I had told her the stories were not true. I told her that, on the contrary, opponents of the war had actually tried to recruit returning veterans. I told her about a 1971 Harris Poll survey that found that 99 percent of veterans said their reception from friends and family had been friendly, and 94 percent said their reception from age-group peers, the population most likely to have included the spitters, was friendly.

A follow-up poll, conducted in 1979 for the Veterans Administration (now the Department of Veterans Affairs), reported that former antiwar activists had warmer feelings toward Vietnam veterans than toward congressional leaders or even their erstwhile fellow travelers in the movement.

There are several books on the subject. Could be written by "leftists" though.
Spat on Veterans: An Enduring Myth
https://www.fromthesquare.org/spat-on-veterans-an-enduring-myth/
 
The Los Angeles Times editorialized that it was a mythical image—an edifying myth, said editor Michael McGough, but still a myth.

Apparently, Wall Street Journal editors did not get the memo. Its January 30, 2023, pages carried Jerry Davis’s “Vietnam War Veterans Deserve an Apology.” In the article, Davis claims that “veterans were often advised not to wear their uniforms lest they become targets for mistreatment. Some were cursed, spat on, and worse.” He goes on to say that “Vietnam veterans often had trouble getting jobs.”

Little in what Davis says is true. To fly home free on a commercial airline, returnees from Vietnam had to be in uniform. Employers were required to hire-back men drafted for Vietnam upon their return. It is true that plant closings in the auto and steel industries in the late 1970s hit Vietnam veterans hard—but that is not what Davis is writing about.

There is no evidence that Vietnam veterans were spat on. Nor could they have been, at least not in the manner described in the most often told stories. Those stories tell of landing at San Francisco Airport and being met by groups of spitters, often hippies. But flights from Vietnam landed at military airbases like Travis outside San Francisco; protesters could not have gotten on the airbase, much less near deplaning troops.

Legend of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/legend-of-the-spat-upon-vietnam-veteran/

In his exhaustive book entitled “The Spitting Image,” Vietnam vet and Holy Cross professor Jerry Lembcke documents veterans who claim they were spat on by anti-war protesters, but he found no physical evidence (photographs, news reports, etc.) that these transgressions actually occurred. His findings are supported by surveys of his fellow Vietnam veterans as they came home.

For instance, Lembcke notes that “a U.S. Senate study, based on data collected in August 1971 by Harris Associates, found that 75 percent of Vietnam-era veterans polled disagreed with the statement, ‘Those people at home who opposed the Vietnam War often blame veterans for our involvement there’ ” while “94 percent said their reception by people their own age who had not served in the armed forces was friendly.”

Meanwhile, the Veterans’ World Project at Southern Illinois University found that many Vietnam vets supported the anti-war protest, with researchers finding almost no veterans “finish(ing) their service in Vietnam believing that what the United States has done there has served to forward our nation’s purposes.”

In the face of such data, why would the current president nonetheless repeat the apocryphal myth about spat-on Vietnam veterans? Because — facts be damned — it serves a purpose: to suppress protest and perpetuate the ideology of militarism.

This objective is achieved through the narrative’s preposterous assumptions. Metaphorically, if not explicitly, the mythology equates anti-war activism with dishonoring the troops; implies that such protest is kryptonite to the Pentagon’s Superman; and therefore insinuates that America loses wars not when policies are wrong, but when dissent is tolerated.

https://www.mainememory.net/sitebuilder/site/2690/page/4310/display

Quote: I am a Vietnam vet, and like most vets, I don’t much care to talk about the things I saw or the things that I went through. But there are a few things that I would like to share with the younger generation.

I was 18-years-old when I was sent off to war and, as I recall, my mother and father were the only ones at the August airport when I left; and they were the only ones at the Augusta airport when I came home. No police escorts, news media, or parades. I recall a lot of states sending buddies of mine nice letters and in some cases, money, as a bonus for serving. I came back from Vietnam in 1971, and as of today, the state of Maine has never acknowledged my service.
I can, and have, gotten over that, but there is one thing that I will carry to my grave. When we left Vietnam, we spent 18 hours in the air before touching U.S. soil. I will never forget how happy we were to be home. I also will never forget the horror of seeing all the protestors there to greet us; they made us feel like the war was our fault.
But the worst part was when they started spitting on us. I still today tear up when I talk about it. Despite all I went through in those 13 months, that was the worst. I was honorably discharged as an E-6 SSG with 11 years active duty, and am considered 100% disabled because of PTSD.
Things have changed today and I am more proud than ever for our young men and women who have and who are serving us.

Tons of similar stories. Protests did happen when veterans returned. They even happened when we returned from Iraq I seen that first hand. Why are we trying to rewrite history?