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

[GMDino]

(08-10-2023, 07:11 AM)Dill Wrote: I don't think anyone is disputing that protests occurred either of the Vietnam or the Iraq War. 

The question is whether veterans were spit upon by protestors when they got home. Or to refine this a bit--the question is about whether and how much such alleged "spitting incidents" should be taken as representative of vets homecoming from the Vietnam War, since the issue is rarely raised in a political vacuum.

So this is more about establishing history than rewriting it. As far as I can tell, no one can find photographs or news accounts from the period in question which confirm the spitting--though there is a great deal of news footage and many photographs.  And many vets dispute it.

This columnist from Desert News, Bob Greene, got over a thousand replies when he posed the question to his readers. He selected some here for interesting reading. Many claim the spitting stories are bunk.  But the common thread that runs through them is that their service was not acknowledged. People had no idea what they had gone through and didn't seem to care. (As with many current A-stan and Iraq vets.) One claims he was indeed spit on, every day in Vietnam by Agent Orange and the government which sent him on a losing mission. https://www.deseret.com/1989/2/4/18800994/vietnam-vets-recall-their-homecomings-often-painfully

My own memories of the period (I began college in fall of '69, with vets all over the campus) are dominated by returning veterans joining the anti-war effort. They were probably the most visible group of returning vets. Most appear to have just gone home and integrated back into life. Of the 7-8 vets I knew from HS, only half went to Vietnam, and only one was killed. 

As far as your question "why are we rewriting history," in this particular case, the rewriting appears to have begun in earnest in the late '80s and early '90s. I've wondered if Hollywood films might have something to do with it as well. (Didn't Rambo say he was spit on?) Events which may not have happened, or happened very rarely, became a dominant representation of  the war for people who learned about it decades later, a fact easily integrated with the U.S. very own Dolchstosslegende--liberals stabbed the military in the back. The war was lost on the home front, etc. 

Seems to me that David Sirota's conclusion, from the ST link in my previous post, suggest why some groups would want to rewrite history, not only of Vietnam but other wars, like the Iraq War, as well.

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.

Part of the "news legs" this issue gets is, it seems to me, derives from the ideological club it provides for revisionist history. If there are vets who were spat upon and otherwise disrespected when they returned, they'd have to experience this question as one more act of disrespect. Can't question the right wing revision of the war, then, without questioning those personal experiences--so "attacking the troops" yet again. No one who seriously wants to know what happened will treat the question that way, but there are strong ideological motivations here to keep the issue hot and muddled, in hopes the villains in U.S. history continue to be the people who wanted us out of such disastrous wars, not the people/policies that got  Americans into them. 

I'm not willing to say no soldier was ever spit on.  It's a big country and everyone has their own individual experiences that we can't discount.  We also can't extrapolate them to encompass everyone else either.

I am willing to ask if some of the "soldiers were spit on" was metaphorical also.  I didn't know about any of the above writings and have not even bothered to go through it all yet though.

I don't know if that's "moral courage" or just having a discussion.  Someone will let me know.