Enough With the Vietnam Lies

In honor of Chris Hayes' courage in questioning the every-vet's-a-hero bullshit, I am finally going to post on an issue I've been wanting to tackle for a long time, but held back out of pure cowardice.

There are 25 million veterans in the United States. They represent a fair cross-section of American society: every race, every ethnic background, every religion including none, every socio-economic background, every political loyalty, all sexes and every sexual preference.

And every point on the civic virtue spectrum from genuine hero (the rare few) to irredeemable evil criminal (also the rare few) and everything in between.

Veterans deserve basic respect for their service to the nation, but nothing more or less until they prove themselves deserving of praise or condemnation.

So it's long past time for everybody who did not serve to stop apologizing to every Vietnam Veteran for disrespect that never happened.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

This just irritates me. Sirota reports on Obama’s Memorial Day speech:

“You were often blamed for a war you didn’t start, when you should have been commended for serving your country with valor,” he told veterans. “You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated. It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened.”

Right, see, that didn’t happen. There is zero hard evidence that soldiers were spat upon when they returned (obviously what Obama is referring to though he didn’t use the word). If soldiers were treated poorly, it was by the federal government that was completely unprepared to deal with the massive trauma the war caused in people’s heads and bodies.

But most protestors against Vietnam protested because they themselves didn’t want to go. They saw the soldiers over there and realized that it could and quite likely would be them. They supported the soldiers so much that they wanted to bring them home, away from a pointless war where 58,000 of them would die. Now one class of soldier was sometimes seen as a bad guy and that was the bomber pilots like John McCain who were raining death down upon the Vietnamese people. But that was a small group of elite soldiers, not the average GI. But protestors wouldn’t spit on soldiers because they knew that would be like spitting upon themselves. This myth really reinforces the idea of the anti-Vietnam protests being about a bunch of elite unpatriotic hippies at wealthy colleges disconnected from “real Americans.” And there’s a lot of people who very much want that idea to be true, including a lot of Vietnam Vets who want to believe the only reason the U.S. lost the war was that we were betrayed at home.

More Sirota:

In his exhaustive book titled “The Spitting Image,” Vietnam vet and Associate Professor Jerry Lembcke of College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts documents veterans who claim they were spat on by antiwar 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 antiwar 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.”

So why is Obama using this imagery? He may or may not know the truth, but no doubt at least some of his people do. But it’s the image and rhetoric. Since it is flat out accepted as truth by the general public (quite literally, telling students that there is no evidence of people spitting on Vietnam vets shocks them more than anything else I tell them, because they have heard it all their lives), Obama is just going with the narrative to serve his present purposes.

But it is a lie, it is wrong, and it does not serve today’s veterans to repeat lies about their ancestors.

What the spitting myth does is make any criticism of veterans - and Vietnam veterans in particular - unacceptable. Dare to call attention to the fact that we have walking around among us right now people who literally tortured, raped and murdered women and children just for the pure fucking pleasure of it? How dare you! Just like a commie hippie: SPITTING ON THE TROOPS.

It's frustrating and infuriating.

Veterans - particularly combat veterans with PTSD and sexual trauma - deserve far better than the shabby treatment they are currently receiving from the DoD and the Department of Veterans Affairs. The rest of us should be demanding that the federal government tax obscenely rich chicken hawks like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly to pay for full treatment and benefits.

But no more apologizing for mythical disrespect that never happened.

Digby has a slightly different take.