Are there any "spitting on Viet Nam veteran" pics or film?

[laststeamtrain]

I know I haven't seen them. Do they exist? Did it ever really happen?

I'm listening to Winter Soldier coverage on kpfa ( http://www.kpfa.org/ ).

They've p
Is he, like Reagan, confusing movies & real life?

I know "Rambo" was spit on, but that was a movie.

I'm wondering did anyone at anytime ever spit on a veteran?

[mahina]

1. "Sir, No, Sir" illuminates this meme,

http://www.sirnosir.com/

-"Sir! No Sir! tells the long suppressed story of the GI movement to end the war in Vietnam. This is the story of one of the most vibrant and widespread upheavals of the 1960’s- one that had a profound impact on American society yet has been virtually obliterated from the collective memory of that time."

[JackRiddler]

15. Highly recommended documentary - must see for all, high school and up.

The only documents of this spitting story you're going to find are fictional, in pro-war and apologetic movies.

The reality is that the antiwar movement was in solidarity with the troops who resisted, and that the American invasion of Indochina came to an end in the period after 1969 because of the mutiny of the troops, who refused to go out on missions any more and who, according to the Pentagon's own admissions, killed hundreds of their own officers to avoid combat in a pointless, murderous conflict.

[Warren Stupidity]

2. Supposedly the guy who wrote 'Born On the 4th of July'

claims he was in fact spit on. That is as close as I have ever come to a substantiated event. In general, this is urban legend. As a participant in many an anti-war demonstration, some of them far from peaceful, I never saw any such event and I don't think that the many vietnam vets rioting protesting with me would have stood for that sort of crap for one second.

[coalition_unwilling]

30. I personally know Ron Kovic (author of "Bot4ofJuly") and he has never claimed he was

spit on, to the best of my knowledge.

[Warren Stupidity]

33. That is why I used 'supposedly'

as I have no knowledge if this is just more rumor or not. It was asserted on the internets. Ah - here we go, it was in the damn movie and it was at one of the riots I attended personally, along with Kovic and about 2500 VVAW hard core protestors and a whole lot of lunatic yippees like myself and other assorted and more boring people at the refuglican convention in miami in '72. Kovic was indeed spit on - by a reknucklian delegate! There ya go! The myth is true! People (sort of) did spit at Vietnam vets!
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Born_on_the_Fourth_of_July

But Tahitinut says it happened to him and I'll go with that and with 'it was rare and not part of what the antiwar movement was about'. As I said, A lot of the folks I was protesting with back then were vietnam vets and there just wasn't going to be any spitting on soldiers. In fact I don't recall any of us spitting on anyone. If we were going to be hitting people with stuff it sure as hell wasn't going to be spit.

[coalition_unwilling]

34. Oh yeah, it's quite possible that the Repukes would have spit on

Kovic.

Of course, the Repukes would have spat on him for exactly the opposite of the reason commonly given in the stating of the myth (in the service of promulgating various stab-in-the-back myths about Vietnam).

I'll have to ask Kovic about it the next time I see him (probably tomorrow at the anti-war demo in Los Angeles at Hollywood and Vine). I promise I'll be back to let you know what Kovic says (assuming I can touch base with him tomorrow, that is).

[ellenfl]

3. my understanding is that was

urban legend. i am of that era and i think i heard about it but i never read about it . . . and i read nothing but stories of vietnam for several years after the war (late 70s thru early eighties). never once read that anyone had been spit on.

ellen fl

[sinkingfeeling]

4. I think there's lots of stories to that affect, but no pictures or verification.

[mitchum]

5. Sure, they are kept in the film archives with Santa Claus's home movies

[TahitiNut]

6. (grr)

Read my fucking Journal!


:grr: :grr: :grr:

[laststeamtrain]

9. You keep a 'fucking' journal? Damn. You're a bad man.

I just keep it all in my head.

[devilgrrl]

11. I got you covered. Yeah! Read his journal!!!! He's not the only it happened to here either.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/TahitiNut/11

[TahitiNut]

17. Thank you, devilgrrl. I appreciate the core integrity you've shown in this.

:pals:

[devilgrrl]

18. Thanks.

I'm still really ashamed of myself over all that. :blush::blush::blush::blush:

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

20. I just read your journal, I am truly sorry for your experience.

Peace be with you.

[TahitiNut]

23. Thank you.

It must be carefully noted that MY experience neither makes the claims of another's experience true nor false. MY experience, however, IS my experience and I refuse to accommodate wrong-headed allegations that I didn't have them. We are all the sum of our experiences and I shudder to think of the lesser person I'd possibly be without mine. That does not mean I'd wish them on another or that I even sought them. They just are.

[nadinbrzezinski]

22. Don't worry, we will have this all over again in twenty or so

maybe forty or so years, with vets from this war

I witnessed (and stopped) a verbal assault from a rightiie on a troop who was homeless

That was about two years ago.

And it wasn't pretty.

I can bet that in forty years the right will be claiming it was the left, who hate murica, verbally assaulting troops and berating them with the usual crap

If nothing else the Right are experts are rewriting history

[TahitiNut]

27. There is nothing quite as influential in what we believe than what we WANT to believe.

Such a realization should give every one of us pause. It does me. I'm often saddened to see such a DESIRE to believe what I KNOW to be false ... not just what I BELIEVE to be false but what I KNOW to be false (since I must also be aware of the influence of my own desires).

In a political climate that preys upon our desires - not just our highest apsirations but our basest appetites - it is critical that we not surrender to cynicism. I am obliged to choose to value the (potentially false) beliefs that would make me/us "better" above those that would make me/us "lesser," more willingly abandoning the latter in the face of experience when they do not serve.

[laststeamtrain]

32. I have no doubt that what you say is true. n/t

[Benhurst]

7. Although anything is possible and almost anything possible has happened,

the spat upon veteran stories are mostly myths. The one I like best is the tearful returning Marine who was spat upon by Hippies. There may have been such a Marine; but he was cut from a very different cloth from those I've known!

I worked with Viet Nam veterans in the early seventies and never heard such stories, which is not to say it is impossible they happened. I do know the vets were being pissed upon routinely by American big business, however, which was reluctant to hire them after several highly-publicized killings brought on by what we now call PTSD.

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

8. I never witnessed any spitting on veterans, but I was spit on by

so called veterans at peace marches in San Diego.

[ThomWV]

10. I did 3 tours in Viet Nam, came back and forth 6 times. Not a drop of spittle

Always traveled in uniform, passed through the San Francisco airport 4 times, not a single word was said to me.

[underpants]

13. Thank you. I think this story, as I have read, is from the same people who

nay-sayed the Mai Lai massacre maybe not the same exact people but the same elements.

It was galvanized in pop culture in "Rambo" and even on "China Beach"-hippies at a gate in the SF airport throwing eggs. They have to change clothes before going outside the gate.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

12. I never heard these stories until the Reagan administration

At the time the war was going on, most Vietnam vets complained about being treated with embarrassed silence and occasional hostility.

[asdjrocky]

14. There are no pictures because it's a pure fabrication.

I had two brothers who served, and if you run with the people I ran with for years, you meet a lot of vets of that era. It never happened. All propaganda, mostly from you know who, to agitate the anti-war people.

It never happened.

[TahitiNut]

19. That's a blatant falsehood.

It happened. It happened to me. It MAY not have happened to many of those who claim it did, but that DOES NOT mean it didn't happen at all. Considering the fact that, at one time, as many as SIX TIMES AS MANY folks claimed to be Viet Nam Veterans as actually served in Viet Nam (2.7 million of us), it can't be surprising that there was a LOT of claimant "bathwater" ... but let's not throw out the baby.

[nadinbrzezinski]

25. As I wrote above, it will also be denied

that vets from this war have been verbally assaulted.

It happened...probably less since there were less actual vets than what at one time people claimed, but it happened

And I for one, will say this to you.

I apologize for a nation of ignorant fools. One reason we are where we are right now is that we refused to learn from the Nam experience, and rather go and watch Rambo defeat them, since we didn't

[asdjrocky]

26. I then stand corrected.

Sorry for my bad, and admittedly anecdotal information. Can you tell me when and where this happened to you?

When my brothers came home, one in 70 and one in 72, we saw nothing like this.

[TahitiNut]

29. I've addressed this too often on DU. Thus, my Journal contains the more salient posts.

Forgive me for not wishing to reiterate that which I've addressed too often. And forgive me for a lengthy Journal in which some diligence is needed to locate the relevant posts. It's the best I've been able to do.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/TahitiNut

[Tarc]

28. It did happen, but not at all widespread or commonplace as the righties claim

[devilgrrl]

16. Some men had this happen to them but there wasn't a mass movement as the 'RAMBO' movies suggest

This is from a fellow DUer: http://journals.democraticunderground.com/TahitiNut/11

There's at least one other DUer who experienced this as well.

I see no reason not to believe them.

[ForrestGump]

24. I'm in solidarity with TahitiNut's graphic above...

It did happen. Those who absolutely dismiss it are guilty of not just black-and-white "thinking" but are happily buying a spurious claim at least as readily as others might believe there were organized cadres of FilthyHippies who formed spit platoons at gateway airports. Of course some people were spat on because they were soldiers returning from Vietnam...people are scum (or, at least, a good damn many can be) and it's almost an inevitability that something along those lines would happen. Look around DU to see examples of so-called 'progressives' who are just nasty pieces of crap -- you sure don't have to look far to find some prime examples, and the Right and the warmongers do not have a monopoly on a-holery.

It happened to a friend of mine, a man who did three tours with the Marines in Vietnam. He was spat on and jeered and called names at the airport when he finally returned home in late 1969 or early 1970, I think at the airport in San Francisco. He's a small dude, pretty soft-spoken, and was then and is now a 'liberal' by anyone's standards...in other words, he was not some anti-longhair Freeper type and he knows all too well that Rambo is fiction. He promptly left the good old USA not long after because he did not recognize the country and because, like a lot of returning veterans, he was marginalized because of his service in a conflict many seemed to want to pretend did not happen. He lived in England for a few years, marrying an English woman, before coming back and relocating to California. He buried his Vietnam experiences for almost two decades, PTSD dreams aside, until his son started asking him about it. It was not a popular war, least of all with those who were sent to fight it.

[kenny blankenship]

21. Sure there are pics and film of it. And you can see them all on AM radio.

[genie_weenie]

31. Yes, it happened.

Because the US government was successful yet again at seperating those who should have been natural allies. Vets and the Anti-War crowd. Fortunately today appears different as both groups seem to realize the bureaucratic machine which grinds people to death for influence and economic gain is the problem not the individual cog in the machine.