The spitting on Vietnam vets; BULLSHIT

[patfromlogan]

It's similar to Vietnam vets getting spit on returning home from war.

No. Spitting on drafted Vietnam soldiers is one thing, but spitting on soldiers who willingly signed up to kill Iraqis is another.

Why don't you drive your ass down to Fort Benning or fort Bragg and spit on a few soldiers. Only this time instead of taking it like some did after Nam, they'll stomp your fucking guts in.

I dont' believe it's ever okay to spit on or disrespect a soldier. But that's my personal belief.

It never happened. It is total unadalterated crapola/propaganda/urban legend/doo doo.

1. Do we really believe that a "dirty hippie" would spit upon a fit and trained soldier? If such a confrontation had occurred, would that combat-hardened soldier have just ignored the insult? Would there not be pictures, arrest reports, a trial record or a coroner's report after such an event? Years of research have produced no such records.

http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/...-8122285c.html

2. 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?

3. 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. Lembcke, a professor of sociology at Holy Cross and a VIETNAM VETERAN, 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.
http://slate.msn.com/id/1005224/http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=350

5. Today, one can walk into, say, a college classroom and within minutes generate an animated conversation with twenty year-olds about PTSD and Vietnam veterans. The students have sufficient images of troubled, homeless, violent, and strung-out vets to sustain the conversation. They also "know" about protesters calling veterans "baby killers" and spitting on them. But try to talk to them about Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), anti-war G.I. coffee houses, or fragging and you will draw blank stares. The real history of G.I. and veteran resistance to the war has been lost, the image of a generation of young men empowered by their wartime experiences displaced by images of them as victims.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...12/ai_19549100

[Tef-the-Persian]

Well, that's good. I don't like being spat upon.

[Ronin]

So it never happened ?

[patfromlogan]

http://www.socialistworker.org/2003-...undtable.shtml

[Ronin]

Now, I recall a scene I saw on a video clip in a TV series about the Vietnam war, where they shows a person let lose a serious loogy on a soldier, and the soldier prombtly attacking their ass.
Was that fabricated?

[patfromlogan]

I don't know, it could have happened, but according to the book the author couldn't authenicate anything, ever. There might have been cases, but why aren't there any documentations? I haven't seen any vids, but there doesn't seem to be any court records of the beat downs that would have resulted. Can you recall the source of the vid?

[Ronin]

It was that long ass TV series about the war in Vietnam, it still shows once and awhile on the History Channel.
The one that showed the infamous clip of the SV major shooting a VC.

[VikingPower]

My uncle was Marine Recon in Vietnam, he spent the night in jail after some protester spit upon him and he promptly responded by beating the shit out of him in the hospital. Nobody ever said they slunk away in shame, but it has happened many times. When I used to work at the VA hospital when I was 16, I made really good friends with a man by the name of Frank Poole, a permanently disabled Vietnam vet and former Green Beret. He was missing both of his legs at the knee and his left hand was crippled and disfigured.

He taught me a lot about life though, and one of the stories he told me was when he and his buddy were leaving a bar about a week or so after returning home, wearing their uniforms and showing off their pride for having served, when a small group of protesters started throwing rocks at them and calling them "baby-killers." Frank wanted to fuck them up, but his buddy was a born-again Baptist who managed to talk him out of it. They just hopped into one of the nearby cabs and went home. Not every vet who got fucked with would just start beating the shit out of somebody.

[patfromlogan]

And after I learned that the FBI led the charge (dressed like hippies) on the Bank of America buildig in Santa Barbara and burned it down, I don't exactly trust our dear secrete police. After all, the same guys who went down in Watergate had burglarized and gone after Ellsberg, the guy who spilled the Pentagon Papers to the NY Times. After all, the FBI is keeping 20,000 pages about Malcolm X secret, 40 years after his death.

COINTELPRO:
1. Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents.

2. Psychological Warfare From the Outside: The FBI and police used myriad other "dirty tricks" to undermine progressive movements. They planted false media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name of targeted groups. They forged correspondence, sent anonymous letters, and made anonymous telephone calls. They spread misinformation about meetings and events, set up pseudo movement groups run by government agents, and manipulated or strong-armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials and others to cause trouble for activists.

3. Harassment through the Legal System The FBI and police abused the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals. Officers of the law gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a pretext for false arrests and wrongful imprisonment. They discriminatorily enforced tax laws and other government regulations and used conspicuous surveillance, "investigative" inter views, and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to intimidate activists and silence their supporters.

4. Extralegal Force and Violence: The FBI and police threatened, instigated, and themselves conducted break-ins, vandalism, assaults, and beatings. The object was to frighten dissidents and disrupt their movements. In the case of radical Black and Puerto Rican activists (and later Native Americans), these attacks-including political assassinations-were so extensive, vicious, and calculated that they can accurately be termed a form of official "terrorism."

A total of 2,370 officially approved COINTELPRO actions were admitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee, and thousands more have since been uncovered.

[patfromlogan]

Koto_Ryu, why don't you write jlembcke@holycross.edu, the author of The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, as he states that in years of research he couldn't believe that it really happened to anyone.

p.s. For some reason, this forum split up addresses; there's no space between e and d

[Ronin]

And after I learned that the FBI led the charge (dressed like hippies) on the Bank of America buildig in Santa Barbara and burned it down, I don't exactly trust our dear secrete police. After all, the same guys who went down in Watergate had burglarized and gone after Ellsberg, the guy who spilled the Pentagon Papers to the NY Times. After all, the FBI is keeping 20,000 pages about Malcolm X secret, 40 years after his death.

COINTELPRO:
1. Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents.

2. Psychological Warfare From the Outside: The FBI and police used myriad other "dirty tricks" to undermine progressive movements. They planted false media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name of targeted groups. They forged correspondence, sent anonymous letters, and made anonymous telephone calls. They spread misinformation about meetings and events, set up pseudo movement groups run by government agents, and manipulated or strong-armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials and others to cause trouble for activists.

3. Harassment through the Legal System The FBI and police abused the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals. Officers of the law gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a pretext for false arrests and wrongful imprisonment. They discriminatorily enforced tax laws and other government regulations and used conspicuous surveillance, "investigative" inter views, and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to intimidate activists and silence their supporters.

4. Extralegal Force and Violence: The FBI and police threatened, instigated, and themselves conducted break-ins, vandalism, assaults, and beatings. The object was to frighten dissidents and disrupt their movements. In the case of radical Black and Puerto Rican activists (and later Native Americans), these attacks-including political assassinations-were so extensive, vicious, and calculated that they can accurately be termed a form of official "terrorism."

A total of 2,370 officially approved COINTELPRO actions were admitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee, and thousands more have since been uncovered.

Sounds like a conspiracy...

[Chronomorte]

Some people don't believe because they don't want to believe. Revisionists do that often.
At least he (presumably) prefaced his conclusion with the words 'couldn't believe' instad of stating it as an absolute fact.

[patfromlogan]

True, Chronomorte, I may have overstated my case because of my personal history with the FBI, the police, and such. He does say couldn't, and having read some of his work, he seems like a very forthwith and honest person.

[Phrost]

You're actually saying none of the Vietnam vets were spit on by protesters?

You're actually saying that?

Come on, that's up there with white supremacists denying the holocaust. You're a hippie leftist, so you don't want to believe this happened any more than the skinheads want to believe that happened.

[patfromlogan]

Sounds like a conspiracy...

Sorry, it's just history. Conspriracy comes in when you remember J Edgar Hoover (the cross dresser pictures the mafia had kept him after commies and colorful types like Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde) making the statement that we must prevent the rise of a Black Messiah.

Cointelpro is just the actions of the secret police, much has been exposed, much remains. It's shameful, not conspiracy. If you want to know the moralily of a nation, study their secret police. All else is bullshit, their secret police are the bottom line.
If you want to consider Cointelpro a conspiracy theory, don't read the following, specially about Barri in the second link.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RA...ointelpro.html
http://www.monitor.net/monitor/bari/default.html#fbi