Spitting on the troops

Seth Gitell:

Anti-war sentiment is moving dangerously close to a place America must never go — putting our anger on the soldiers that have been fighting the four-year Iraq war.

Some of this takes the form of minimizing what happened the last time American GIs returned from an unpopular war — Vietnam. Liberal commentators, such as MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, are diminishing the hostile treatment Vietnam veterans garnered when they returned from Vietnam.

On the air on Thursday, Mr. Olbermann disparaged the old report of Vietnam veterans being spit upon when they came home: "And, oh, by the way, there is not one confirmed case, not one, of Americans spitting on veterans returning from Vietnam."

Washington Post blogger William Arkin, meanwhile, went so far as to lay a condition for America's "support" of veterans. "These soldiers should be grateful that the American public, which by all polls overwhelmingly disapproves of the Iraq war and the President's handling of it, do still offer their support to them, and their respect," Mr. Arkin wrote. "Through every Abu Ghraib and Haditha, through every rape and murder, the American public has indulged those in uniform, accepting that the incidents were the product of bad apples or even of some administration or command order."


Let's state the obvious. First, Mr. Arkin's words are slanderous. To pluralize Abu Ghraib and Haditha and "every rape and murder" is unconscionable. True, there have been some misdeeds, acts as in Vietnam, where there was a William Calley, who was convicted in the murder of 22 Vietnamese civilians at the My Lai massacre. But in Vietnam there also was helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson who stopped Calley from killing even more innocents. The bulk of the American soldiers cannot be held responsible for the isolated wrong.

And, as for Mr. Olbermann, the point is not whether the social science research collected in Jerry Lembcke's book "The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam" is correct and that no evidence exists of returning veterans being spit upon, but how most of these men were treated after the war.

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A Boston radio talk show invited him (his father who had co-written The Ballad of the Gren Beret.) as a guest. Poison and invective came in from one of the callers, "If you weren't killing babies in Vietnam, you'd be killing them here," she hissed. Although she was unable to spit directly on him, the call was the verbal equivalent.

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And the current tone of the anti war left is much the same. They can't seem to contain their hatred and contempt for those who execute a policy they do not support. At first it was all directed toward the President and the Secretary of Defense, but now is is drifting downward into the ranks. The masks are slipping on their pretensions of support for the troops and the spitting invective is out there as they try to deny the history of their movement while they relive it.