Little Otter, please educate yourself. Read here http://slate.msn.com/id/1005224/ and then maybe do some more historical research. Just because you didn't witness it, doesn't mean it didn't happen.
I have educated myself. It didn't happen. No one can document a single account of such harassment being told until sometime in the late seventies.
Find me a story that was published, or recorded from the time of the war, and you'll have something. Until then, all you have is a whole bunch of guys engaging in rightwing mythology at the expense of the antiwar movement.
There's been an entire book written on the subject by a vietnam veteran and founded of vietnam veterans against the war - Jerry Lembcke. If you're interested in historical reality, you should that book out because he and his students did tens of thousands of hours of research on the subject and debunked effectively every tale they were told. Whehter it's soldiers flying in from Vietnam to commercial airports, hippies outside of airports, hippies on base - all of parts of the tale come apart. there are no arrests for harassing a returning soldier - and the police were always happy to arrest anti-war protesters. there are no news papers stories about it. No returning soldier complained about it in the questionaires they returned to the VA about their experiences coming home - in fact, the anti-war movement was frequently listed as one of the entitites that was most aggressive in helping soldiers readjust to life in the US.
If you want to educate yourself, read The Spittting Image: Myth, Memorty and the Legacy of Vietnam. This is a smear to delegitimzie the antiwar movement and they can use just as effectively against current anti-war activies as could in the past. The question is who do you believe - the American right who created this meme or the people who have actually done the research?
But go ahead - present us with a single contemporaneously told tale of soldiers being harassed.
Tell that to Nikko Schoch, co-founder of Veterans for Peace
"I was spit on. I was called a baby killer even though I had never carried a gun," Schoch said. "We're going to see more psychologically wounded soldiers coming back from Iraq. I hope we as a people can support them."
Source: http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,60 0119904,00.html
The only person you'll find that rails against this apparent "myth" is Lembcke. In fact, almost any article I've read on the "myth" of anti-veteran protestors uses Lembcke, and only Lembcke as a source. I don't believe that spitting or harassing returning vets was widespread, but there is enough anecdotal evidence from living Vets, including anti-war vets to say that it happened.
Using your logic, we could excuse Germany's citizens for their leaderships demonization and murder of Jews during the Holocaust, since there is no evidence that normal people in towns knew about what was going on. You will not find one German newspaper from the late 1930's or early 1940's that reported on the widespread murder of Jewish people in the country. That does not mean it didn't happen.
I know, I know, Godwin's Law, but I'm not accusing anyone of Nazism, simply using it to prove a point.
