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21-07-2004, 06:02 PM

In article ,
wrote:

wrote:

I didnt see any of it, and I went to school with vets. How much of
this did you
actually see in NY?
-snip-

Just as a datapoint-- I came home from Vietnam in July of 1970 to
rural upstate New York.

I was *never* disrespected, and was even thanked a few times. I also
drank for free for 30 days until I reported to first North Carolina,
then Virginia---- Nobody ever gave me shit about my service.

This seems the realistic history. Not entirely, but to a surprising
extent, the "spit on & called baby killers" cliche is urban folklore;
making it "hippies" who did it heightens the fantasy element of folklore
memory. Rather like other bits of urban folklore, the stories are always
re-told as "this happened to me" or "this happened to my best friend,"
when it is just a tale retold, that if it happened rarely didn't happen
the way it was told or to as many people who retell the folk tale. Where
are the photographs of hippies at airports & shipyards & train stations
with "Baby killer!" signs waving at all the soldiers they magically knew
they'd be seeing arrive all sorts of places. There is a derth of
contemporary editorials & photographs & film footage proving this
preposterous widespread youth-culture assult on fellow youths ever
happened.

If some dorkpizzle of a highshool dropout once followed a soldier through
the streets of Manhattan yapping at him as a baby-killer, that hardly
reflected the behavior of hippies, let along the peacenik
make-love-not-war hippies who'd be more apt to annoyingly give a soldier a
flower with all the endearing qualities of a Jew for Jesus harrassing
Jews.

It happened rarely to few, but in hindsight, everyone thinks or pretends
they saw it happen personally. All the boys in my social class went to
Vietnam; some never returned; some returned heroin addicts or otherwise
messed up in the head; some were so antisocial from their experience they
literally had to go live in the woods for ten to twenty years. Others
became activists & advocates for vets who were injured by their experience
in Vietnam. Some let their hair grow out or otherwise joined (or returned
to) the mainstream of youth culture, & some few became & remain to this
day antiwar activists; others got themselves a Harley & a pot belly & a
wooly beard & preferred THAT subculture. Most just returned to their
lives, a little older & a lot different than they would've been without
the experience of losing an unjust war, & bonded best with fellow vets who
knew what it all meant, & were often a little quiet about it all around
others, unless it was dragged out of them as I would often drag it.

But most returned to families & friends, who loved them & were proud of
them, & interacted in a completely healthy manner with an extensive social
circle, among whom everyone had a brother, cousin, or friend who'd been to
Vietnam, & never disrespected soldiers in the least.

One of my great friends was a navy sea in vietnam, afterward a professor
of navigation in the NROTC program at the University of Washington, where
I worked. Grant never imposed his experiences on anyone, but if you were
interested, & asked why he limped, or what he did in the war, hooboy was
he a bundle of tales, most of them heroic. He never suffered the guilty
syndromes of so many vets because his job was essentially to drop behind
enemy lines & bring back downed or captured soldiers -- that's an
experience you live through, if you live through it, with a good
self-image. He was also not afraid to admit the war was pointless &
unjust. And one of his experiences was the discovery of a Me Lai-like
village where every inhabitant had been killed from a helicopter -- the
only survivor was a kitten, which Grant put in his jacket, & when a
helicopter came for a pick up, the kitten remembering what the previous
helicopter had done, filled Grant's jacket full of liquid catshit. The cat
remained a base pet to the end of the war, a reminder to everyone that
there were indeed baby killers among them, atrocities being one of the
universal facts of war.

So vets as well as peaceniks knew all too well that the baby killers were
real, & that even if anyone did get put on trial for their crimes, the
worst they faced was a short time of house arrest, or so the very public
case of Lieutenant Caulie indicated. So yes "baby killer" was a term that
was abroad. But I was not unique in that era in having nearly all the boys
of my family, & in my neighborhood, drafted; most of them came back okay,
but not all of them did; & nobody loved them less or dishonored them in
any manner, we were just glad that the ones who were all right were with
us again, & grief stricken over the ones who were not all right.

People posting on UseNet "I was a vietnam vet, & where was my welcomne
home parade" or "those drug-addict hippies spat on me & called me a baby
killer" sound like delusional guys with some justified anger still
festering but entirely misplaced, since it was the government & not their
fellow youths of the era who ****ed up so many lives. Some indeed came
home so damaged by the war their own families turned away from their
crippled personalities. I personally never met a vet who thought he should
have a D-Day style parade, but I knew plenty who were eager to be again
present within the warm regard of family & friends, including peacenik
family & friends.

But just as often, even those who were indeed damaged by their experience
returned to face the love & caring of friends. I am thinking of Cliff (not
his real name, as he could easily be reading this), who before his Vietnam
experience was a pretty normal outgoing hippy sort of a guy who could
party with the best of us, laughed easily, loved to get high, & was an
admirable artist. The guy who came back never laughed, never spoke above a
whisper, & his artwork had shrunk to the size of postage stamps. He would
never tell any of us what happened, leaving us to this day to wonder if he
was damaged by experiences he can never reveal, or just by going overboard
in his eagerness to be high & causing some physical damage. But when Cliff
went into another of his suicidal depressions, we peacenik hippies would
scour the neighborhood to find where he was holding up this time, bring
him back to the group house on Capitol Hill, & sit with him all through
the night until the black clouds left. Never for a moment was he a spat on
babykiller -- he was our friend who saw a little too much action, & we
still encouraged his artwork, strangely tiny though it had become.

A great many of my generation were harmed by that war one way or another.
The villification of some imaginary style of hippies is an easy scapegoat
for people with seriously mistargeted anger issues. But it was NOT a
generation of dopefiend draft dodgers vs baby killers. It was just our
generation, & the real division were the Haves who could get out of having
to go all or could go as officers, & the Have-nots who had no choice. We
were all hurt by that war, to one degree or another, & if some damaged
people need to invent soothing lies about how the worst thing about it was
the hippies, well, if that soothes them so be it. In the real world, of
course, even so-called hippies served.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
Visit the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com