Antiwar veterans in action - and, yes, some veterans got spit on

Sometimes you come across a really good story.  This one is about the Vietnam veterans' activism against the Vietnam War, from John Prados' The Hidden History of the Vietnam War (1995).  He tells in one chapter about some of the Nixon administration's attempts to discredit, undermine, demonize and even imprison antiwar veterans.

The current administration's nasty tactics of trying to brand war critics as traitors for daring to dispute Dear Leader Bush's version of reality didn't just spring full-blown out of the brow of Karl Rove.  The Nixon administration was a key political influence on the current Bush team, not least among them Don Rumsfeld and Dark Lord Dick Cheney.

One of the more successful pieces of propaganda coming out of Nixon's miserable abortion of an administration was the notion that antiwar protesters were hostile to the troops themselves.  The longevity of Nixon propaganda is illustrated by this otherwise informative and decent article: War Could Pivot on U.S. Hearts and Minds by Josh Getlin and Elizabeth Mehren Los Angeles Times 08/21/05.  In the middle of it comes this whopper straight out of the scam-the-rubes Republican jive machine.  Comparing the antiwar sentiment against the Vietnam War to the public worries about the Iraq War, they write:

There was a national draft during Vietnam that caused millions of parents to fear that their sons could be sent to war. That war also spawned a protest movement that seemed to aim much of its anger at U.S. forces. The Iraq war is being fought by an all-volunteer army, and most critics make a point of condemning the war, not the warriors. (my emphasis)

The article has some of the better observations I've seen in the mainstream press about how public attitudes about wars are shaped.  But right in the middle of it is this bonehead claim.  Can't the writers and editors do the most minimal research before they pass on stale, 35-year-old Republican fabrications as thought they were any other than the relics of the Watergate administration?

But that's the degraded media culture we have in the United States today.  In his book, Prados talks about how the intelligence in Vietnam was often fudged to meet the predelictions of policymakers.  No, that didn't start with this Bush administration either.  But credit where credit is due.  Not even the Johnson and Nixon administrations in their most dishonest moments just completely fabricated the reasons for going to war.  Dear Leader has the dubious honor of being the boldest and most spectacular of Presidential liars.

But I digress.  Prados mentions that one of the things that analysts got wrong was, well, the number of residents in South Vietnam.  As it puts it, probably not with hyperbole, "In this most quantified of conflicts, half the data was fictitious."  Compared to the Bush administration's intelligence on Iraqi WMDs, of course, that sounds like a fabulous record.  But writing in 1995, before we had the perspective we have now on such things, Prados was amazed by the degree of intelligence failure.  And he wrote, leading in to his discussion of the antiwar movement:

Is it any wonder the Vietnam War was lost?

In a way the troops saw more clearly than everyone else. The "grunts" in the field, the men doing the fighting and being killed, who saw the mines and booby traps, even the guns their generals insisted could not be there because the people wielding those weapons or placing those traps were not represented on the NVA [North Vietnamese Army] order of battle [which includes troop counts] - the grunts saw what was real, and their growing qualms effectively stopped the war. More and more soldiers rejected the insanity of the system by tuning out, by becoming less and less willing to take on missions, by questioning their orders, not merely carrying them out. "GI resistance" became a reality during the Nixon years. As much as anything else, that meant that the war had to be brought to an end. Typically, however, before that point was reached, the Nixon administration tried to shoot the messengers, supposing that its problems would go away if only the antiwar movement could be eliminated.  As a result the Vietnam War led to a war at home, a war directly against Americans, especially those Vietnam veterans who came home to oppose the war.  (bolded emphasis mine)

Let's walk through this one nice and slow.  Not that any Republican trolls could keep it in their heads no matter how slow you said it or how many times you repeated it.  For them, if junkie bigot Rush Limbaugh and his like aren't saying it, it can't be true.

The growing protest of Vietnam veterans was a key element in stopping American participation in the Vietnam War.  The soldiers in the field - those that good Republicans claim to idolize - "rejected the insanity of the system ... by becoming less and less willing to take on missions, by questioning their orders, not merely carrying them out."  The Nixon adminstration directed its venom particularly at antiwar veterans.  You know, the veterans our good Republicans claim to idolize.

I'll tell more of this story in the next post.  But in 1972, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) was a very visible presence at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, which both happened to be held in Miami Beach that year.  At the Republican convention, supporters of the antiwar Republican Pete McCloskey got four VVAW activists into the convention hall.  Three of them were in wheelchairs, including the Ron Kovic who was protrayed by Tom Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July. At one point, they started making their presence known to these Republicans who love and honor our veterans so much:

When they raised signs these were ripped from their hands and torn up; when they shouted, Republicans tried outshouting them and security guards ejected them from the premises. Nevertheless Bobby Mueller, Bill Wieman, Mark Clevinger, and Ron Kovic felt they had been effective. So hostile was the atmosphere that Kovic, in his wheelchair, was spat upon, but at another point he was interviewed for more than two minutes on network television and was able to get his point across. (my emphasis)

Now why would these folks dishonor and hate our soldiers so much that they would spit on a veteran in a wheelchair just because he was protesting the war?  Why? Why? Why?  Well, let's see, might be because they were, uh, mean Republican white folks who didn't give a flying [Cheney] whether these guys had been crippled serving their country in the Vietnam War?  Yeah, that explains it for me.

This is why the Republican jive story that seems to be hard-wired into the brains of today's war fans about antiwar protesters spitting on veterans returning for Vietnam is such a bizarre projection of what prowar rightwingers were actually doing themselves.  When he researched this piece of urban folklore for his book The Spitting Image (1998), Jerry Lembcke found no documented instances of or even contemporary references to Vietnam veterans being spit upon by antiwar protesters.  But he did find that "most of the documentable incidents of abusive behavior toward Vietnam veterans involved pro-war people against anti-war veterans." (my emphasis)

Prados tells us:

Ultimately it is impossible to bring closure to the story of the Vietnam War, to Americans' understanding of what happened to them and around them, without confronting the myths that have grown up surrounding the image of a monolithic antiwar movement. When one breaks the old molds, the first thing discovered is that Vietnam veterans played key roles in the antiwar movement just as they did in the war itself. Most everyone has heard of the largest such veterans' group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), particularly its April 1971 action in Washington, where almost a thousand veterans met to hold an intensely emotional demonstration on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. (my emphasis)

More on this in the next post.