I am what is considered a “Vietnam Era” vet having served in the United States military from 1973-77 and should stress, I did not serve in Vietnam.  To be blunt: it wasn’t a good time to be in the military and like most of those who served, I did my time, got out, put the USAF in my rear view mirror and got on with my life. I do not think my situation is rare: Many veteran from this period in time did not join the VVA, the American Legion or the VFW and in fact, in the forty years since leaving the USAF, I have attended exactly one veterans memorial service and that was actually the Medal Of Honor Service a few months back in Harrisburg. Most of my acquaintances do not know I was even in the USAF as the topic doesn’t come up as it isn’t something I think most people are really interested in.

About ten years ago I stumbled upon what I was to discover is a “radical” history of the Vietnam Antiwar movement entitled “The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam” in which Jerry Lembcke  states that no proof of the spat upon veteran ever existed and according to Jerry, ALL the stories of hostility and mistreatment aimed at the Vietnam veterans is a myth.

I obtained a copy of Lembcke’s book and read it, actually several times and the work is simply deplorably bad. From his malformed hypothesis to the lack of adequate research the book is simply unacceptable as a scholarly work. Ironically, I could not say Lembcke was wrong I just knew that his research methods and supporting documentation did not support his hypothesis.

For eight years I researched Lembcke’s assertions that vets were on good terms with those in the antiwar movement and that no contemporary accounts of hostility directed at the troops existed.  Either Lembcke is a very bad researcher or he simply ignored the facts as the information that seemed to elude Jerry was easy to find. I have about 6,000 newspaper articles from the 1960s, copies of underground newspapers, antiwar literature, government reports, electronic copies of FBI files, records from NARA (National Archives and Records Administration), research papers via JSTORS (a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources), and about 600 books written mostly by those in the antiwar movement.  Frankly, Lembcke is just wrong. Evidence abounds.

My research effort resulted in a book entitled “We were winning I left- The real story of Vietnam Vets and the antiwar movement.” Did you know:

  •  In 1964 Haverford students were raising monies for the North Vietnamese.
  •  Female protesters in New York in 1965 substituted murdered and killers for “Boys” in “Bring the killers and murderers home now”.
  •  An Army captain from El Paso Texas thanked his home town for their support of the troops…anonymously. He didn’t want his family harassed by those in the antiwar movement
  •  Sailors on the USS Kitty Hawk refused to give their names to a reporter on board for fear of retaliation against their families.
  •  The North Vietnamese Government send a warm thank you to those attending a 1967 antiwar protest. We know this as David Dellinger one of the protest organizers read the telegram to the protesters
  •  Antiwar protesters burned down a Navy Research Shack at the State University of New York
  •  1967 National Guard training now includes being spit on (reported in the New York Times)
  •  Military Police at the Pentagon in October of 1967 were spit on by protesters as were police officers
  •  Captain O’Sullivan was killed in Vietnam and his Wife received hate calls from those in the antiwar movement before his body even arrived home
  •  Senator Todd reported that grieving family members of dead servicemen were receiving harassing calls from those in the antiwar movement. The FBI Television show even aired an episode about these calls.
  •  Troops in Vietnam were very upset that they were being called murderers, rapists and baby killers while the peace movement said nothing of Vietcong atrocities.
  •  Antiwar protesters picketed nearly every veteran event at the state and national level throughout the war.
  •  Radical historians report that Vietnam Vets were not welcome in veteran organizations and this is simply a deliberate lie. When Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) claimed 20,000 members and had maybe 8,000, VFW and American Legion individually reported 350,000 to 400,000 Vietnam Veterans had joined their ranks. That nearly 800,000 that didn’t join VVAW and did join other organizations.
  •  The American Legion headquarters in Seattle Washington was bombed by those in the antiwar movement
  •  100% of those who traveled to North Vietnam during the war were handpicked by Hanoi; all reported the POWs were being treated well; and all blamed the war on the United States
  •  There were over 3,000 bombs set off by radicals who purportedly wanted “peace” in Vietnam.
  •  The antiwar movement condemned the attempted rescue mission of American POWs.
  •  Recruiters and the ROTC had it especially hard as they were on the very campuses the radicals pummeled with their anti-war message.
  •  While all this was going on, real Americans were sending all manner of things to the troops from Christmas gifts, toiletries, and ditty bags. Real Americans supported the troops!
  •  GIs routinely wrote home and asked the folks to send aid to the South Vietnamese. Literally hundreds of GIs had family back home start a clothing drive or a campaign to send aid to the South Vietnamese and yet no radical history ever mentioned this.

Yes, the kids that showed up for the protests were trying to stop the war but unknown to them, they were being led by a handful of Bolshevik radicals from competing  communist ideologies trying to jump start a revolution. It was as dumb as it sounds but no less real to the bombers in the Weathermen, the Black Panthers and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

No one wants to deal with the truth….. sad, very sad

Steven N.