Posted on 10/16/2025 1:53:10 PM PDT by DallasBiff
Twenty-one-year-old Steven A. Wowwk arrived as an infantryman in the Army’s First Cavalry Division in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam in early January 1969 to fight in an escalating and increasingly unwinnable war. By June, Wowwk had been wounded twice—the second time seriously—and was sent back to the United States for treatment at Boston’s Chelsea Naval Hospital.
It was after returning to the U.S. and while en route to the hospital that Wowwk first encountered hostility as a veteran.
(Excerpt) Read more at history.com ...
Good for but you were the exception, not the rule. As a VN Vet I faced the gauntlet when I returned home Nov’70 thru SFO.
“Why Were Vietnam War Vets Treated Poorly When They Returned?”
Because they were BABY KILLERS, every one of them.
(like it or not, that’s what the Dems think of you...and you EMPOWER those Dems every time you sit out a November election...and you know who you are).
I was stationed at Bien Hoa, and flew out of there, landing at Travis. I was never told what to wear, and made it all the way to the Midwest, in my Air Force uniform. No one paid any attention to me. Later, I got stationed at Travis.
I am also a Vietnam veteran, MM. 😇
I forgot to mention, welcome home brother.
If you say so.....
The radical left, hippies, draft dodgers, commies, fake news media. Yes, there were scumbags back then just as today.
Did you know John Levitow? He was in C-47s too. 👍
I don’t. All the sources are from the communists so no reliable information exists. It’s my estimate which includes those sent to revolving ‘reeducation camps’. But what the hell, I’ll just throw all the Vietnam war era deaths in it because it was started, perpetuated and driven by the northern Communists. All the blood is on their hands.
“Baby killer” was just projection from Leftist women who killed their own babies and projected their guilt onto veterans cuz -Leftism.
We flew out of several different locations, I didn’t know him, also in different years. I was at Pleiku and TSN.
God bless you.
Blame Walter Cronkite and the lying left wing media.
😇😂
I think Levitow’s Spooky gunship was flying out of Bien Hoa, where I was stationed, but his incident happened in 69. I got there in 70.
Glad you weren’t hassled.
My brother and I both served in combat in Vietnam and we both ran into jerks:
1. My brother was asked “well if you liked the Vietnamese so much, why you just stay there?” And when he told the guy that he was badly wounded and sent home, the guy said “well, isn’t that too f’ing bad”.
2. I was hitchhiking from Camp Pendleton on my first liberty from the hospital in uniform and car after car passed me, flipping me off and then giving the Peace Symbol. After a couple hours of this, a young guy in a MGB stopped for me and after quite a bit of effort - I was wearing a full-length steel leg brace and had a pair of crutches.
I got in. After we had gone about five miles down the freeway, the young guy driving asked how I got hurt and I said “I got shot”. He said “where” and I pointed at my right thigh. He said “no, what country? I said “Vietnam” and he pulled to the side of the freeway and said “get out”.
There several other incidents more but you get the idea. You were lucky.
I remember those days, it was the F’in hippies who spat on the returning soldiers.
To this day people on the conservative side will accuse each other of McCarthyism! That's 80 years of successful psyop, still going strong!!
These two ops, plus the 'hiding in plain sight' op, are beyond successful in plain human terms.
It points to the preternatural nature of Communism. It is being helped and orchestrated from down below by the evil one.
In an exchange during one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. told his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."[68]
The Tet Offensive was portrayed by the New York liberal media as a defeat for the U.S., while in fact, it was an almost disastrous defeat for the North Vietnamese, as General Westmoreland and historians agree. The Viet Cong not only lost half of the 90,000 troops they had committed to battle, but it was virtually destroyed as an army.[69] Some false reports made by biased journalists include claiming the VC managed to overrun five floors of the American embassy, when in reality they never even managed to get past the main entrance, or Newsweek showing 18 out of 29 images depicting Marines either dead or huddled behind cover, neglecting to mention that they were pushing back the NVA onslaught. id="cite_ref-70" class="reference">[70] British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,
For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and television screens - never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought, by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondent's own side.[71]
Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there." In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he asked,
What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?... Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."[72] Ironically, it was also because of the bias from the Western press, in particular The New York Times, that caused the NVA to undergo their Tet Offensive with overconfidence that they would cause the entire South Vietnamese to embrace Communism and go against Capitalism and Saigon.[73]
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite regularly carried news reports from its Moscow Bureau Chief, Bernard Redmont. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became CBS News Paris Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was that he had been a KGB operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious Silvermaster group.[74] Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow Comintern party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called "the living room war."
The single most explicit example of such biased reporting is typically seen to be the portrayal of the Tet offensive, as mentioned above, in which Western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the Communists.
Truong Nhu Tang, a founder of the National Liberation Front, and a minister of justice for the Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - one of the most determined adversaries of the US during the war - stated years later,
The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang, The New York Review, October 21, 1982)
In addition to Cronkite's biased reporting, FBI documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Yahoo! News offer evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.[75]
- https://www.conservapedia.com/Liberal_bias#Vietnam_War
*Years ago I thnked a VietNam vet for hsis ervice to the country and told him what I thought of those who treated the returning service members so horribly.
He had tears in his eyes when I left.*
I’m ashamed that they had to go through such horrible treatment. I hold Vietnam vets in the highest regard. To me, they are royalty. To the Vietnam vets here on FR, thank you and welcome home. As long as I am alive, you have someone who is grateful and admires you. You deserved so much better.
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