I was 13 yrs old when my dad came home from viet nam the last time. His plane landed in Springfield Mo. and we drove there to get him. As my dad was walking into the terminal with me (I ran out to meet him) some punk teenager ran up and spit on his dress greens, my dad grabbed me to keep me from pounding him, dad told me that someone with as small a mind as his wasn't worth the effort to whip his a$$. I still get angry when I think of it.
Five years later while in the bus terminal in Little Rock Ark. another teen flipped me off and called me a baby killer, I too was in dress greens headed home on leave.
The left in this country is anti military
http://www.indepundit.com/cgi-bin/mt3/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=139
For those who don't believe these spitting incidents occurred, may I direct you to pp. 324-325 of "The Long Gray Line: The American Journey Of West Point's Class Of 1966" by Rick Atkinson (this book won the Pulitzer) where returning Vietnam veteran Tom Carhart is spat upon by a group of hippie girls while connecting through O'Hare airport.
I was an Air Force Academy cadet in 1973. I can tell you from direct experience that it was not unusual for long-haired hippie types to approach you in public places and insult you. I clearly remember a hippie asking me how many babies I killed while walking through a bus terminal in LA. Another hippie just saw me walking along the road in Colorado Springs and started shouting curses at me from his car and flipping the bird. A lot of girls would not date anyone with short hair. That was a normal state of affairs. What was so startling to me as an 18 year old kid was the intense feral hatred these hippies had for me if I went out in uniform. They would be in a wild-eyed rage.
Nobody ever spat on me nor anyone I knew. However, I never went in public in uniform alone. All of the spitting incidents I've read about seemed to be opportunistic, where a bunch of hippie creeps spot a military member alone. It's always a cowardly ambush.
For those who don't remember, this extreme attitude extended to anyone in any uniform of any kind. Hippies called anyone in uniform "pigs." Of course, the military and police were pigs in their insane view, but also security guards in stores and Boy Scouts. The abuse was fairly indiscriminate.
Military people were advised not to wear uniforms in public to avoid harassment. It wasn't until the 1980s, when Reagan was elected, that we stopped listening to the warnings and started wearing our uniforms off-base. I guess we kinda thought of it as showing the flag. It all began to turn around under Reagan.
I have since read in bemusement from liberals that these assaults and insults never happenned. They're trying to rewrite history, to erase their shameful behavior from the books. That's why I think it's important to press charges against these punks, not only to punish them but also to document their violence. And if you punch a spitter out, I'm OK with that, too.
Tantor
Posted by Tantor at October 23, 2004 09:51 AM