Free Republic

STORIES ABOUT spat-upon Vietnam veterans are like mercury: Smash one and six more appear. It's hard to say where they come from. For a book I wrote in 1998 I looked back to the time when the spit was supposedly flying, the late 1960s and early 1970s. I found nothing. No news reports or even claims that someone was being spat on. What I did find is that around 1980, scores of Vietnam-generation men were saying they were greeted by spitters when they came home from Vietnam. There is an element of urban legend in the stories in that their...

. . . "It's 33 years overdue," said Robert Lee, a creative director at Publicis Groupe's Kaplan Thaler Group, of the Anheuser spot, referring to the cold reception that Vietnam veterans often got after returning from that war. Still, some viewers were a little uneasy with the corporate flag-waving. "It would have been better if it was a PSA, a public-service announcement, and not a BSA, beer-service announcement," said Tom Amico, a creative director at Kaplan. . . .