Reply #11: Spitting? [View All]

I always thought that tales of anti-war protestors spitting on returning Vietnam veterans were an urban legend at best and outright disinformation at worst. I've heard so many of these stories over the years that I now think there's some truth to them. But who was doing the spitting?

Most returning veterans were draftees, who bore no responsibility for the war and were always considered victims themselves by the anti-war movement. Why would protestors hang out at the airport all day just to spit on blameless draftees? This makes no sense.

If there were spitters, and I think there actually were a few, I think they were "agents provacateurs", low level intelligence operatives ordered to discredit the anti-war movement. This for a very logical reason that addresses one of the great lies of the Vietnam era. The big lie is that the press, the media, or whoever, turned the country against the war. The truth is that the returning veterans turned the country against the war, and they did it across the dinner table. When Johnny came home and told mom and pop that the war was bad they believed him, and they would never have believed the same truth if they read it in the paper or saw it on TV.

Hence the spitters. It makes perfect sense to me that paid operatives would hang around the airport all day and spit on returning veterans, especially draftees. This to give the returning soldiers a bad first impression of the anti-war activists that they'd been hearing and reading about while overseas.