they knew what they were getting into when they were drafted

There are like half a dozen vets who post here regularly and they seem to get along well enough.

[sees that Dom is telling a story from his past]

[gets excited]

[keeps reading]

Sorry, I forgot to mention that the drum majorettes leading the parade were all hot sl00ts and gave me my first handjobs behind the barber shop.

Interesting leftward spin here.

Fly straight up calling the eye witness a liar. The Devout One carefully threads the line sticking to spit only. But the story/point is wrong anyway, as stated by our own personal eyeball witness, just in this here tiny little thread.

Waiting for Fly's apology to Dominic (who, I suspect, is a liberal as well, but who cares about the facts).

I really hate this framing because we don’t know what happened on the ground. They were ambushed and out manned and out gunned. Saying they left a soldier to die is pretty gross. To imply that the guys in the ground didn’t do everything they could is gross. Once they realized he was missing, I’m sure they did everything possible to attempt to locate him while taking care of casualties. I’ve read reports that high level units were activated and deployed to the area.

I don’t doubt Trump is trying to cover up something, mainly because he is about winning. Framing it to some how **** on the soldiers is ****ed up though. It is possible that there was a delay in getting **** going if they needed approval though and they may be scandal worthy a-la Benghazi.

Really don't know what this argument is about, the right wing don't have a monopoly on scumbags.

Dominic was already not 100% on his eyewitness testimony from 41 years ago when he was 12. He's maybe going to ask his dad about it, but I think from posts elsewhere, that his dad is a pretty raging Trumpkin and may remember things the way he wants as well. Pretty much everyone knows that memories are quite easily changed, especially if you are either biased or were very young. Dominic knows this anyway.

The general point that this bit of "common knowledge" was manufactured seems pretty well founded by the dearth of contemporary published reports, but widespread discussion as if the events were common that started only years later. I think this is one of those things where the right can't lose in their own minds because they don't believe in things like historians or research. Any lack of evidence of contemporary reporting is very easy to attribute to universal liberalism in the media and academia.

Straight up calling people liars when they are saying things that aren't true more often would fix a significant problem with this country, but like everything else, ole pokerodox is in his feelings about me doubting Dominic's 40 year old memory(influenced by a 30+ year old urban legend campaign) but not, you know, Donald J Trump calling Wilson a liar and then getting immediately proven wrong. It's like the biggest news story in the country right now?

And then John Kelly also making **** up about Wilson? No?

Get the **** out of here with this transparently insincere bull****.

Grunching but has this not gotten more love? The party of rape apologists everyone - women are all making it up but poor vets are too scared to come forward! I mean we are through several looking glasses at this point.

I like how apologies are demanded for bersmirching the 40 year old memory of a then child who walked it back anyway.

Like micro explained and as I've been saying, there's simply no convincing right wingers these are basically apocryphal legends traded amongst themselves until they form into unimpeachable fact. Challenging unfalsifiable 40 year old memories merits a swift apology, human memory cannot be wrong.

No one is going to apologize yo, go back to your safe space.

Dom's a solid guy, and I trust he's not bull****ting us. OTOH, it's well-documented that these tales of soldiers getting spat on have been wildly over-exaggerated and invented in order to browbeat and discredit the anti-war movement. Like, rara here pretending he was treated like a second class citizen because of a few mildly insulting lawn signs is a pretty clear example of how this works.

In 1983 Someone wrote "dork" on my Pee Chee Jesus wept. Pray for me.

The baby killer stuff is also notorious "urban legend" material. He might be a solid guy but it's sort of besides the point since it's highly, highly likely the thing he's talking about simply never happened.

Worth reviewing:

The Myth of the Spitting Antiwar Protestor

and

The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam

These stories perpetuate precisely because it's not simply obvious clowns like rara who spread them but "decent" people too. Myths becomes truths due to personal recognizance: well, we're not so sure, but this guy telling me seems pretty OK, it's probably true.

But these stories are classic political fairy tales: undocumented, unproven, but used in highly politicized ways. They don't stand up to logical scrutiny (why would a bunch of veterans let themselves be spit on and their **** vandalized by a bunch of pussy hippies? Where are the cops? How are protestors even finding these veterans?)

There's no reason to believe these stories and lots of good reasons to see how pernicious they are. They exist to stifle dissent, to shield leaders from criticism, to take what a protests against aggressive foreign policy and hide behind defensible images of soldiers. It's a stabbed-in-the-back myth we still see burrowed deep in the brains of old white boomers jerking off to Trump and Fox News: liberals in Congress and radicals in universities are undermining America and its interests, see how depraved they were, we've have crushed those third world rice farmers but for all the duplicitous pussies in our midst, spitting on The Heros as they returned home, vandalizing their homes and cars.

Dom may be a good guy but it's destructive to repeat that ****, no matter how pure the intent.

I will second for Dom.

There were in fact babykilling soldiers in Vietnam, so Dom's recollection might be correct, and you're admonishing him for it. That seems pretty bad.

http://www.toledoblade.com/special-t...Highlands.html

The articles help to show where whatever actual anti-soldier came from. I believe it was Sam Yberra who decapitated a baby after his friend died. Other soldiers had ears on necklaces, etc.

I think Microbet and you are both good guys, but you two have a tendency to whitewash any bad things that might occur from the left side for no good reason. Whatever mistakes that come from the left during that era shouldn't be something to cover up or be ashamed but to be learned from.

The Weathermen and a quite a few very radical people did and said radical things. **** happens.

What in the ****? Soldiers did bad things in Vietnam, ergo Dom's recollection about his neighbors home being tagged with graffiti might be correct, and I'm the bad guy for admonishing Dom?

It's a pretty simple rule:

Am I repeating a bunch of ham handed myths designed to silence political dissent? Am I sure the thing I'm caping for actually happened?

If the answers are "yes" and "no" then the criticism is warranted. Some related thing being true doesn't make Dom's claims true by proxy.

So, yes, I agree, American soldiers did very bad things in Vietnam, and Dom's recollections are about soldiers' homes having "baby killer" painted on them are almost surely fictional -- it's a common trope, he's repeating a commonly debunked urban legend, repeating it is destructive and your argument is a complete non-sequitur. That My Lai was an empirical reality doesn't mean a bunch of right-wing myths about duplicitous traitor liberals is suddenly magically perhaps true by proxy.

Like if we're gonna go down this path, can't we at least make the left responsible for Stalinist pograms or something? At least those happened.

Paul D's argument is that the left has to take the blame for some percentage of whatever ****ing nonsense the right invents out of whole cloth. Hey, be a sport, gotta be ashamed about something from the era, be a team player and let the right wingers have this one and simply apologize, OK?

No dude. The left is deeply, deeply imperfect now and deep into the past. Conceded. The stories about protestors spitting on Vietnam vets remain completely unverified legends.

I tend to believe Dom based on what he said and also agree there is a non zero chance it is a conflated memory, but really y'all. The frequency of spitting/baby killer incidents whether rare, EXTREMELY rare, or 100% non existent is irrelevant. It has been co-opted and exaggerated for political purpose (not talking about Dom) and getting sucked into a debate about specific incidents is exactly how it works in the favor of those who have co-opted it. Even if it were a common thing in the 70s what would that have to do with present day liberals and conservatives? This **** is so transparent. It is the liar's bread and butter. Let's debate the unprovable, inane details instead of saying **** you, you do not own the higher ground of "honoring the troops". Period.

I personally am done giving fellow white males credit for being "decent guys" because they are able to interact with me superficially in a socially appropriate way. If you voted for this *******, you are a piece of ****, full stop.

You're of course correct that no matter how non-existent the evidence, clowns like Paul D will emerge from their garbage cans to insist the left apologize no matter how true it is and tut tut about how he hopes everyone learned their lesson, just because.

That these incidents probably never happened and are probably wholly fictional is worth reiterating to reinforce the point about the social utility of these myths. Granting that they simply trended to be rare rather than they never happened or giving some space for nice people to repeat them without retort ("don't bother dom too much, he's so nice") is why these stories take on collective cachet because you remove all the ground to rebut them. This is just another of the long line of variants of "sit quietly while right wingers lecture everyone" -- it's not merely that they don't have the high ground. They're largely lying. Maaaaaaaybe not dom, but you carve out enough maybes for this person and that person and these myths travel forever. I agree there's a whole lot of motivated reasoning here, that no fact is going to slow down your average right wing idiot from repeating blatant lies, but there's value in making it clear to more normal people that these myths about traitorous spitting, vandalizing protestors attacking vets are almost surely entirely fictional.

@pauld

I don't follow that either. Probably 6 figures of babies were killed in the war in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The question is what was said or done about it in the US, how was it said or done, and who was it said or done to. I'm not really invested one way or another in whether people were called babykiller or spat on, but if that essentially never happened to troops who had just returned from the war, then most Americans believe a lie. That's pretty noteworthy.

I don't apologize for terrible things the left actually did. Take Vietnam: the North Vietnamese committed atrocities too.

No. My argument is you're not a partisan person who refuses to concede bad stuff has occurred on the left. Thanks for taking your usual route though. Micro and you are entirely dismissive of Dom even though what he said is a plausible outcome that emanated from dark places of that era.

Seriously, dude, you need to wrap your head around why the left/liberals are viewed as intolerant if you cannot grasp that trying to dismiss someone as being destructive when he may be speaking the truth is bad.

Well it didn't come up out of nowhere. The issues today is how people are going to remember Benghazi and Niger, whether it's even appropriate to argue with a 4 star general, and such. It's relevant.