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10-20-2017 , 02:10 PM
they knew what they were getting into when they were drafted
Vietnam War Mythology
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Vietnam War Mythology
10-20-2017 , 02:28 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by raradevils
It's on full display in this thread my vets don't come forward with past treatment.
There are like half a dozen vets who post here regularly and they seem to get along well enough.
10-20-2017 , 04:15 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dominic
Yes it did. My next door neighbor had his garage spray painted with "baby killer" and other things. I remember, because I helped my Dad and the neighbor clean it off when I was around 12. This is 1975ish. It could've been kids messing around, who knows? But it happened.

And I remember Memorial Day Parades in the 70s where Vietnam Vets were booed and had things thrown at them. My town always had a Memorial Day Parade to kick off summer. It was a big deal. In 1976 or 77, the town decided not to have the Vietnam Vets march that year because of the problem it caused. Kids wrote papers in class about it. It was controversial. How do I know? I was there.

So, either you're wrong, or I'm a liar and/or misremembering a big chunk of my childhood. Which do you think it is?
[sees that Dom is telling a story from his past]

[gets excited]

[keeps reading]

10-20-2017 , 04:37 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by dlk9s
[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.
10-20-2017 , 06:16 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dominic
And regarding Vietnam vets being disrespected when they came home, I remember vet neighbors in the 70s whose homes were vandalized and spray-painted with "baby killer" on them.

It was a real thing, Fly, not some made up BS in the 90s.
Quote:
Originally Posted by FlyWf
Gonna go with a "pics or it didn't happen" there, champ
Quote:
Originally Posted by FlyWf
OK. But like, that didn't happen. You heard it happened, but you didn't see it yourself. Because it didn't happen.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dominic
Yes it did. My next door neighbor had his garage spray painted with "baby killer" and other things. I remember, because I helped my Dad and the neighbor clean it off when I was around 12. This is 1975ish. It could've been kids messing around, who knows? But it happened.

And I remember Memorial Day Parades in the 70s where Vietnam Vets were booed and had things thrown at them. My town always had a Memorial Day Parade to kick off summer. It was a big deal. In 1976 or 77, the town decided not to have the Vietnam Vets march that year because of the problem it caused. Kids wrote papers in class about it. It was controversial. How do I know? I was there.

So, either you're wrong, or I'm a liar and/or misremembering a big chunk of my childhood. Which do you think it is?
Quote:
Originally Posted by DVaut1
"But I *saw* with my own two eyes soldiers being SPIT ON when they came back from Vietnam, happened in my town ALL THE TIME" is in literally every copy of the Children's Treasury of Right Wing Fairy Tales, right after "I saw this black lady with 5 kids and done up nails on a cell phone paying for a new TV with food stamps!" and the traditional white folktale of the mythical sad sack white uncle who had to give up his career as a firefighter because they couldn't pierce through the affirmative action bubble with its enduring life lesson, black people get all the good civil service jobs these days dontchayaknow.

You can't convince a white conservative these things aren't real. They're part of the White People Canon, shared cultural inheritance. Might as well just give up the whole race if these tales aren't true, no point in continuing after that. They happened, just deal with it silly liberal. They saw it. Remember how ikestoys, who is like 30 or whatever, totted around Vietnam Stabbed in the Back Theories and **** like that? Dude obviously sat on his dad or his grandpappies knee and heard these things during White People Story Time but once ingrained in the impressionable young white mind, they can't be shaken.

Related, you know you've got a really classic of the genre when it includes other assorted folk wisdom in the back of the book. "Liberals SPIT ON veterans!" usually comes right before the Common Sense Appendix: Top Ten Life Tips for Living White and Living Right, including #3: It's just Obvious You Cross the Street Late at Night When a Black Man is Coming Your Way and #7: There's All These Crimes These Days, It Was All Different When We Used to Let Kids Pray in School and Everyone Was In Church On Sundays, Think About It
Quote:
Originally Posted by DVaut1
Probably not though. No one can prove a negative. But there's basically zero published reports, police reports, or any contemporaneous evidence of vets being spit on. Just word of mouth tales. That's it. Most of them don't show up in books, magazines, and newspapers until the 1980s.
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).
10-20-2017 , 06:20 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by FlyWf
https://twitter.com/CNNPolitics/stat...86623661023234

Hahaha holy **** they really did leave one of our soldiers behind to die and are trying to cover it up.

Like when I say we can't make this Trump's Benghazi, that's still true, but the one lesson we should learn is not to ****ing humor these people the next time they try to moralize.
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.
10-20-2017 , 06:30 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by pokerodox
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).
Really don't know what this argument is about, the right wing don't have a monopoly on scumbags.
10-20-2017 , 06:36 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by pokerodox
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).
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.
10-20-2017 , 06:52 PM
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****.
10-20-2017 , 06:57 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by raradevils
It's on full display in this thread my vets don't come forward with past treatment.

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.
10-20-2017 , 07:16 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by pokerodox
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 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.
10-20-2017 , 07:29 PM
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.
10-20-2017 , 07:37 PM
In 1983 Someone wrote "dork" on my Pee Chee Jesus wept. Pray for me.
10-20-2017 , 07:38 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Trolly McTrollson
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.
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

Quote:
One of the most resilient images of the Vietnam era is that of the anti-war protester — often a woman — spitting on the uniformed veteran just off the plane. The lingering potency of this icon was evident during the Gulf War, when war supporters invoked it to discredit their opposition.

In this startling book, Jerry Lembcke demonstrates that not a single incident of this sort has been convincingly documented.
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.

Last edited by DVaut1; 10-20-2017 at 07:45 PM.
10-20-2017 , 07:49 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Trolly McTrollson
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.
I will second for Dom.
10-20-2017 , 08:13 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by DVaut1
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.
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.
10-20-2017 , 08:17 PM
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.
10-20-2017 , 08:26 PM
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.
10-20-2017 , 08:28 PM
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.

Last edited by Johnny Truant; 10-20-2017 at 08:35 PM.
10-20-2017 , 08:29 PM


Quote:
You asked me I didn't ask you! And I did what I had to do to win, for somebody who wouldn't let us win! Then I come back to the world, and I see all those maggots at the airport, protestin' me, spittin', callin' me a baby killer and all kinds of vile crap! Who are they to protest me?!
10-20-2017 , 08:35 PM
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.
10-20-2017 , 08:36 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Johnny Truant
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 liars bread and butter. Let's debate the inane details instead of saying **** you, you do not own the higher ground of "honoring the troops". Period.
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.
10-20-2017 , 08:39 PM
@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.
10-20-2017 , 08:40 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by DVaut1
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.
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.
10-20-2017 , 08:42 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Johnny Truant
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.
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.
Vietnam War Mythology
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