Don't Spit On Me

SLATE keeps writing about the apocryphal accounts of returning Vietnam War soldiers getting spat on, trying to get to the bottom of it, like whether it actually happened or not. Turns out, despite it being "common knowledge," it's a harder story to unravel than it would appear to be, given how widespread awareness of it is.

That's what makes it suspect to me. There are a couple of ways to go with it, and SLATE is going at it in one direction, trying to determine if it's an urban legend or if it actually happened. But what I think is more interesting is this: assuming it actually happened, who did it, and why?

The assumption, of course, is that it's those nasty left-wingers who did it, like hateful, uhhh, hippies -- little Mansonian wannabes spitting on the babykilling troops the Right faithfully supported in the Vietnam War. That itself is an urban legend, this faithful support of the Right, where the troops are concerned. It seems that the Right loves war, and is less fond of soldiers. At least that's how they conduct themselves in practice.

And what makes me think this is the conduct of the Right with regard to the current War in Iraq.

For all of their cries to "Support the Troops" it's abundantly clear that the Republican leadership tried to wage this war on the cheap, and despite all of the money they've greenlit for the Pentagon, it appears that a lot of it is ending up in contractors' pockets (sometimes literally!) instead of going to support the troops in the field. The Walter Reed scandal that's brewing reveals that the GOP leadership (and keep in mind that these wrongs were known well before the 2006 elections) has been screwing over the troops who've returned, offering them substandard care when it's offered at all.

What's more, their vicious, partisan attacks on John Kerry, Max Cleland, Al Gore, and other Democratic veterans' records -- really, any Democrat veteran of prominence has had their courage and experience challenged, with cruelty and brutality. Never mind that the current GOP leadership is packed with chickenhawks -- men with deferments piled up like their rivals' Purple Hearts, men who evaded service in the Vietnam War. They are as shameless as they are ruthless in their attacks on the patriotism and valor of Democrats who actually served in the Vietnam War.

And those attacks aren't even confined to Democratic veterans -- think of how viciously the GOP went after John McCain, who was a POW, for God's sake, and who clearly suffered during his time in captivity. The Bush League went after McCain ruthlessly, and McCain himself is not popular with the GOP rank-and-file. Passing odd for people who supposedly "support the troops."

Now, the GOP has been haunted by the so-called Vietnam Syndrome, the reluctance of the US to engage in foreign wars, because of the resultant social unrest caused by them. To the Right, Vietnam "spoiled" American war-making, perhaps irrevocably. Given that their foreign and domestic policy has increasingly been focused around enemy imagery (Communists, Liberals/Progressives, Unionists, Secularists, Terrorists, in rough chronology since the early 50s), war-making is absolutely central to their conception of politics. That's how they end up "strong on defense" and are habitual funders of Big Military, at least on the contractor level. Maybe it's the dominance of Leo Strauss's approach to ideology in their elite ranks.

Given the Rightist Cold War rhetoric about "losing" countries to Communism (as if they were theirs to lose), I can't help but think that the Right had to have been unfuriated by the failure of the US to win the Vietnam War, which would've flown into the face of every doctrine of American exceptionalism that the Right holds dear -- in fact, in some circles, it still pisses them off, gets them saying that the war wasn't lost, that the US actually won, or that the Left sabotaged support for the war, leading to the failure of the objectives. Vietnam is still very much with us, even as we slog on in Iraq. George Bush I was convinced he'd licked the Vietnam Syndrome in Gulf War I, and George II was apparently motivated to finish the job in Gulf War II.

Someone had to be blamed for the failure to win in Vietnam. The GOP is notorious for its "Blame the Victim" politics -- ideologically, it does this across the board, time and again: the poor are to blame for their poverty, women who're raped had it coming, countries that get ravaged by free market economics are the fault of their stupid populaces, and so on. Defend the ideology, blame the victim; that is their approach. The prison abuse scandals were another example of this, really -- the GOP sought to protect the framers of the prison abuse policy, while punishing the practitioners of it, the ground-level troops who actually did it. Deniability at the top, responsibility at the bottom. That is the GOP way.

So, you have Vietnam veterans returning from a failed war, and you have pissed-off Rightists who're angry at them for blowing the war, you have a movement that is centered on hatred, warmongering, enemy imagery, and blaming the victim -- the returning veterans would have been a target of opportunity for angry reactionaries: "You lost us the war; you let Vietnam go Red! You failed us! You worthless pinkos!" *spitooey*

It's logical to me, it makes sense.

The antiwar movement, also known as the peace movement, was largely sympathetic to the plight of the soldiers, wanted them to be brought home in a war that they thought shouldn't have been fought to begin with. It was the prowar Right who thought the Vietnam War was justified, not the antiwar Left -- so the motive is there for the Right to have taken out its anger on returning veterans, whereas the Left would've seen the veterans as victims of a bad policy. See the difference? If the policy isn't bad, then you have to blame the people who carried it out for screwing up -- that's the Right's view: somebody's to blame, because our motives are unassailable. From the Left's more rational perspective, if the policy was bad to begin with, then blaming the soldiers is useless -- you have to put pressure on the policymakers, where it belongs.

And that's exactly what the Left has been doing in the Iraq War. They've been putting the focus again and again on the leadership of this war, while expressing tireless and vocal support for the troops. People on the Left were hostile to LBJ and Nixon in their conduct of the Vietnam War, while people on the Right were hostile to the peace movement and, I suspect, to the soldiers for "losing Vietnam." The Right has been saying it supports the troops, but its actions have put the lie to that statement, in their understaffed, undersupported, overcontracted war of opportunity in Iraq. And what's more, the Right has defected in its support of the war -- but only because we're not winning it. The (unfortunately largely ineffectual) Left opposed the war from the outset, while the (unfortunately politically dominant at the time) Right only opposed the war in Iraq when it was clear that the war was not being won. Sunshine patriotism reveals itself once again.

The interesting thing to me is that the antiwar movement for Iraq is tiny compared to the prowar movement that currently exists, so the Right won't be able to blame the Left for sabotaging the war effort, because the Press was on board for the war, the Left was nearly nonexistent and marginalized, and the Democrats were mostly meekly on board with Bush's War, at least until 2006. So, who will the Right blame this time around for the failure to win in Iraq? That remains to be seen.

But with regard to Vietnam, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that, if any spitting on veterans was done, it was done by reactionaries who spat, and not liberals, not progressives, not hippies, not peace activists. They did it to communicate their contempt for the troops for losing a front in the War on Communism that was central to their ideology.

And there's one more point that's almost overlooked because of its conspicuous absence: given the shamelessness of the American Right in political warfare, fabricating whatever it can't find, trumpeting what it does find -- the Republican Noise Machine, right? How is it that these apocryphal and seemingly widespread spitting on the troops accounts aren't at all well-documented? If they actually happened, I think the Right would be parading them out endlessly. But instead, the Right isn't doing that.

That is terribly suspect to me, because if it was an actual weapon they could use against the Left, they would use it. That is how they work.

But they don't do it -- rather, it just sort of exists in the pop culture, without support. And so I think, if it happened, then either: 1) if it was perpectuated by the Left, it wasn't widespread, and was blown way out of proportion by the Right wing as a way of attacking the Left's patriotism; or 2) it was perpetrated by the Right wing themselves, and they know this, which is why they haven't run with that football to the endzone.

To my eyes, the Right had the motive to take it out on the returning Vietnam veterans for losing the war in Vietnam.

The GOP pursues a very kiss up/kick down kind of policymaking, and I can see their rank-and-file taking it out on returning vets far more than I can see some rabid flower children going after them.

Anyway, that's my thought on that.