Ah, the legend lives on. Mishawaka has become the first Indiana city to designate a "welcome home" day for Vietnam veterans, which is a nice gesture. But do we have to keep dragging out the whole hippies-harassing-vets myth?
Down on Parry Street in South Bend, Vietnam veterans gathered at the Marine Corps League over ice cream, cake and their favorite beverages to say it's about time.
“I ran into some peaceniks after I got off the plane at San Francisco Airport. They spit on my uniform,” said Richard LaBonte, 63, of Osceola. “The cops arrested them and told me where the bar was.”
Spider Davis, 62, of Mishawaka, recalled the welcome he received in Oakland after serving in Japan and Vietnam as a sergeant E-5 in the Marines.
Davis walked off the plane into tiers of protesters who relentlessly blocked Vietnam veterans trying to make their way out of the airport.
“They threw garbage at us. They threw wet, dirty coffee grounds that stained my uniform,” Davis said.
I wouldn't ever say a specific soldier's account of his homecoming was exaggerated, and there's no point in trying to prove a negative -- that no one was ever spat upon or had garbage thrown on him. But the whole "We were denied an honorable homecoming" line has morphed into an urban legend wildly distorting what actually happened back in the day. Notice how all the incidents take place at the airport, never anywhere else like in a bar or on the street. And just try to imagine all these wimpy hippies actually having the nerve to get close enough to a Green Beret to spit on him.
It just wasn't that bad overall. As Jerry Lembcke observed in his 1998 book "The Spitting Image," protesters spent most of their wrath on the politicians conducting the war, not on the soldiers fighting it. In fact, a common chant at protests was "Bring the boys home." Of course there were antagonisms between veterans and the anti-war groups, but let's not get carried away with after-the-fact embellishments. History matters and the truth counts.
