As many other commenters have said, this ain’t so. You find me one article from the time of the Vietnam War reporting on this. It was only with America’s move to the far right in the 1980s that people started to claim this had happened to them twenty years before.
The anti-war movement in the 60s was very much about “hating the war but helping the troops”. Many of their leaders had been to Vietnam themselves. Everyone knew someone who had been drafted and many people knew someone who had died.
If you think I’m wrong, feel free to show me primary sources. I think if you read the news of the time or saw the original materials, you’d have to agree that all the anti-war organizations were unified in their support for the troops as victims of the unjust war and there there were absolutely zero reports at the time of veterans being spat upon.
We honor those who fight for their country. Thanking a veteran for their service is a proper and respectful thing to do but as a citizen of this country, you should also be supporting politicians who will fight for quality veteran healthcare and who will use American power wisely. The military is, ultimately, run by elected civilians so never forget your responsibility to those who serve. We all have a duty to each other.
We all have a duty to each other as individuals — but the only duty Americans have toward the US military is to reject it utterly. Generations of bitter experience have shown that it is impossible to “use American power wisely”.
Take a look at US military involvements since World War 2. The US has started endless wars and “actions”, mostly in countries that never offered any American any harm and lost almost all of them. It’s been one war crime after another — a series of war crimes actively abetted by both political parties.
And it has cost America over $6 trillion dollars — that’s $6 million million dollars — just in the last twenty years. America could have had free healthcare, it could have fixed their crumbling infrastructure, it could have educated its children, but instead it committed genocide in a long list of countries that most Americans could not even identify on a map, costing each American man, woman and child about $20,000.
And let me repeat — the US failed to win any of these wars. None of them achieved any of their political, military, strategic, tactical or humanitarian objectives. Heck, America hasn’t even managed to finish any of them: Americans still regularly die in Iraq, still regularly die in Afghanistan and Syria and Libya.
As a rational person, you should deplore this complete and insanely expensive failure to achieve anything. As a moral person, you should weep over the hundreds of thousands killed, the thousands of American soldiers killed, the four million Americans crippled for life by these stupid wars.
My “duty to others” logically leads me to oppose the US military in absolutely all it does. The idea that America can freely invade other countries based entirely on lies, trash those countries, kill hundreds of thousands of completely innocent people, and then reward the architects of these mass killings with great power and wealth — this idea is nauseating to anyone with any moral integrity, or any compassion.
Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people, they’ll come back twenty years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.
