I'm pretty pissed about this war, but one thing it has done, strangely, is increase my respect for the people in the military by leaps and bounds. I'm pretty happy that we're still a country that produces guys like the Tillmans.
SCMT- tha's called supporting the troops. I am worried that should this occupation continue, that support will evaporate in a confaltion of the war and the warriors.
2: You mean as supposedly happened with Vietnam, but actually didn't? I suspect the only people likely to "conflate the war and the warriors" are going to be the sort of cravens who were eager to use both as political capital in the first place... not unlike Nixon and Agnew.
I don't think hostility to military recruiters quite expresses the same emotion as hostility to soldiers.
5: That's not a protest of the soldiers, that's a protest of military recruiters. I know people involved in that sort of thing, and they basically grow out of sympathy for the soldiers more than anything else. The attitude is "Evil military recruiters are desperate to make quota and mislead poor, well-meaning working joes into becoming cannon fodder," which is certainly not the same thing as "Evil soldiers don't belong among normal people."
I don't support that sort of action, though, because even well-informed potential recruits get intimidated for no good reason.
re: 3
The article you linked to states
I should add that, if you go back to the late 60s and early 70’s and look for evidence that these things happened, not only don’t you find any evidence, but you don’t find anyone claiming that it was happening at that time.
Funny thing, when I enlisted in 1974, I had fellow soldiers say that it had happened to them, and I was not all surprised to hear it. But I guess I'm just lying about it too.
So much for my mad httl skilz. And FWIW, the urban legend of the returning Viet Nam vets being used as handy spitoons was a part of regular, war if only supported by the people chats that I had with my brother officers in the ealy 80's, so the legend definately predates the Persian Gulf War.
8: But I guess I'm just lying about it too.
Nah, all the veterans who say they witnessed no such thing at antiwar protests must be lying and the second-hand version of events you prefer to believe must be true, despite there being virtually nothing to document it. Thanks for clearing that up.
Can we not get into rehashing Vietnam issues? Re: #2, I don't think the same thing will happen, now, TLL. The behavior (if it happened, yada yada) of anti-Vietnam folk was at is was (if it was, yada yada) in part because it was part of a much broader reaction against The Man. If you look at some of the names listed on the prior comments about the advisability of going to war in Iraq, you'll see that the people protesting this time around are The Man. It really is an Establishment-in-exile moment. It's bizarre as hell, and no one in the media seems willing to openly acknowledge it, but it is what it is.
6 & 7. Recruiters aren't soldiers?- That's not you're point, I know, but this incident was not isolated. Recruiting centers have been vandalized, guys just doing there jobs intimidated, etc. Not a healthy work environment. And I know that there are peaceful ways to protest recruitment with opt out lists, etc. So it's not like that is the only way to protest recruitment.
12: Recruiters are plainly soldiers who are under ever-increasing pressure to fill increasingly desperate quotas through fraud. In this, they differ from the larger mass of American soldiers.
Recruiting centers have been vandalized, guys just doing there [sic] jobs intimidated
Cite?
8: It just doesn't ring true to me, Idealist. Not only would there likely be some sort of actual documentation in a news story somewhere, it seems there would also be at least one hospital record for a severely beaten protester. I've known lots of people who claim to have tipped cows, too, despite it being more or less physically impossible.
TLL, you're being particularly silly today. Hostility at recruiters derives solely from sympathy towards the soldiers who are actually fighting.
It just doesn't ring true to me, Idealist.
Sorry you think I'm lying about what I heard. Not much I can do about it.
In the early seventies, I and nearly everyone I knew, including my thoroughly middle-of-the-road parents, were opposed to the war in Vietnam, and not a single one of my friends or acquaintances ever expressed an intention or even a wish to spit on a soldier.
Someone on the right's reaction to Tillman's comments.
I think it's more, Idealist, that it's something you heard, and didn't witness. Chain-yanking and what-not.
The fellow who tipped the cow was not known for yanking chains.
If it's a very young cow, perhaps. But a full-grown cow is pretty much like trying to tip a station wagon that can move away. Or attack you.
I don't think you're lying about having heard it, Idealist.
I am, however, known for yanking chains.
13. OK, Doc, there's a bunch:http://nefac.net/node/273
http://www.indepundit.com/archive2/2005/03/free_speech_or_1.html
http://www.wtol.com/Global/story.asp?S=2887448
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1709556/posts?page=49
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20050225134157499
And like I said, the protest of recruiting does not have to be violent or destructive
http://www.afsc.org/pacificsw/counter-recruitment.htm
http://www.afsc.org/pacificsw/counter-recruitment.htm
21: That link belongs on the m-fun thread, in the Attack of the Ruminants section.
You've got to enlist another cow to help, the cow-tipping fellow told me. They are wonderful practical jokers, in addition to the pretty eyes and the milk-making.
17: I'm guessing that Sorry you think I'm lying about what I heard , aside from being severely lame, s/b Sorry you think I'm credulous about what I heard.
Just because people believe urban legends and repeat them to you in all seriousness doesn't make them true. One way urban legends commonly spread and amplify is just through the principles of good storytelling; a story is more interesting and evocative to many a listener if the teller can claim to have been there to witness it, so a good raconteur will do just that, whether or not it's true. Technically this is "lying," but of course most people telling a story don't really think about it that way, or at most think it's a white lie since they "know" that story probably did happen just like they told it. This is probably a big part of how the stress cards legend came to spread, for instance.
Man oh man, I hope that story in 21 is true.
While I was a series officer at Parris Island, a concerted effort was made to have the drill instructors not "cuss" at the recruits. Believe me, the vocabulary was pretty inventive, if no less stress inducing.
a concerted effort was made to have the drill instructors not "cuss" at the recruits.
That one's got to be on you guys. Liberals swear.
I've seen that before in fiction, but always assumed it was nonsense -- that drill instructors were supposed to be as hostile as conceivably possible without actually using profanity. I figured it was made up because it seemed so silly, and it's not as if the military's ever been a no-swearing zone otherwise.
33. Your tax dollars at work. It was all I could do to keep my military bearing sometimes.
R. Lee Ermey really was a Marine drill instructor. Food for thought.
35: I love that guy. Great voice, great eyes.
35, I read an interview with him in which he stated that Kubrik made him dial Gy. Sgt. Hartman waaaay back, lest he be unbelievable.
LB there was a marked difference in the vocabulary in the few years between my time as a recruit and my turn on the drill field. It really didn't make much of a difference in the experience.
Huh. I wonder if it goes in waves, because while I'm not coming up with specifics, I coulda sworn that I'd seen the 'no swearing' thing in books about the 50's. Maybe it was a policy that got abandoned and reinstated or something.
Could it have had something to do the draft?
This is wierd:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=2555758&page=1
Okay, I'm confused, because not a single one of TLL's anti-free speech comments or cites makes even the slightest bit of sense. All of the vandalism cited apparently took place at night, when, presumably, no recruiters were around to be scared by the nasty punk-rockers. The entirely peaceful campus civil disobedience cited was in response to recruiters actively trying, in their official capacity, to get people to join the military and thereby aid the war effort. Not a single one of these examples involved any kind of personal threat made against a soldier, recruiter or otherwise. All of them were peaceful protests -- some of them illegal, no doubt, but not in any way violent -- against a war machine that's killed untold thousands and continues to kill them as we blog.
Just as with protests during the Vietnam War, the overwhelming majority of protests against the current wars include the message that the protestors' ire is NOT directed against individual soldiers, but against the decision-makers and their policies.
This is just part of the same old reactionary canard against the peace movement, and like all old canards, it's really starting to stink.
35, I read an interview with him in which he stated that Kubrik made him dial Gy. Sgt. Hartman waaaay back, lest he be unbelievable.
Apparently he got the part after letting loose a stream of insults for 15 minutes without repeating himself while being pelted with oranges and tennis balls, which he didn't acknowledge in the slightest.
This is just part of the same old reactionary canard against the peace movement, and like all old canards, it's really starting to stink.
I think that's a fine response to the JPuds and Pantloads, but I don't think it's useful when addressed to people who spent time in the military voluntarily. I assume--rightly or wrongly--that people who spent time in the military voluntarily feel a greater responsibility to it than to their political party. And I can't, for the life of me, see what incentive the military has to wrongly believe that a significant part of the country dislikes it. That doesn't mean the "spitting protester" stories are true, but I'm suspicious of claims that former military personnel who say that they believe those stories are acting in bad faith.
Let's see, spitting on a soldier, My Lai massacre. Hmm, which story has been substantiated, and who should be ashamed?
Let's see, spitting on a soldier, My Lai massacre. Hmm, which story has been substantiated, and who should be ashamed?
Even if both had been substantiated, I would think that the people who were responsible for My Lai--the soldiers who took part, and anyone above them who ordered it or made it likely--should have been more ashamed, and something deeper, as well. But it's hardly fair to charge that to every soldier in Vietnam, just as it's hardly fair to charge every soldier in Iraq with what apparently happened in Haditha.
My Lai is quite as relevant to our present situation as hippie spit. Every time Idealist brings up that canard, he implicitly demeans the people who worked to end that war, and by extension, those who have opposed the war in Iraq. Do I really have to hear that pointless story told as if it gave some indication of the character of the antiwar movement?
have u ever felt like u could write a story bout You? Things u do, how u do them, THE WAY PEOPLE LOOK @ U The things that U did when U were untouchable on edge There r many reasons y i would talk bout MYSELF. dont no who U R..GET THAT. reply?
Every time Idealist brings up that canard, he implicitly demeans the people who worked to end that war, and by extension, those who have opposed the war in Iraq. Do I really have to hear that pointless story told as if it gave some indication of the character of the antiwar movement?
It's a canard because . . . why? What part of what I wrote are you calling me on? What part of what I wrote do you know to be false? How?
How does disputing the claim that people never spit on service people as an expression of opposition to the military and the war in Vietnam an attack everyone who was a protester then, much less now? I protested the war in Vietnam--do you take my position as an expression of self-loathng?
If this debate says anything about the current antiwar movement, what it says to me is that there are people whose positions depend on hatred and contempt. Not all, maybe not many, but I certainly see it a lot here, which is why I mostly just lurk these days.
Why is it so important to you to deny that protesters ever spit on servicemembers or mistreated them in other ways, or that they treated the military with contempt? I am aware of no reasonable person who claims that most protesters did it or that most (or even many) war protesters in the 1960s took out their opposition to the war on individual veterans. (That said, many protesters--including me--were guilty of doing things that in retrospect did cross a line. When I chanted "Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna' win," I think I crossed a line between wanting our involvement in the war to end because it was ill-conceived and wrong (having more knowledge now, I realize it was vastly more the former than the latter) to saying things that could reasonably have been interpreted as supporting an enemy of the US and wishing defeat on our soldiers in the battlefield, although this is not really what I meant--I was just young and stupid). What is so offensive is the insistence that war protesters never did anything wrong. I was one, and I know this claim to be false.
Conversely, why is it important to you to connect war crimes committed in Vietnam to servicemembers and their supporters today? The answer, to me, is that there are a lot of people out there for whom it is important to see disputes over policy as a battle of good and evil. You have to insist that war protesters, both in the 1960's and today were not just right, but vitruous, just as people who supported the war then, or now, have to be not just wrong, but evil and liars. And for that reason, you have to insist that claims that returning servicemembers were spit on or otherwise treated badly is a myth dreamed up by evil conservatives in the 1980's, and you have to insist that soldiers who serve honorably, and with great personal sacrifice, are tainted with the guilt of war crimes committed before they were born in a war where, again, the vast majority of servicemembers served honorably--even though many were there not as volunteers but only because their country called for their service and they answered instead of ran.
Shorter: The supposition that leftists have always been virtuous, brave, intelligent and right, and that conservatives have always been dishonest, cowardly, stupid and wrong is so self-evidently dishonest that it stuns me how otherwise intelligent people are so wedded to it.
It's because you're actually talking to one 47-year-old balding man in a basement at undisclosed location who has never interacted with the world except through a computer screen, and hence doesn't know the evil that lurks in the hears of (wo)men.
Wars aren't about the troops. The war has to have some worthy objective. Talking about it in terms of the feelings of the troops is a diversion and usually is a leadin to a smear.
In the ideal case, 1.) the goal is a worthy and necessary one, 2.) the leadership is worthy of respect, and 3.) the troops are honored and respected for what they've done.
In Vietnam and now in Iraq, #1 and #2 have not been true. That's the big story. #3 is a way for the unworthy leaders to hide behind someone else. This has been pumped out as propaganda theme continuously for 35 years now.
I stand by what I just said, regardless of whether or not troops actually got spit on, or how many times it really happened. It certainly wasn't a mass event, though. At best, a few stories have been hyped into a propaganda zinger.
The supposition that leftists have always been virtuous, brave, intelligent and right, and that conservatives have always been dishonest, cowardly, stupid and wrong is so self-evidently dishonest that it stuns me how otherwise intelligent people are so wedded to it.
I'm not actually sure that I see that here very often, but certainly I can see that the conservatives come in for a pounding that is occasionally not very polite. But there is also a counter narrative about anti-American dirty hippies that's pretty strong. If you're my age (about LB's), that's been the more dominant of the two narratives throughout your life. Anti-sixties diatribes used to be a part of my general conversation. So some of what you're referencing may be a defensive (which I don't use to imply "inappropriate") reaction to the perceived dominant theme.
The Sixties folks catch a fair bit of crap. I think a lot of it is deserved. But people always leave out the all-important fact that they were important in massive changes to American society that have been astonishingly valuable. So if I were a dirty hippy like mcmanus (not that he's commented on this thread, but I like to think of him as the archtypal dirty hippy), I might be sensitive to slights and inclined to anger. The hippies were right, it seems to me, about an awful lot of the important stuff.
I'm not sure that addresses the issues you discussed. I'm sorry you mostly lurk now, though I can (kind of) understand why.
But there is also a counter narrative about anti-American dirty hippies that's pretty strong. If you're my age (about LB's), that's been the more dominant of the two narratives throughout your life.
I think this is a fair point. I saw a graph the other day showing that most people my age (50) vote liberal, as do most people in their early to mid 20s, and that most people your and LB's age vote conservative. I imagine that we have different experiences in terms of the tenor of the political conversations in which we engage. Not surprisingly, I do not hear many people talking about how the hippies were terrible because were were (the tail end of) that generation.
Excuse me, Idealist, but I wasn't the one to bring up Vietnam. I don't bring up things like My Lai as a general rule, because I don't believe it reflects on the character of the average soldier in Vietnam. Any more than I believe that Haditha reflects the behavior of the great majority of soldiers in Iraq today.
Neither do I believe that spitting on soldiers was characteristic behavior for people who opposed the war. You keep bringing it up in the same way people bring up the rastafarian giant puppets--to suggest that we need not take the antiwar point of view seriously.
Until this moment, as far as I can recall, you've never had anything to say about the antiwar movement other than to repeat this story, which came to you second-hand at best.
I'm sorry you consider that your manner of protesting the war was unserious, but although I'm aware that plenty of stupid histrionic stuff was done by elements of the antiwar movement, not everyone went around waving VC flags just because you and your friends did, believe me.
Nobody's saying leftists are always right and good, or that conservatives are always bad and wrong. (At least I'm not.) But this isn't the first tiime we've heard the hippie spit story from you, and if you want to contribute your bit to the myth that the left at that time consisted entirely of stoned out anarchist nitwits who didn't want to get drafted, maybe we should remember that what energized the left and turned the majority of Americans against the war was the documentation of the atrocious effects of the war on the Vietnamese people. Remember napalm? Remember the illegal bombing of Cambodia? Quite frankly, I still believe that Henry Kissinger is an unrepentant mass murderer, and the fact that he is welcome at the White House would be amazing to me, if I didn't believe that Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush are cut from the same cloth. Just because I don't consider the majority of soldiers complicit in the acts of the few doesn't mean that I don't consider the architects of this disaster to be war criminals.
But it's nice to know that these people who have attempted to legitimize torture, and who are responsible for the deaths of tens to hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, are free of the taint of hatred that so disfigures the souls of the left.
Undoubtedly some hippie somewhere spit on some vet. Just as surely, some vet somewhere beat the crap out of a hippie (who hadn't spat on anyone). I have my own ideas on how much of one there likely was relative to the other, but I've got no more proof for it than the urban legend spreaders on the other side.
I'm pretty tired of the calumny that I loathe people in uniform, either then, now, or looking back, because I oppose policies designed by civilian politicians. And I think I'm pretty much in the mainstream on this one. I understand that it serves someone else's rhetorical needs to lie about what I think in this way -- just as it helps them to say that I hate the President, or the right-wingers, or suffer from some kind of syndrome. (All untrue, by the way. Maybe someone does -- hell, we'll probably hear from one or two of them soon -- but it's not me, and I think I'm way more in the mainstream of opponents of Admin policies on this than they are . . .)