>--hitch forgot to throw in references to the myth of the spat upon
>soldiers returning home from broken wars...he shoulda said something
>like, "let's not be like the hippies who spat on the Vietnam
>vets!"...that woulda really won the crowd to his appeal...When hitch
>starts mentioning spat upon soldiers...then he'll have completed his
>transition to lunacy...
>
>steve
>
The fact that anything so preposterous as the "spat upon soldiers" myth
even requires a labored refutation is telling in itself. Some people
will believe anything. The setting for this fable is usually an
airport. My father was an army colonel serving stateside during
Vietnam, and I can remember as a kid tagging along with my mom to pick
him up at various airports, including Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis,
Memphis, and several other places, as he traveled about the country in
full uniform. I never saw any hippie wrong-os hanging around the gates
waiting to shower uniformed soldiers with drool. More to the point,
whenever you went to an airport in those days, the place was invariably
full of guys in uniform. Anyone who lurked about waiting to shoot gobs
of spit at any of them would have to be very brave AND very stupid.
It's the U.S. version of the Weimar-era "Dolchstoss" legend.
Jacob Conrad