His comment:
As a Vietnam veteran what I remember most was being either ignored or treated as if nothing happened to me. Most of the people I knew at that time just acted as if I had gone on vacation to a tropical isle. The most abuse I received was from WW2 vets, the so called 'greatest generation", who insulted me by declaring that 'Nam was not a real war, that I was no doubt a dope addict and/or baby killer, that we 'Nam vets had had it easy, that we did not deserve any medals, ad infinitum. Even my own family would not discuss the war or express any desire to hear what I saw or did. For many years I kept mum and just kept truckin' along. About 1976 or so I started to shift my feelings and became a militant Vietnam Vet. I am proud of my service and would do it again in a heartbeat. Any patience I had with draft dodgers has evaporated in the mists of time. I respect true conscientious objectors, but have no time for the pukes that ran away to Canada to hide from the draft. End of rant!
IIRC it was circa 1973 when I flew military standby into Logan. To do this you had to wear your uniform to get the price break.
Anyway, as the saying goes, there's always some dope that doesn't get the word. Nobody told her Vietnam was over and she was supposed to find another cause.
My father and a couple of others met me at the gate (LONG before airport security. You could meet passengers at the gate.)
Anyway some Birkenstock shod, braided armpit hippie chick spit on me and called me a baby killer. She was promptly tagged and tagged hard by a still living friend and her nose got split open like a rotten tomato hitting the pavement. My friend whispered something into dad's ear and took off. (Meet me in Quincy. I'll take the T.)
Needless to say, the hippie chick screeched and the State Police hauled us into a room and asked for a description of the assailant.
Needless to say, he got three conflicting descriptions and we argued among ourselves if the assailant had even been a man or a woman or even what race they were. The State cop looked at us suppressing a smirk.
I do recall the hippie chick screeching in outrage that we were all liars and the description was a crock. After our side of the story the cop told her in a nasty tone that if she had kept her tongue and her spit in her mouth she wouldn't be there filing a complaint.
He asked us if we wanted to file charges and she turned purple. That pretty much ended it.
I imagine the cop sent out an All Points Bulletin telling the State Police to be on the lookout for a gay, Native American, Jewish, Spanish speaking red haired green eyed crippled he/she wearing blaze orange pants, a neon green top in a wheelchair or some damned thing.
These were the pre camera days so nothing came of it.
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Later circa 1982 I was living in Kodiak and became an acquaintance of one WW2 former Army captain by the name of Frank Parker. He was strictly Old School a brawler and a real scrapper. Story was he landed at fought at Cassino as a captain leading a company.
One day Frank handled a particularly mean drunk via the knot on the head route and as he was commencing to throw the idiot out asked me, "Piccolo, would you please open the door for me?"
"Frank, you know I get paid good money to fix that damned door," I answered.
"Oh, yeah. I forgot," replied Frank and he promptly threw him through the closed door. I followed the drunk out and went to my pickup for my tools.
That's the kind of guy Frank was. He was also one of the kindest people I ever met.
Anyway, later on at another bar we talked and the subject of Vietnam vets came up. I pointed out that some of the WW2 guys at the Legion/VFW didn't call it a real war and he went off like a skyrocket.
"Those guys were all clerks and rear echelon types!" He stormed. "No real combat guy would treat them that way! The biggest battle of the whole war is not some extravaganza somewhere, It's the one YOU are PERSONALLY are in the middle of! Damned rear echelon types!"
I later heard that at the Legion he stuck up for the Vietnam guys with a purple passion.
Frank was just another one of the WW2 guys that raised me.
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There's 'contentious objector' draft dodgers and then there are these guys. (FWIW Alvin C. York applied for CO status.)
I don't have a lot of patience for Canadian draft dodgers, myself. Carter was a jerk for letting them return. Letting someone get away with something only encourages others to do so.
They didn't have to run. They could have joined the Coast Guard, the Navy or the Air Force and been relatively safe. Instead the fled.
Hell, IIRC there was a program that allowed COs to serve a couple of years alternative service!
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Circa 1970 or maybe 1971 I was disgusted with the way things were being conducted in Vietnam and saw it for what it had become. It had become a meat grinder to keep the checkbook open for military contractors.
When I discovered the Lady Bird Johnson held a HUGE pile of stock in Bell Helicopters I figured the corruption had made it all the way to the top. every helicopter that got shot down mad her richer.
About that time the so-called 'Rules of Engagement' were in effect, hand tying the GIs. I thought about that one and figured the Congress Critters responsible for that may have been WW2 vets but were most likely were never near the front because anyone that had been knew you don't wait to be fired on. Shoot first and you may not be fired on if you get them first. Play to win.
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Dope addicts.
Alcohol and tobacco have served as a release for GIs since Day One. C-rations used to carry a few smokes with them. All this is a given.
As for pot and heroin, one has to remember that the American GI is simply a random piece of Americana. They come in all shapes and sized. Some have a predetermined bent towards drug abuse. The way I see it is the Vietnam GIs had pretty close to the same drug habits as their stateside counterparts, but may be a bit slightly higher which I will attribute to stress.
One thing, though. Guys in line units didn't tolerate junkies. They wanted people they could count on. From what I have been told, line unit GIs attribute heroin use to REMFs.
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IMO, Vietnam was a festering sore for the nation. I had no problem with it early on. Go in, get it done and go home.
Instead the politicians got in the way and we kept doubling down. It went from being a legitimate mission to a three ring circus and kids paid the bill with their lives.
I can't say as I was angry at the people that protested the war. To some degree, so did I because of the way it was handled. Still, the protesters should have gone against the people that were rightfully responsible for it, the politicians.
Turning against the troops was and still is a disgrace. I still carry animosity toward the people that crapped on the troops. They're the same kind of people that crap all over a poor $2/hour cashier because the price of milk went up.
Grow some balls and fight with the boss of the dairy association and leave the clerks and cashiers alone.
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I have no real problem with people getting rich during wartime. Henry J. Kaiser and Andrew Jackson Higgins earned their money by supplying the government with legitimate products needed to conduct the war.
What I DO have a problem with is the military Industrial complex lobbying congress to continue and drag out hostilities for their profits. Hell, Ike warned us about the military/industrial complex!
FWIW one of the slogans the protesters used was 'War is god for industry. Invest your son.' As the war dragged on that one made a lot of sense.
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Further adventures in this post.
In Kodiak I knew Captain Frank Parker, a fisherman and one of the kindest people I ever met so long as you didn't get out of line by Kodiak standard which is to say you really had to f*** up to piss him off.
I knew he had played in the 1942 Rose Bowl because I once asked him about the very worn ring he wore. When I asked him he smiled and proudly said, "I got that for playing in the Rose Bowl in 1942!"
I got curious and started Googling about the players of the 1942 Rose Bowl and learned a lot about one of my mentors that passed in 2002 in a nursing home. I never knew that he was carrying so much of the war with him.
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Sidebar.
Speaking earlier of $2/hour cashiers...
Someone I sometimes hang out with discovered why life is good to me and an awful LOT of the little people like me. It's because I am good to them and defend them.
The one that went through a Walmart nearby was when some guy was thumping an old woman cashier about an expired coupon and I stepped in. I told him to leave her alone and to take his twins and just leave.
"They're not twins," he snapped.
"I'll be damned!" I shot back. "Where did you ever find a woman that would let you f*** her twice?"
The woman turned red and covered her mouth to keep from laughing in front of him. My friend laughed outright and practically fell over.
He left and when I got home I started wondering why my grocery bill was so low until I discovered she'd run several expensive items through without scanning them!
My friend almost $hit his pants when he saw what had happened.
To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this:
http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY
