Second, and one disturbing to me (as one who was called 'baby killer" on my way home from overseas in the San Francisco airport in 1966) , is that returning veterans from the Vietnam weren't actually treated so badly after all. Last night on C-Span the current CEO of Slate was reviewing his new book about the glory and wonder of San Francisco, and told of how all the returning vets he knew there in the '60's and 70's (who by the way were all drug users and probably shared the SF values) were treated very well by his friends - it was a pack of conservative lies that they had been disrespected and even spit on. Then remarkably tonight on the C-Span history channel, there was coverage of a class session by a Meredith Lair of the history department at George Mason University, of all places, who seemed intent on proving essentially the same point, in particular that returning vets were never spat on - meticulously she questioned all possible proof that such incidents ever took place, her primary evidence seeming to be that because this class of twenty year olds, two generations removed from Vietnam, knew no one who first-hand had been treated with disrespec as a returning vet from that war, it never happened. She pointed out that there seemed to be no actual photos of soldiers being spit on, although there were she claimed pictures of anti-war protesters being spit on and she later produced a picture which she maintained had been photoshopped to show Code Pink protesters in 2005 urging the murder of US troops - so you see, it turns out by her implication that our returning soldiers have always been treated kindly, while it's the anti-war types who have been disrespected and lied about - facts are indeed ephemeral things......
Proving once again that winners always rewrite history in the absence of proof to the contrary, while at the same time omitting the essential essence of the history they are altering.
If you who are a scifi fan: the Babylon 5 episode “Sleeping in the Light” makes this point very dramatically.