Spitboaters Against the Truth

Have you licked your troop today?

By Steven Wells
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Oct. 31, 2007

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photo credit: HAWK KRALL

During the Vietnam War returning troops were spat on--spat on, I tell you--by filthy, disgusting hippie antiwar protesters. This disgusting spitting (on troops, by hippies) happened so often that it entered folklore and was enshrined in the American consciousness by films like First Blood and Hamburger Hill. And it's regularly dusted off and wheeled out by right-wing talk radio chickenhawks as further proof that pacifists are worse than Nazis.

This is a terrible burden for today's antiwar movement. But I have the solution: Modern-day peaceniks should greet troops returning from Iraq by symbolically licking the spit off them. And instead of marching on Washington to shout abuse at the commander in chief (who is, after all, a symbolic Super Troop), we should line up to symbolically lick the symbolic spit off his fake symbolic cowboy boots.

Hell, while we're at it, maybe we should rethink this whole "antiwar" thing. We should accept the argument made by the president and his choir of house-trained right-wing howler monkeys that it's impossible to support the troops and not support whatever illogical, unjustified and illegal war the president feels like starting.

In which case, as we all desperately want to be seen as supporting the troops, let's call for more wars, longer wars and bigger wars. Because we just love our troops so much.

My god, that mass spitting (on troops, by hippies) must have been horrible. All those thousands of verminous traitors coughing up gallons of drug-clogged snot onto the troops must have made horrifying news footage.

So isn't it odd that none exists? Or that the documentary evidence for any demonstrator even breathing moistly in the general direction of a troop is so thin that sociology professor Jerry Lembcke--himself a Vietnam vet--wrote a book about it called The Spitting Image?

The reason being, of course, that the spitting almost certainly never happened. And one of the reasons it never happened was that the antiwar activists who stopped the Vietnam War weren't beamed down from Planet Hippie. As we saw in the recently released documentary Sir! No Sir!, the dudes who stopped the war were America's Marines, soldiers and Air Force themselves, by refusing to fight and by swelling the ranks of the antiwar movement. And despite the claims of right-wing "spitboat" vets who've since come forward to claim they were personally spit on, comrades don't tend to spit on comrades.

In which case perhaps we'd better shelve the troop-licking idea and demand (as politely as possible) that all the troops are brought home. Now.

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