Heads up! The "spitting on our vets" bullshit is starting up AGAIN.

[Bozita]

I found this in a LBN thread:
http://www.kirotv.com/news/9765757/detail.html


National Guardsman Brutally Attacked In Pierce County

POSTED: 4:33 pm PDT August 30, 2006
UPDATED: 6:15 pm PDT August 30, 2006

PARKLAND, Wash. -- The Pierce County Sheriff's Department is searching for five people who allegedly attacked a uniformed National Guardsmen walking along 138th Street in Parkland Tuesday afternoon.


The soldier was walking to a convenience store when a sport utility vehicle pulled up alongside him and the driver asked if he was in the military and if he had been in any action.

The driver then got out of the vehicle, displayed a gun and shouted insults at the victim. Four other suspects exited the vehicle and knocked the soldier down, punching and kicking him.

“And during the assault the suspects called him a baby killer. At that point they got into the car and drove off and left him on the side of the road,” Detective Ed Troyer with the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department told KIRO 7 Eyewitness News.

The suspects were driving a black Chevy Suburban-type SUV.

more...


But have people forgotten Jerry Lembcke's book?

http://www.slate.com/id/1005224 /

Although Nexis overflows with references to protesters gobbing on Vietnam vets, and Bob Greene's 1989 book Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam counts 63 examples of protester spitting, Jerry Lembcke argues that the story is bunk in his 1998 book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (click here to buy it). Lembcke, a professor of sociology at Holy Cross and a Vietnam vet, investigated hundreds of news accounts of antiwar activists spitting on vets. But every time he pushed for more evidence or corroboration from a witness, the story collapsed--the actual person who was spat on turned out to be a friend of a friend. Or somebody's uncle. He writes that he never met anybody who convinced him that any such clash took place.

While Lembcke doesn't prove that nobody ever expectorated on a serviceman--you can't prove a negative, after all--he reduces the claim to an urban myth. In most urban myths, the details morph slightly from telling to telling, but at least one element survives unchanged. In the tale of the spitting protester, the signature element is the location: The protester almost always ambushes the serviceman at the airport--not in a park, or at a bar, or on Main Street. Also, it's not uncommon for the insulted serviceman to have flown directly in from Vietnam. In the most dramatic telling of the spitting story, First Blood (1982), the first installment of the series about a vengeful Vietnam vet, the airport is the scene of the outrage. John Rambo, played by Sylvester Stallone, gives a speech about getting spat upon. Rambo says:
"It wasn't my war. You asked me, I didn't ask you. And I did what I had to do to win. But somebody wouldn't let us win. Then I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport. Protesting me. Spitting. Calling me baby killer. ... Who are they to protest me? Huh?"

Of course, the myth of the spitting protester predates the Rambo movies, but how many vets--many of whom didn't get the respect they thought they deserved after serving their country--retrofitted this memory after seeing the movie? Soldiers returning from lost wars have long healed their psychic wounds by accusing their governments and their countrymen of betrayal, Lembcke writes. Also, the spitting story resonates with biblical martyrdom. As the soldiers put the crown of thorns on Jesus and led him to his crucifixtion, they beat him with a staff and spat on him.

Lembcke uncovered a whole lot of spitting from the war years, but the published accounts always put the antiwar protester on the receiving side of a blast from a pro-Vietnam counterprotester. Surely, he contends, the news pages would have given equal treatment to a story about serviceman getting the treatment. Then why no stories in the newspaper morgues, he asks?

Lastly, there are the parts of the spitting story up that don't add up. Why does it always end with the protester spitting and the serviceman walking off in shame? Most servicemen would have given the spitters a mouthful of bloody Chiclets instead of turning the other cheek like Christ. At the very least, wouldn't the altercations have resulted in assault and battery charges and produced a paper trail retrievable across the decades?

more...

[glitch]

1. Another thread on this. Setting off BS detectors all over the place

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2486202

[Bonhomme Richard]

2. The only people I keep hearing about driving .....

"a black Chevy Suburban-type SUV" are gov. employees.
And shrub employees would be that stupid to drive a Gov. vehicle while doing the dirty work.

[Dhalgren]

3. Either this is totally fictitious, or the Guardsman got the shit

kicked out of him for some other reason that he didn't want to relate.

[misternormal]

4. Another story, and other hoax...

"...attacked a uniformed National Guardsman..." "...driver asked if he was in the military..."

This was enough to tip me off that it was a narrative of a hoax...

[Montauk6]

5. Then again, are the alleged horkers members of Fred Phelps' cult?

[sui generis]

6. yeah, cause you know we liberals just drive around in our

shiny black suburbans looking for soldiers in uniform to beat up while waving our guns!

all. day. long.

:eyes:

cause that's what librools do, is beat up poor helpless soldiers in uniform while waving guns around. Come on U.S. Government, don't you think you coulda come up with a more realistic scene? Or maybe he just shorted his dealer at the local crack house, who knows.

and in this day and age when simply EVERYONE has a camera on their phone, water bottle, thong. You would think that SOMEBODY would have been a witness.