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July 11, 2005

A soldier's memory

Among other things, Hillary Nelson’s column in Saturday’s Concord Monitor touched on whether soldiers during the Vietnam era were actually spat upon and vilified as baby-killers. The conclusion you draw from her column is that this is mostly myth, that few incidents of spitting and name-calling can be verified.

Nevertheless, the column reminded me of a memorable day in my life.

I never went to Vietnam, but I served four years in the Army, 1966 through 1970. Two of those years I spent in West Germany, where my job was to gather and analyze information about Soviet military activity in East Germany. I returned to the United States in February 1970, landing at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey.

I was disillusioned about my country. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated while I was gone. Urban rioting and racial unrest were rampant. It seemed like the Vietnam War, which I had always opposed, would never end. And I had grown fond of Europe, where I met my wife and got to know new cultures.

Gone two years, I had no preconceptions about how my fellow citizens might see me.

We returning soldiers were loaded into buses at McGuire and driven to the Philadelphia airport, where we were to make our way to our next assignments. It was about 9 a.m. I was in uniform, of course.

As I walked through the airport, I could see disgust toward me in the expressions of many people I passed. When I sat to wait for my flight, people stared at me so hard they seemed to be looking right through me. Some averted their eyes, but seldom without a hint of scorn.

These people were not hippies or protesters. They were middle-class citizens in polyester leisure suits with loud ties. They were mothers of three and men with briefcases.

Although I heard more than one person mutter under his breath that morning, no one spat on me or called me a baby killer, at least not to my face. I think it is true that these exact things happened to very few men in uniform during the Vietnam war. But I also believe what I felt that day in the Philadelphia airport was a common experience for returning soldiers.

It was as though my uniform stood for everything that had gone wrong. It was as though I was the problem personified.

Posted by Mike Pride at July 11, 2005 07:06 PM

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