"In the Seattle airport, as I was arriving home after serving in Vietnam in 1968-1969, a gang of 10 to 20 strangers clustered in the terminal and shouted insults at me as I passed by in my uniform. At the time, I paid them little attention. I was swept up in living, at long last, the dream that had sustained me through the hell of war: I was coming home. I was touching U.S. soil for the first time. Besides, I simply could not appreciate the magnitude of what they were doing at the time. It never occurred to me that people could be so morally bankrupt that, devoid of any fortitude, they would substitute the safety of another's company and, together, attack individual young soldiers, who walked through the airport alone in the sacred moment of homecoming. The longer I was home, however, the more clearly I understood that my Seattle experience was no curious aberration. This was part of an organized effort by a large and vocal segment of our society to ridicule and demean traditional values and strength of character by ridiculing and demeaning those who believed in them."
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Kenneth E. Baggett, as quoted by Bob Greene in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989), p. 222
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vietnam_War
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Vietnam War
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