"The idea of hippies spitting on "a burly member of the Green Berets" fresh from a tour of duty fighting the North Vietnamese in the bush isn't an accurate description. Just as everybody who opposed the war wasn't a hippie, the typical guy coming back from Nam wasn't a Green Beanie. Most weren't even grunts in the bush. They were rear echelon mother fuckers- ammo humpers, or finance clerks, medics. Maybe they worked in supply or were M.P.s. Not much in their Nam experience would condition them to do anything but "stand there and take it," because for a full year, that's just what they did. They stood there and took it- from colonels, captains, sergeants- even if they never raised an M16 against a VC. For a lot of guys, the enemy had been the Army, not the Nam, and being hassled at the airport in uniform, while unwelcome, was often the last act of harassment in their military careers."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Jerry Olson, as quoted in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989) by Bob Greene, p. 201-202
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vietnam_War
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Vietnam War
236 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Vietnam War →
Related Quotes
"Intelligence on Vietcong positions and movements frequently arrived too late to be actionable, delayed in an informat…"
"The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men, including all of us who have allowed it to …"
"You sense a strong sense of mission among the fighting men in Viet Nam, an enormous compassion for all victims of Com…"
"By Thanksgiving, 1967, we still had not made any really final decision about whether or not we'd return for another t…"
"The Vietnam war literally brought this country to its knees because, without going into the technicalities of what Co…"
"Now then, the question is, How can we move to begin to change what's going on in this country. I maintain, as we have…"
"We thought, We will go to Vietnam and be Audie Murphies. Kick in the door, run in the hooch, give it a good burst- ki…"
"And for the men in the audience, hands down, the worst PTSD in the war is in the women who served as surgical nurses …"
"The Road to Viet Nam, and to the other important places Mr. Hope visits at Christmas, had to end for Bob and me after…"
"There were only two types of people when I came home- those who were against what we did and those who said nothing. …"