The NY Times today reported that Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic aspirant for the Senate in Connecticut acknowledged inadvertently misleading people into believing he was a soldier serving in Vietnam. While most of the attention will focus on how this plays in the upcoming election and speculation regarding the reasons why he fabricated his past, I would like to respond to another of his remarks, that in addition to serving he remembered "... the taunts, the insults and even the physical abuse."
Blumenthal's recollections,or "recollections," in this regard might have been meant to be "personal" experience as a phantom Vietnam vet or simply a parroting of popular beliefs that anti-war activists abused soldiers with word and deed. Either way it's important to correct yet another myth: that anti-war activists abused soldiers either as policy or as indiduals in some sytematic way. The best source to debunk this, especially the oft-repated canard that anti-war activists spit on Vietnam vets is sociologist Jerry Lembcke's The Spitting Image, which exhaustively tries and fails to find such cases of extreme abuse and concludes it was an urban legend in the pre-Fox news era of manufacturing truth for political ends.
The anti-war movement (then and now)always felt soldiers were victims of the government's war policies and while it's impossible to say that no individual might have acted in an abusive fashion in some situation there were only a tiny number of instances even reported (and not necessarily substantiated)in a war that took place over many years. Activists did attack draft boards and ROTC as an institution and the ties between universities and the military, but this is not what Blumenthal is aluding to in his pathetic way.
This is not only a matter of historical accuracy, but such lies play into the hands of war-mongering presidents who seek, as Bush and others did, to portray opposition to war as being against soldiers as individuals.