Kicked in the Ted

The article referenced below by professional buffoon Ted Rall is less provocative than his usual schtick. Next to condemning President Reagan to hell, or accusing a dead Ranger of wanting to murder innocent people, this is mild stuff. Maybe he reads his critics on the Web and has started to reconsider his vile tactics.

I love the quotation, "There isn't even one letter written by a soldier at the time referencing" spitting on Vietnam veterans. There is no record of any liberal screaming at me when I was in college, or making rude comments to my girlfriend (now wife), but it did happen, whether or not I can document it. I didn't think to report it to the police, because it didn't seem like they needed to be involved. I imagine that if you were in combat for the better part of a year, you wouldn't go running to the cops just because of saliva. Yet apparently there's a professor -- at Holy Cross, no less! -- who wrote an entire book saying that no protestor anywhere spat on any veteran.

Now, as it happens, I have a good source of first-hand observations about Vietnam protestors and how they treated members of the military. He is my father, who was an ROTC candidate while a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Campus protestors showed their spirited yet civil disagreement with the war by blowing up the ROTC building. That did make the papers, so the good professor has some evidence for his next book. And the future Army officers could not wear their uniforms on campus, for fear of being physically attacked. These attacks were not urban legends, either.

I've known many Vietnam vets with similar stories. It's funny, though -- they never mention working-class folks performing the abuse. The only ones doing the hitting and yelling were privileged, self-righteous college kids. Perhaps all these stories are invented, too.

I enjoy the pseudo-analysis of military compensation. He refers to a "two-year stint" in the military, which is unusually short -- most active-duty enlistment terms are four or six years. He complains that "Starting pay in the U.S. armed forces runs about $12,000 per year, about the same as working at McDonald's," but that pay increases almost immediately after boot camp, and the figure doesn't include the free housing, food, medical care, and other benefits. Add in college tuition money, and they are earning the equivalent of over $30,000 annually, which isn't bad for an entry-level job.

The cartoonist heroically says, "I'd rather sleep under a bridge, eating trash out of a Dumpster, than murder human beings for Halliburton." That life would be a big step up for Ted Rall.