Monday, January 07, 2013

The Daily Flashback: Screwed Vets Edition

This one paragraph sent me reeling, unpleasantly, back in time to a place and time I'd rather forget. Like America has.

Daily Politics Blog - Charles P. Pierce - Political Blogging - Esquire-- Chuck Hagel Already Knows How To Be Defense Secretary
...(And thus doth fall one of the great wingnut myths of all time — that draft-dodging hippies trashed the Vietnam veterans when they got home. It was the antiwar Left and its remnants that ran the GI coffeehouses, and that listened to the terrible stories and took them seriously. It was those remnants — and, if I can brag a little, the alternative press of the day — that helped force the issue of PTSD, and the complications from Agent Orange, and the other ancillary horrors into the spotlight. By contrast, the conventional veterans groups were next to useless; I still remember Vietnam vet sources of mine cursing what they called "the class of '45." And the Reagan people told them what a noble cause it was in which they had fought, and then cut the funding that was helping them back here.)...

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