Legionnaires: Diseased (2)

Last week I wrote a post, in the wake of Legion protests that veterans who oppose the Iraq war are guilty of "politicization," in which I revealed some of the shamefully anti-American ways in which the "American" Legion has served as muscle in right-wing political crusades.

When I saw this letter [1] from an outraged American Legion deputy commander, Lt. Col. Hal Donahue, USAF (retired), criticizing his beloved organization for becoming a mouthpiece for the Bush administration even as that administration proverbially spat upon veterans, I realized I'd forgotten the most damning parts.

Forthwith, in honor of Lt. Col. Donohue: the rest of the story - starting with those halcyon days in which Legionnaires literally spat upon veterans.

In the now-classic study The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam [2], sociologist Jerry Lembke established that the only actual documented examples of the frequently repeated canard that Americans spat upon returning Vietnam veterans came from the kind of World War II veterans who wouldn't let their brothers back from Vietnam join local American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts beause they were seen as shameful, as polluted. (The New York Times reported on the phenomenon here. [3]

They were the kind of veterans who - Gerald Nicosia tells the story in his history of Vietnam Veterans Against the War [4] - greeted the antiwar veterans who had marched 86 miles from Morristown, New Jersey to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, just like George Washington's army in 1777. The World War II veterans heckled them:

"Why don't you go to Hanoi?"

"We won our war, they didn't, and from the looks of them, they couldn't."

A Vietnam vets hobbled by on crutches. One of the old men wondered whether he had been "shot with marijuana or shot in battle."

I forgot, too, about their political interference in a prominent trial. The Legion post in Columbus, Georgia, home of Lt. William Calley's Fort Benning jail cell, promised they would raise $100,000 to help fund the appeal of the man convicted of murder in the My Lai Massacre "or die trying": "The real murderers are the demonstrators in Washington," they said, "who disrupt traffic, tear up public property, who deface the American flag. Lieut. Calley is a hero..... We should elevate him to saint rather than jail him like a common criminal."

I forgot, too, this little tidbit from a 1972 biography of George McGovern [5], the former college professor who became a South Dakota senator and Democratic presidential nominee: when he first ran for Congress, American Legion members sat in on his classes, taking notes, so they could accuse him of being a "Communist."