D.F. Hippies and Vietnam Vets

This stuff just continues to piss me off.

In response to my earlier post on the troubled relationship between Dems and the military, a smart Democrat with some involvement in these issues e-mails:

I should say, though, this doesn't happen often but I actually disagree with you on the substance of the post, at least in part. I don't think the fundamental problem between Dems and the military is over policy, but rather at a much more emotional level. I think a lot of military people are under the impression that Democrats in general think they're a bunch of baby-killing Rambo assholes. I'm not a big fan of viewing everything in politics through the prism of Vietnam, but I think that legacy of how vets were treated by the left is very much still there. It's something that our generation just never had, but go back not too long ago and it was a tremendously powerful narrative.

It would be terrific if Ezra's "smart Democrat" could point to a few examples of how "vets were treated by the left" during the Vietnam era. I believe history shows -- as Ezra's first commenter points out -- that the left treated vets with a great deal of respect and, indeed, vets were leaders (and moral ballast) of the anti-war movement in the late 60s/early 70s. It was members of the VFW that spit on anti-war vets during those gleeful days.

It was Nixon who feared and plotted against a young, returning soldier named John Kerry, and it was the right who in 2004 ridiculed Kerry's service and genuine heroism during the war.

I realize the narrative is long-standing and powerful (and formed by the "Rambo" movies, in fact), but it doesn't help for "smart Democrats" to echo, rather than fight against it. Not very "smart" at all.