Vietnam

[Dave Wilton]

But no one has ever even found a vet who will say, "yes, I was spit upon
when I returned home." Not a single one. It's not a question of verifying
whether a particular claim is true, no one can even find a first-hand claim
of such an incident to verify. Whenever one has seemed to appear, it has
evaporated upon closer examination, with the vet or witnesses admitting that
it didn't happen to them but to someone else. Add that to the fact that the
spitting stories didn't start to appear until 1980, years after the war's
end, and the reasonable conclusion is that they simply did not happen.

(Of course it's possible that it could have happened-you can't prove a
negative. But even if such an incident were found to have happened, it still
would have been an extremely rare occurrence, and not at all the commonplace
event that popular imagination would have it.)


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Dan Goncharoff
Sent: Sunday, May 23, 2010 8:13 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Vietnam

I don't understand. Who keeps track of spitting incidents at airports?? If
no one, does that mean they must not occur, since they are impossible to
verify decades later?

DanG

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