Jonah, speaking of spitting deniers, I was just thinking about this because Paul Krugman also makes the claim that the spitting never happened in his new book. In fact, we’re on an ouroboros-ian path back to your USAT column, because Krugman repeats the spitting on vets never happened canard in the same paragraph that he — no joke — erroneously blames the Rambo movies for turning the American public against the Democrats on national security issues.

But I’ll share my personal connection here — my father is a retired Lt. Col. USMC. Upon returning from one of his tours in Vietnam he enrolled in the Univeristy of Colorado at Boulder to get his MBA. While he was in school there, one of his duties as a Marine officer was running the undergraduate ROTC program on campus. They might as well have put a target on his back. I don’t think he was ever spat upon, but the Students for a Democratic Society and other protest groups constantly harassed him. Being spat upon is entirely believable and even preferable to some of the things he endured.

Oh and by the way, if any of you reading this happen to be the student at CU in the early seventies who took it upon himself to knock unconscious an SDS organizer with a bullhorn because he was disrupting ROTC field drills — my father is still looking for you, so he can personally offer the thanks of a grateful nation.