I never could figure why he thought the signs were funny. If I’d been a sailor, I would have been offended. Who wants to be compared to a cur that relieves himself in public? The old man could be a pretty tough customer when insulted, so I’ve always half suspected that he’d only heard about the signs and thought they were a pretty good joke.
A few years ago, I had a lengthy conversation with the late Bob Mason, retired editor of The Virginian Pilot of Norfolk. He’d accumulated an extensive library on naval history, and he’d lived for many years in Tidewater Virginia. He’d heard about the signs and was quick to say that he’d never encountered one and that he didn’t know of anyone who had. As far as he was concerned, the signs never existed.
Like many urban legends, the sign motif contains elements of humor and horror and makes for a good tale. It may even have a slight basis in fact, but the persistence of the legend only serves to illustrate the disdain in which sailors, impressed from the dregs of society at the beginning of the 20th century, were once held. The conduct of naval enlisted men only improved after Josephus Daniels, publisher of The News & Observer of Raleigh and secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, raised recruitment standards and encouraged educational programs aboard U.S. ships. (If you’d like a detailed description of the reforms Daniels instituted as secretary of the Navy, read the essay “The Wreck of Uncle Josephus” in Richard McKenna’s “New Eyes for Old.”)
During the period my father claimed to have seen the signs, millions of Americans were serving in the armed forces, which seems an unlikely time for the proliferation of signs disparaging the social standing of enlisted men. Americans were committed to the war effort and completely supportive of their fellow citizens in uniform.
But the veracity of the dogs-and-sailors legend doesn’t trouble me. I’m much more concerned with the accuracy of another urban legend that’s been making the rounds for the last 30 years — the widely held belief that many veterans of the Vietnam War were spat upon and called “baby killers” when they returned to the United States.
The story may have a limited basis in fact, but I’ve never talked to a veteran who said he’d suffered such treatment. In an interview following the first Gulf War, Gen. Norman Schwarzkoph reacted angrily when asked if he’d been spat on after his tour in Vietnam. “No one spat on me or on any of my men!” he blurted.
A large percentage of the troops who served in Vietnam were draftees, regular Joes snatched almost randomly from civilian life. No doubt the majority of Americans who protested the war, Janes and Joes themselves, felt compassion for the men and women in the military and were thus unlikely to vilify their peers. This is evidenced by the fact that our most revered and visited monument is the Vietnam Memorial.
If there were no welcome-back parades, it was because the troops returned individually when their tours of duty were concluded. By the time the last helicopter fluttered away from the U.S. embassy in Saigon, the majority of our military men and women had long since been pulled out of the country.
Like the dogs-and-sailors story, the baby-killer legend has gained currency in oral tradition. Moreover, it is, in part, a rationalization for the popular belief that objecting to the ongoing war in Iraq is tantamount to not supporting our troops — when in fact the opposite is true. Those who were against the recent war sought to avoid unnecessary loss of life, especially American lives. And given the immediate results of the conflict — no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear bomb program, no discernable connection with al Qaeda, no Saddam Hussein, and all this at the cost of thousands of lives and billions in treasure — we would have done well to heed their warnings.
At the very least, we should acknowledge that those who argued against the war were also supportive of the troops. They were the least self-deceptive among us. They sought only to avert unnecessary suffering and death, the inevitable byproduct of our untimely and ill-conceived aggression.
Stephen Smith is a professor of English at Sandhills Community College. He can be reached at travisses@hotmail.com.
