I came back from my tour in late '68, and started college in Jan '69. The number of green fatigues walking around campus with long hair and peace symbols was overwhelming. The Right today would like us to think that the returning VN Vet was constantly scorned and insulted by draft-dodging hippies, but it wasn't like that at all. I don't doubt that may have happened somewhere to somebody, I can't speak for anyone but myself. But I am convinced those stories are mostly lies perpetrated by supporters of the war. I was never spit on as a vet, no one I knew was ever spit on, and no one I knew knew anyone who was ever spit on.

The initial impression was that you couldn't argue too smugly the merits of our involvement in VN because most of the people you'd have to convince had actually been there, and all the people who were likely to agree with you, hadn't.

I wasn't immediately recognizable as a Vet, I wore my old dungarees, chambray shirts, and bluejacket (Navy fatigues) so I looked just like any other hippy in bell-bottoms and a work shirt. My hair was short, because I was still a reservist with weekend drills to attend. Only the fading name and rank insignia stencilled on my clothes gave me away as a GI, and the blue was swamped by the sea of Army and Marine green on campus. They had told us in the service it was illegal to wear our fatigue uniforms as a civilian, and our dress uniforms were only for official holidays. But we were proud to wear them anyway.

The university (at least the public, state university) wasn't so much a hotbed of anti-war activism as a a hotbed of anti-war veterans, mostly working class kids who in the late 60s, would never have had the chance to go to college otherwise. It's funny how that aspect, so compelling to anyone who actually lived through it, doesn't seem to have survived in our film and TV dramatizations of that era.

This is not me, its a stock photo off the net. I never wore the "dixie cup", or white hat, as a civilian, though. I favored a blue baseball cap with a Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club patch sewed on it.