“Instead of being treated like a hero, like the normally do to the troops coming back from any campaign, I was spat on, eggs and piss bottles were thrown at me. I was called baby killer … And the thing [the hostility] about it was, that was the first campaign that the [civilian] news media was allowed to go over and take pictures,” James Sikes, a member of 100th Frist Advance Infantry, recalled his first moments back on American soil after being medical evaluated from Vietnam.
James Sikes was born in the early cool February of 1954 to a family of sharecroppers. Growing up, the Sikes Family was considering “poor white trash.” And James could never have understood why people treated him like that. Growing up, he grew to hate the world and everything …show more content…
The mass media, had reported back to Americans that, they were killing civilians. When asking James about this statement, he stated, “Was women and kid[s] kill? Underneath Geneva Conventions, but the moment a civilian picked up a weapon and shows hostile toward American soldiers, they were considered a combat [solider] and a threat to [American] soldiers. For example: there were women who had bombs strapped around the waist when I first arrived, I assumed she was pregnant, but comrade shot her dead. Upon revealing, he pointed out to me, that she had bombs strapped to her …show more content…
It only fueled the anger of the anti-war movement, and started to create hate for the soldiers as they returned home. Just as the Washington Post reported about war veteran, Joseph Zengerle and his account on his first moments upon seeing civilians, “‘Still wearing Army fatigues, Zengerle boarded a plane from San Francisco to Dulles International Airport. "When I entered and dropped my bags… it was dead quiet on the airplane. Everybody was in there in civilian clothes. They just looked at me. I walked down the aisle to my seat and nobody talked to me. Nobody even smiled at me’”