The Spitting Image

I saw it with my own eyes: finally, someone was stepping up to claim that he was spat upon when he returned as a vet from VietNam. It was, of course, Michael A. Smith, VietNam vet, who spat on Jane Fonda at a book signing, in a sort of sick payback gesture. The problem is, payback for what? It is almost impossible for Smith to have been spat upon when he returned from service - the Spat-Upon Vet is a myth. In _The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of VietNam_, author (and 'Nam vet) Jerry Lembcke tries unsuccessfully to trace down even one credible story of a vet being spat upon. Rather, he finds a story of the progressive marginalization of VietNam vets and their betrayal. In his words:

I called the image of spat-upon Vietnam veterans a myth. The historical fact, I pointed out, is that the peace movement reached out to veterans as potential allies in a struggle against an unpopular war, while many veterans were joining the anti-war movement by the late 1960s.

My search for evidence turned up a couple of claims which, if interpreted generously, could have been construed to suggest that veterans or servicemen in uniform may have been spat on. But I also found research done by other scholars that showed quite convincingly that acts of hostility against veterans by protesters were almost nonexistent. No researchers cited reports that veterans were spat on (Beamish, Molotch, and Flacks, 1995).

I also found historical evidence for what I came to call "grist" for the myth. There are newspaper reports, for example, of pro-war demonstrators spitting on anti-war activists. In their retelling over the years, the oral accounts of these incidents could easily get reinterpreted and inverted and made into stories about activists spitting on veterans. There is also a record of military authorities warning GIs that they might experience hostility from opponents of the war. Most interesting in this regard were the warnings issued to Vietnam-bound troops that their families might receive harassment phone calls from communist sympathizers saying the soldier had been wounded or killed.

Another kind of grist is the claims by veterans today that they were spat on. During the 1980s these stories began to proliferate, which prompted Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene to ask Vietnam veterans to send him their stories of being spat on. Greene compiled the responses he received for a 1989 book, Homecoming.

These stories have to be taken very seriously, but as historical evidence they are problematic. In the first place, stories of this type didn't surface until about ten years after the end of the war. If the incidents occurred when the storytellers say they did, in the closing years of the war, why is there no evidence for that? Moreover, many of the stories have elements of such exaggeration that one has to question the veracity of the entire account. One that Greene published read,

My flight came in at San Francisco airport and I was spat upon three times: by hippies, by a man in a leisure suit, and by a sweet little old lady who informed me I was an "Army Asshole."

Besides the fact that no returning soldiers landed at San Francisco Airport, I find it hard to believe that the same veteran was spat on three times in one pass through the airport.

There are many stories like this one (the prevalence of San Francisco in these stories might be suggestive of a story-telling cliché) but my favorite example appeared in a November 2, 1998 New York Times story about Vietnam veterans taking a bicycle trip the length of Vietnam. (The trip was televised for broadcast on NBC a few weeks after the Times story appeared.) The Times story told what motivated Peter D. Kiernan the 3rd, a partner at Goldman, Sachs, to organize the trip:

"It was not until Mr. Kiernan spent a long evening three years ago listening to a top executive describe his Vietnam War homecoming—on a stretcher with a bullet in his leg—that he gave the idea much thought. 'He said college kids rushed up and poured rotten vegetables on him,' Mr. Kiernan related. 'They spat on him. He was so ashamed.'"

Given that under normal circumstances civilians without rotten vegetables could not get near the area where healthy returning GIs deplaned, this story seems highly implausible. My effort to correspond with the reporter, Laura Holson, to see why she and her editors found the story believable enough to retell, have been unsuccessful.

I cannot, of course, prove to anyone's satisfaction that spitting incidents like these did not happen. Indeed, it seems likely to me that it probably did happen to some veteran, sometime, some place. But while I cannot prove the negative, I can prove the positive: I can show what did happen during those years and that that historical record makes it highly unlikely that the alleged acts of spitting occurred in the number and manner that is now widely believed.

The historical record shows that there was widespread solidarity between the anti-war movement and veterans. The earliest efforts by the anti-war movement to reach out to GIs had taken the form of legal aid for soldiers wishing to leave the service or simply fight for their rights within the military structure. Veterans of World War II active in the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee in New York City were some of the first opponents of the war to propose that the movement recruit Vietnam veterans into protest activities. By 1969, large numbers of Vietnam veterans were joining the anti-war movement. During1970, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) began conducting educational activities designed to "bring the war home" to the American people.

Reclaiming our memory of the Vietnam era entails a struggle against very powerful institutional forces that toy with our imaginings for reasons of monetary, political, or professional gain. It is a struggle for our individual and collective identities that calls us to reappropriate the making of our own memories. It is a struggle of epic importance. Studies of the twentieth century will shape America's national identity for decades to come. How Vietnam is to be remembered looms large on the agenda of turn-of-the-century legacy studies.

Remembered as a war that was lost because of betrayal at home, Vietnam becomes a modern-day Alamo that must be avenged, a pretext for more war and generations of more veterans. Remembered as a war in which soldiers and pacifists joined hands to fight for peace, Vietnam symbolizes popular resistance to political authority and the dominant images of what it means to be a good American. By challenging myths like that of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran, we reclaim our role in the writing of our own history, the construction of our own memory, and the making of our own identity.

The image of the spat-upon veteran is, of course, only the grounding image for a larger narrative of betrayal. The story that the spat-upon veteran is supposed to call to mind is how the unwillingness of the country and its leaders to make the ultimate sacrifices for the war effort robbed our young warriors of their victory and the nation of its honor. It is the story of how those who were disloyal to the nation's interest 'sold out' or 'stabbed in the back' our military. Acceptance of the image of spat-upon veterans entails an acceptance of that larger story of betrayal.

The "spat upon veteran" figures prominently in Nazi propaganda about why Germany lost the first World War.

Fast forward to the present. From Lembcke:

analysis of news stories gleaned from the press accounts of fall 1990 reveals that the administration had put forth one reason after another for U.S. involvement, to the point that nobody could reason about the rightness or wrongness of the war. [...] In all, the administration put forth six reasons for U.S. involvement in the war: the defense of Saudi Arabia; putting military teeth in the economic blockade of Iraq; freeing the hostages; the liberation of Kuwait; the removal of Saddam Hussein; and jobs. [...] With the ends always changing, reasoning within a means-ends framework became paralyzed. At that point, public decision-making defaulted to levels of emotion, symbolism, and myth. [...] It was the myth of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran that galvanized the sentiments of the American people sufficiently to discredit peace activists and give George Bush his war

So, in the final analysis, it is creeps like Michael A. Smith who are doing their best to continue the betrayal of the 'Nam vet, pervert the American spirit, and rewrite history, and provide false justification for the continuation of warmaking, and of war veterans. Will his false story go unchallenged (except in a whiny blog which nobody reads)?