[Peace-discuss] 'Spat-upon' vets

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The politics and psychology of this matter are related to those of the
POW-MIA flag issue that D. Green mentioned. Appropriate to think about on
Vietnam Reunification Day.  --CGE]

	Boston Globe
	Debunking a spitting image
	By Jerry Lembcke  |  April 30, 2005

STORIES ABOUT spat-upon Vietnam veterans are like mercury: Smash one and
six more appear. It's hard to say where they come from. For a book I wrote
in 1998 I looked back to the time when the spit was supposedly flying, the
late 1960s and early 1970s. I found nothing. No news reports or even
claims that someone was being spat on.

What I did find is that around 1980, scores of Vietnam-generation men were
saying they were greeted by spitters when they came home from Vietnam.
There is an element of urban legend in the stories in that their point of
origin in time and place is obscure, and, yet, they have very similar
details. The story told by the man who spat on Jane Fonda at a book
signing in Kansas City recently is typical. Michael Smith said he came
back through Los Angeles airport where ''people were lined up to spit on
us."

Like many stories of the spat-upon veteran genre, Smith's lacks credulity.
GIs landed at military airbases, not civilian airports, and protesters
could not have gotten onto the bases and anywhere near deplaning troops.
There may have been exceptions, of course, but in those cases how would
protesters have known in advance that a plane was being diverted to a
civilian site? And even then, returnees would have been immediately bused
to nearby military installations and processed for reassignment or
discharge.

The exaggerations in Smith's story are characteristic of those told by
others. ''Most Vietnam veterans were spat on when we came back," he said.
That's not true. A 1971 Harris poll conducted for the Veterans
Administration found over 90 percent of Vietnam veterans reporting a
friendly homecoming. Far from spitting on veterans, the antiwar movement
welcomed them into its ranks and thousands of veterans joined the
opposition to the war.

The persistence of spat-upon Vietnam veteran stories suggests that they
continue to fill a need in American culture. The image of spat-upon
veterans is the icon through which many people remember the loss of the
war, the centerpiece of a betrayal narrative that understands the war to
have been lost because of treason on the home front. Jane Fonda's noisiest
detractors insist she should have been prosecuted for giving aid and
comfort to the enemy, in conformity with the law of the land.

But the psychological dimensions of the betrayal mentality are far more
interesting than the legal. Betrayal is about fear, and the specter of
self-betrayal is the hardest to dispel. The likelihood that the real
danger to America lurks not outside but inside the gates is unsettling.
The possibility that it was failure of masculinity itself, the meltdown of
the core component of warrior culture, that cost the nation its victory in
Vietnam has haunted us ever since.

Many tellers of the spitting tales identify the culprits as girls, a
curious quality to the stories that gives away their gendered subtext.
Moreover, the spitting images that emerged a decade after the troops had
come home from Vietnam are similar enough to the legends of defeated
German soldiers defiled by women upon their return from World War I, and
the rejection from women felt by French soldiers when they returned from
their lost war in Indochina, to suggest something universal and troubling
at work in their making. One can reject the presence of a collective
subconscious in the projection of those anxieties, as many scholars would,
but there is little comfort in the prospect that memories of group
spit-ins, like Smith has, are just fantasies conjured in the imaginations
of aging veterans.

Remembering the war in Vietnam through the images of betrayal is dangerous
because it rekindles the hope that wars like it, in countries where we are
not welcomed, can be won. It disparages the reputation of those who
opposed that war and intimidates a new generation of activists now finding
the courage to resist Vietnam-type ventures in the 21st century.

Today, on the 30th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam, new
stories of spat-upon veterans appear faster than they can be challenged.
Debunking them one by one is unlikely to slow their proliferation but, by
contesting them where and when we can, we engage the historical record in
a way that helps all of us remember that, in the end, soldiers and
veterans joined with civilians to stop a war that should have never been
fought.

Jerry Lembcke, associate professor of sociology at Holy Cross College, is
the author of ''The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of
Vietnam."
 
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