[Peace-discuss] 'Spat-upon' vets

[David Green]

Joel Kovel talks about the theme of captivity in
relation to the POW/MIA in Red Hunting in the Promised
Land, which I read to the group. He relates the theme
all the way back to European-Native conflict,
genocide, projection, etc. The theme of betrayal in
"spitting" legends is of course related, and most
obvious in the McCarthyite era regarding "losing"
China. The specter of Vietnam betrayal is implicit in
a horrible revisionist piece in today's NYT by Stephen
Morris, which has to be read to be believed. Following
the current Iraqi debacle, there probably won't be a
captivity issue, so we'll be left with betrayal. Who
will be blamed? Us, of course, and we won't have Jane
Fonda as a lightning rod. Get ready.




--- "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu>
wrote:

> [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."
>  
> © Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
> 
> 
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