[Peace-discuss] FW: Nobody Spat on American GIs!

[David Johnson]

Nobody Spat on American GIs!
<http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/03/nobody-spat-on-american-gis/> 


by Jerry Lembcke <http://www.counterpunch.org/author/jerry-lembcke/>  

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*	http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/03/nobody-spat-on-american-gis/
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Stories of spat-on veterans began proliferating in the U.S. media in 1990 as
the country ramped up for the first Persian Gulf War. Anti-war activists had
spat on troops returning from Vietnam, or so the stories went, and to make
sure that did not happen again, Americans were urged to rally around the men
and women dispatched to the Gulf. Within weeks, the nation was awash with
yellow ribbons, symbols of support for troops, and by inference, the mission
on which they had been sent.
Rather than being spit on, returning GIs and veterans led anti-war
demonstrations, as in this photo from 1970.
The classic spitting story is told by a Vietnam veteran who deplaned at San
Francisco's airport and was met by spitting women and hippies or "male
longhairs," some carrying placards reading, "Baby Killer."
Several of the story tellers say they were warned by military authorities on
the plane to go immediately to the airport restroom and change into civilian
clothes lest they be attacked by protesters. One caller to a radio show
interview with me said that he observed the trash can in the restroom piled
high with uniforms. When he was asked if there were any photographs of the
piled uniforms, he was gone.
The Gulf War context may have catalyzed, "I was spat on, too," stories that
had never been told before - a kind of copycat phenomenon. But the accounts
only proliferated after that.
With research help from Holy Cross College student Lynn Barowsky in 2008, I
began collecting the first-person spitting stories and entering their
details into a spreadsheet. To my surprise, the frequency of stories-told
had not diminished since they first trended in the early 1990s. I have now
recorded over 200 stories from returning vets, all of whom relate some
variant of the spitting image.
My 1998 book, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0814751474/counterpunchmaga> ,
delved into the origins of the stories and inquired into their persistence.
I was careful not to call the stories lies, and even allowed that some
version of their classic form may have actually occurred - after all, you
cannot prove a negative. However, there is no evidence that such incidences
actually happened, and a scant record of claims in the media or anywhere
else made during the late 1960s and early 1970s when the corporate media
would have made every effort to cast aspersions on anti-war activists.
Some particulars in the stories could not be true, such as returnees from
Vietnam landing at civilian airports like
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0814751474/counterpunchmaga>
Description: Image removed by sender. spittingimageSan Francisco. Rather,
those planes arrived at military facilities such as Travis Air Force Base,
50 miles north of the city where protesters could not have gotten near
deplaning troops.
Also, it was very unlikely that returning soldiers would have been told to
take off their uniforms. Discarding their uniforms would have meant
abandoning military property, a serious offense that returning soldiers
looking forward to getting home and out of the service would have been
hesitant to commit. Plus, it is implausible that young women would spit on
anyone as a form of political expression, let alone a battle-hardened male
soldier.
Stories of protester hostility toward veterans were incongruent with the
historical record that activists had reached out and recruited veterans to
the cause of ending the war, and that thousands of service personnel
returning from Southeast Asia joined the anti-war movement.
The image of spat-on veterans was displacing memory of veterans politicized
and empowered by their wartime experience. The consequence of that
displacement would be evinced years later when a new generation, oblivious
to the political narrative of antiwar veterans, sought identity within
victim-veteran imagery provided by the mental health discourse of Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
I was most fascinated by the fact that similar stories were told in other
nations after other lost wars including Germany following World War I and
France after its loss of Indochina in 1954. In both cases, it was women who
were alleged to have greeted returned veterans hostilely. The German women,
some with pistols tucked in their skirts, were said to have spat on the
soldiers.
The German scholar Klaus Theveleit, in his two-volume
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0816614490/counterpunchmagaw> Male
Fantasies, examined the stories and judged them to be what his title
exclaimed - male fantasies. Theveleit used a Freudian analysis to explain
that the stories were expressions of male fears of women with male powers -
even the power to project body fluids.
In turn, the scapegoating of women masked veterans' fears of their own
female Inner-Other laying hidden in the subconscious until brought to the
surface by battlefront defeat casting doubt on their masculinity.
Theveleit's psychoanalytic study centered on veterans who were key members
of the Freikorp, formed to suppress the revolutionary upsurge in Germany
following World War I. Many of his subjects became prominent Nazis a decade
later.
One might think that with the passage of time and the efforts like my own to
debunk the spitting stories as myth, their telling would be a past-tense
phenomenon - the kind of stories "once told" that are now known to be
folklore. But one would be wrong.
The October/November 2014 issue of AARP Magazine ran a story written by Gary
Sinise, the actor who played Lieutenant Dan in the movie, "Forrest Gump,"
who related a story his brother-in-law, Jack, told upon returning from
Vietnam. Jack ducked into the airport's men's room to shed his uniform
because, "he'd heard the stories about returning soldiers being spit on." It
was what happened "at home" during the war, wrote Sinise, that inspired his
commitment to see that it didn't happen again and that the troops sent to
"protect our liberties" will be appreciated and cared for.
I continue to receive stories sent to me as evidence that Vietnam veterans
had been spat on. The most recent was received on January 22, 2015 from a
veteran who returned through San Francisco in 1970:

"I was followed by five or six hippies who immediately started cussing at
me, calling me all kinds of names and spit at me. They didn't hit me since
they were bad shots. I realized that to hit them would create a disturbance,
involve the police, and the odds were against me. So, I continued on and got
onto my plane. To this day, I don't even like to go back to that area of the
country."

This fellow was quite angry with me for describing stories like his as
myths. In a set of email exchanges between us, he said I was calling men
like him "liars" and expressed doubt that I "had ever served my country" and
speculated that I had an "anti-military agenda."
Stories of spat-on Vietnam veterans have become so ingrained in the American
discourse about war and veterans that they can now be referenced
matter-of-factly with no acknowledgment of their mythical properties. Their
migration from bar-stools to the higher cultural ground of literary trope
has been assisted by mainstream news organizations, which, with few
exceptions, repeat the spit-on stories uncritically.
As recently as February 22 of this year, The New York Times Sunday Review
repeated the canard - ".with Vietnam, people spit on you." - as if it's just
something that everyone knows to be true.
As one of the Vietnam War's more enduring legacies, the stories of
denigrated veterans are now salted into the biographies of the latest
generation. The late Navy SEAL Chris Kyle wrote in his book American Sniper
of being disparaged in San Diego upon his deployment to Iraq. He recalled
passing "a small group of protesters demonstrating against the war. They had
signs about baby killers and whatever, protesting the troops going over to
fight."
The new stories also continue a pattern in which claims of mistreatment by
anti-war activists are often bundled in resumes displaying remarkable
martial accomplishment. In his blog, culture critic Michael McCaffrey
challenged the veracity of several boasts made by Kyle and gave particular
attention to the "baby killer" incident. It was, said McCaffrey, "at worst,
pure fantasy; at best, a great embellishment."
The American betrayal narrative was provided Presidential imprimatur when
Barak Obama used his 2012 Memorial Day speech to announce a $65 million
Pentagon plan to commemorate the war in Vietnam with a 12-year series of
events running across the 50th anniversary dates of the war. Speaking to
cameras with the Veterans Memorial Wall as the backdrop, the President
called the Vietnam War, "one of the nation's most painful chapters."
Treatment of Vietnam veterans he said, ".was a national shame, a disgrace
that should have never happened..We're here today to see that it doesn't
happen again."
News pundits were quick to associate the President's remarks with the
enduring images of the Vietnam era spat-upon veteran. The Los Angeles Times
editorialized in 2012 that "it was a mythical image - an edifying myth," the
writer said, but still a myth. An edifying myth - and a dangerous myth. The
disparaged Vietnam veterans invoked by President Obama are mythical, and it
is dangerous imagery. Myths are group stories, stories as real as the people
who tell them - as real as the group, the nation, that the stories create.
Nations bonded by commitments to avenge their hurts are dangers to all.
Germany's dolchstosslegende led it into a terrifying campaign for
retribution that, in the end, destroyed Germany itself. France's generals in
the 1950s, feeling abandoned in Indochina by civilian leaders, sought
reaffirmation in Algeria and inflamed the conflicts there with consequences
that Paris has still not outlived.
The United States, having gone to the Persian Gulf in 1990 to "kick" its
Vietnam Syndrome, as President George H. W. Bush said at the time, instead
supercharged the jihadi movement into the World Trade Center and found
itself, years later, bogged down in a multi-front war with no end, much less
victory, in sight.
Remembered by many as a war lost because of betrayal at home, Vietnam has
become a modern-day Alamo that must be avenged, a pretext for more war and
generations of more veterans.
However, it more correctly should be remembered as a war in which soldiers,
veterans and citizens joined hands to fight for peace demonstrating the
effectiveness of popular resistance to political authority.
Obama's endorsement of the Pentagon's plan to remember Vietnam during the
next 12 years as a war lost to betrayal on the home front only beclouds what
needs to be remembered lest we are taken down the path to more wars like it.
We need to reject the political, economic, and militarist logic that leads
to endless wars, and to remember the inspiring history of returning veterans
who, along with the anti-war movement and GI resistance, brought the troops
home from Vietnam.
Jerry Lembcke is Associate Professor Emeritus of Sociology at College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. He is the author of The Spitting Image: Myth,
Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0814751474/counterpunchmaga>  and
Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/155849815X/counterpunchmaga> . His
newest book is PTSD: Diagnosis or Identity in Post-empire America?
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00HBQSZU8/counterpunchmaga>  He can
be reached at  jlembcke at holycross.edu.
This article originally appeared on Fifth Estate
<http://www.fifthestate.org/> .

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