[Marxism] "Urban legend" with government backing: Viet vets were spat on in the airports

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Boston Globe     April 30, 2005

Debunking a spitting image

By Jerry Lembcke

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."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/04
/30/


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