Who Spat On Whom?

Is it really an "urban myth" that Vietnam-era soldiers and veterans were spat upon by protesters?  This topic is being recycled with the recent news coverage of Jane Fonda being spat upon at a book signing.

The author of the "urban myth" view is Holy Cross professor and Vietnam Veteran Against The War alumni Jerry Lembcke, whose book, "Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam", was published in 1998.  He reprised his effort in a recent guest piece in the Boston Globe:

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."

The "urban myth" notion has been kicked around for years.  Jack Shafer (who has been a towering genius on the Valerie Plame case) wrote in support of Lembcke in 2000 and again in 2004.  Ahh, but did he apprise himself of Lembke's political views, and, if he knew then what we know now about the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, would he be so supportive?

You guessed it - Lembcke's thesis is a rehabilitation effort of the Vietnam anti-war movement, of which VVAW were a significant part.  And his political motivation?  Back in 1991, he thought that the rallying cry of "support the troops" was being used to stifle dissent prior to Gulf War I, and a research project was born.  Fortunately, he had determined the conclusion at the outset, as he describes in the linked article excerpted after the break.  One can only imagine what he thinks today.

The pithiest rebuttal is available in the comments at Hit and Run:

Jerry Lembcke, a Marxist historian, was unable to find any story that convinced him veterans had ever been spit on. Lembcke has also been unable to find convincing evidence that Marxism isn't a workable economic theory; I am not surprised at his inability to find proof of something less well-documented.:)

We aren't pithy.  But as an opportunity to check the author's credibility, our eye is drawn to this in the book review:

Lembcke's most controversial conclusion is that posttraumatic stress disorder was as much a political creation -- a means of discrediting returning vets who protested the war as unhinged -- as it was a medical condition. The image of the psycho-vet was furthered through such Hollywood productions as 'The Deer Hunter' and 'Coming Home.'

Or, let's rely on Jerry Lembcke himself to characterize his work (if we can trust these message boards):

Derek Summerfield is correct that PTSD is a social construction but there is more to say about who constructed it, how, and how the concept functioned in post-Vietnam America.

  In my book THE SPITTING IMAGE: MYTH, MEMORY, AND THE LEGACY OF VIETNAM (NYU Press, 1998) and the article "The `Right Stuff' Gone Wrong" in CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY (24/1-2, pp. 37-64) I argue that PTSD was as much a mode of political and cultural discourse constructed by the media as anything "found" by mental health professionals.  Furthermore, Psychiatrists imported almost all its key elements (e.g. alienation, survivor guilt, and flashbacks) from other contexts.

  PTSD functioned to help erase the memory of the war as an act of U.S. agression that we lost because the Vietnamese beat us by rewriting it as a war we lost because we defeated ourseselves, i.e. our military was stabbed in the back, our soldiers spat on, etc.  The image of the dysfunctional PTSD-stricken victim-veterans displaced the historical reality that the war politicized and empowered a generation of GIs who revolted against the war and joined the movement to stop it.

Until I can track down a copy of the book, that will have to do. 

Left unmentioned in these summaries of the media conspiracy is John Kerry, onetime spokesperson for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, who gave some well-publicized testimony to the US Senate in 1971.  On the subject of veterans, Mr. Kerry offered this:

But the problem of veterans goes beyond this personal problem, because you think about a poster in this country with a picture of Uncle Sam and the picture says "I want you." And a young man comes out of high school and says, "That is fine. I am going to serve my country." And he goes to Vietnam and he shoots and he kills and he does his job or maybe he doesn't kill, maybe he just goes and he comes back, and when he gets back to this country he finds that he isn't really wanted, because the largest unemployment figure in the country- it varies depending on who you get it from, the VA Administration 15 percent, various other sources 22 percent. But the largest corps of unemployed in this country are veterans of this war, and of those veterans 33 percent of the unemployed are black. That means 1 out of every 10 of the Nation's unemployed is a veteran of Vietnam.

...I understand 57 percent of all those entering the VA hospitals talk about suicide. Some 27 percent have tried, and they try because they come back to this country and they have to face what they did in Vietnam, and then they come back and find the indifference of a country that doesn't really care, that doesn't really care.

Evidently, Mr. Kerry had embraced the myth of the suicidal, unemployed vet.  Later, Mr. Kerry was asked about drug use by soldiers, and said this:

The problem is extremely serious. It is serious in very many different ways. I believe two Congressmen today broke a story. I can't remember their names. There were 35,000 or some men, heroin addicts that were back.

The problem exists for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the emptiness. It is the only way to get through it. A lot of guys, 60, 80 percent stay stoned 24 hours a day just to get through the Vietnam-

Senator Symington: You say 60 to 80 percent.

Mr. Kerry: Sixty to 80 percent is the figure used that try something, let's say, at one point. Of that, I couldn't give you a figure of habitual smokers, let's say, of pot, and I certainly couldn't begin to say how many are hard drug addicts, but I do know that the problem for the returning veteran is acute...

So, in his Senate testimony the spokesman for the VVAW is describing vets as suicidal, unemployed drug addicts.  Perhaps in a moment of eerie prescience John Kerry had already embraced the troubling message of such films as "Deerhunter" and "Coming Home". 

In any case, a former member of the VVAW manages to conclude, after careful research, that the notion of the psycho-vet was a media creation (abetted by the right) intended to discredit protesting veterans.  Hmm - from Kerry's testimony, one might have guessed it to be a creation of the anti-war left, intended to discredit the Administration's pursuit of the war.

My confidence is his objectivity is not high.

As noted, this theme has been aired before.  Here is a Free Republic chat from Nov 2004; another chat; and a laudatory book review by an activist.

And the other end of the spectrum would seem to be "Homecoming - When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam", as described here.

OK, that is a start.  Bob Greene collected testimonials from folks claiming to remember abusive treatment.  Another possible source of contemporaneous evidence would be travel orders or travel advisories from the early 1970's - did the military have any written advice about soldiers traveling in civilian clothes to avoid trouble?

Other suggestions as to contemporaneous evidence would be welcome - letters to the editor of a small-town paper describing/deploring/(applauding?) abusive treatment, or letters home from a soldier might also be convincing.

Otherwise, reasonable folks like Jack Shafer will be unconvinced.

UPDATE:  Let's present an excerpt from p. 232 of Bob Kerrey's new book, "When I Was A Young Man".  The future Senator is describing an incident in 1969; he is in Philadelphia undergoing rehab with his prosthetic leg and the incident occurs at the Martin Luther King track meet at Villanova:

After the race I was taunted by a group of long-haired men who blocked the exit and knocked me to the ground as I pushed past them to leave.

Now, Kerrey does not say he was spat upon.  However, this does not sound precisely like the Veterans outreach described by Lembcke.  Of course, lacking a police report or a contemporaneous news account, Lembcke might just reassure us that this is just an invented memory.  (And doesn't he get knocked down in New Hampshire in 1992, or some other Presidential run, by unsympathetic protestors?  Hmm...)

Excerpt from:

We Are What We Remember

By Jerry Lembcke,  Associate Professor of Sociology

In February 1991, I was asked to speak at a teach-in on the Persian Gulf War in the Hogan Campus Center Ballroom.  My presentation focused on the image then being popularized in the press of Vietnam-era anti-war activists treating Vietnam veterans abusively.  After sending troops to the Gulf         region in August, the Bush administration argued that opposition to the war was tantamount to disregard for the well-being of the troops and that such disregard was reminiscent of the treatment given to Vietnam veterans upon their return home.  By invoking the image of anti-war activists spitting on veterans, the administration was able to discredit such activism and galvanize support for the war.  Drawing on my own experience as a Vietnam veteran who came home from the war and joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), I called the image of spat-upon Vietnam veterans a myth.

After seven years of research and writing, my book, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam was published in August 1998, by New York University Press.

Comments

[Harry Arthur]

Having made several comments on this subject on an earlier thread, I've got to say that though I disagree with Jane Fonda on many things, no one has a right to spit on her or anyone else just because we aren't in agreement with their viewpoint. This is one of those doors that swings both ways.

Michael (self-proclaimed Viet Nam veteran) Smith's behavior was deplorable, uncivilized and just plain wrong.

If Michael Smith had been listening during his military training (if he in fact was ever actually in the military) he would have picked up the concept that the military's job includes protecting Jane Fonda's right to have and exercise her opinion whether we agree with it or not. Shameful!

[Crank]

Between Lembcke and John Esposito, the ex-HC prof who spent the Nineties arguing that the threat of Islamist terrorism was an illusion and a myth, the faculty at my alma mater haven't covered themselves in glory.

[gt]

Well, the Right is now telling us we actually won in Vietnam so who's going to spit on a winner?

[Patrick R. Sullivan]

"Well, the Right is now telling us we actually won in Vietnam so who's going to spit on a winner?"

That's why they were spitting, throwing bags of excrement, bombing post offices, visiting North Vietnam and making Tokyo Rose style radio broadcasts. They hated the U.S. because of its successes. Just as they do Bush today.

[Forbes]

Is actual evidence of wet spit required, or can we just stipulate that the idiom "spat upon" incorporates the concept that Vietnam vets were poorly welcomed home and disrespected, and worse? And to make the opposite case regarding how they were treated is not possible?

And no disrespect to HA and CT, and other vets, but isn't it amazing how so many, generally on the political left, cannot stop talking about Vietnam and all sorts of myths associated therewith?

And while I recognize that TM likes to tweak Kerry on this stuff--but look at this testimony--can he perhaps be called a fabulist? A Lt. j.g. serving on a patrol boat in the deep south for four months, and he's an expert on drug usage--except he can't say how many smoke pot or use hard drugs--but he can say the problem is acute. The fact that he refers to "habitual" pot smoking, i.e. addiction, suggests how little he knew about marijuana, but then Kerry's testimony wasn't really factually supported--so this part is par for the course, as well.

And yeah, TM, when is Kerry going to sign that Form 180?

[Harry Arthur]

No offense taken whatsoever, Forbes. I hold your commentary in very high regard - you "get it". I generally choose not to talk about Viet Nam (though my memories are all good ones) except when I read opinions from people who saw movies or read books and then express their "informed" opinions that are not in concert with reality as I knew it. Personally, I'd rather talk about the future than the past - Social Security, Medicare, taxes, etc.

You are correct, however, that the left very much likes to talk about Viet Nam, quagmires and the like. That was the first theme we heard in Afghanistan and then again in Iraq the first time a little dust storm slowed our advance the slightest bit. I won't go so far as to question their patriotism but I have to wonder when I discern the disappointment accompanying each military success and the smugness accompanying our occasional military failure.

Many of them are still living in the '60s and '70s and haven't come to the realization that we completely reformed and restructured the military from the ground up after Viet Nam in our transition to an all volunteer force. I do talk about today's military because I'm very proud of the dedication and professionalism that I know first hand and that I see every day in the lives and performance of these fine young men and women. We are truly blessed as a nation that they are standing on the wall protecting us.

"And yeah, TM, when is Kerry going to sign that Form 180?" Ditto. He won't because his original discharge was less than honorable.

[Peter Jessen]

I am a Vietnam era vet, honorably discharged in 1969 after approximately 2 years, 10 months and 22 days of service. I was spit on, although the real deal was the name calling, especially "baby killer," and the silence. A pilot friend, on getting out, was told, not asked, when the interviewer (young) said to him, "Oh, you're a baby killer." He broke his nose and went to Paris to cool off for a year. I wound up state side. Could fly half fare in uniform. I stopped traveling in uniform because of the name calling (some spitting). Without the uniform they would just looked at the closed cropped hair and scowl. When I applied for graduate school the grad students tried to keep me out on the "fact" that I was a baby killer. If a prof hadn't gone to bat for me I would not have gotten in. And although no one dared confrom me face to face, I was told that come the revolution (and they seriously believed a socialist revolution would "soon" take place), that I would be one of the first ones they would have shot. This was not personal, just intellectual business, something that had to be done across the board.

Many of the anti-war vets in DC in the 70s were guys who did not serve in Vietnam but did want extra compensation for having served. My view was that only combat vets deserved extra. In spring 2002, while in a HS class of my last son, Vietnam came up. I corrected a fact. I was asked by students if I was in the service during Vietnam. I nodded yes. They came up and shook my hand and thanked me for my service. First time in the 32.5 years since my service ended. That summer I ran into three guys from California in town for a training camp. We got to talking and each had the same exerience: Spring of post 9/11 we were each finally thanked by people for our service.

Now, why don't you hear about the spitting, etc? Because few vets whine. And who would brag about that? That's not our deal. We mostly grinned and bore it. I am in the VA system for health care. Go to any VA hospital, and check out the medical condition of many of the Vietnam combat veterans. Dispite the amputees and other problems, I have yet to hear someone complain except or the fact that too many are not supporting the guys on the line now in Iraq and Afghanistan. Don't make the mistake of thinking that because you don't hear complaints things didn't happen. Most that I know are proud of their service even when it isn't clear to them why they were at war. And most of us who were drafted (if we survived) were of the mind that we would never want to do it again but were glad to have done it.

Note the big difference between soldiers in Vietnam wanting to go home and many soldiers today wanting to go back, including amputees. It is a different military with a different sense of purpose. The country, in my view, will be the better for it as they rotate back to the states. We still need to do better making sure their families are taken care of while they are in combat rotation. Two good places to start would be a GI Bill and GI housing at reduced interest rates for combat veterans.

[Harry Arthur]

Been spending time in the ol' parallel universe again gt?

[Harry Arthur]

Sorrowfully, Col David Hackworth has succumbed to cancer at the age of 74, very likely caused by his exposure in Viet Nam to Agent Blue, a less well known cousin to Agent Orange that is thought by some to cause bladder cancer. Hack was a true soldier's soldier who always lead fearlessly from the front. His story is here. May he rest in peace.

[Iron Teakettle]

First, if Mr. Maguire will accept it, I offer my apology for a witless comment I made last week.

On the subject, maybe I grew up in the wrong neighborhood, but none of us spat on soldiers. We looked up to them and we registered with Selective Service, perhaps with trepidation, but not with thought that we would become war criminals. We looked up to the Marines who came to our (public) high school to administer physical fitness tests.

As for the veterans, the ones I knew were go-getter over-achievers. They were reluctant to indulge a teen-ager's blood-thirsty imagination with war stories, but they were looking to succeed in their jobs and create a family life.

[spencer]

Why worry about Viet Nam when your great President Bush is in Moscow this weekend to honor the triumphs of Stalinist Communism.

[Patrick R. Sullivan]

"Why worry about Viet Nam when your great President Bush is in Moscow this weekend to honor the triumphs of Stalinist Communism."

Made possible by FDR's communists, such as Harry Dexter White.

[Knemon]

"The fact that he refers to "habitual" pot smoking, i.e. addiction, suggests how little he knew about marijuana"

I know plenty of "habitual" pot smokers, i.e. addicts. But yes, I imagine JFKII was always the squarest man in the room.

[nikita demosthenes]

Remarkable comment, Peter Jessen.

Thank you for your service to your country. Welcome home. We're all free to write good, bad, or silly things on blogs because of the sacrifice of real people like you. This, unfortunately, is a point that the Left never truly internalizes.

-nikita demosthenes

[PersonFromPorlock]

I always suspected that Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome was a 'political' disorder, but one concocted to explain away the toll postwar neglect took of Vietnam vets. Vets were disproportionatly unemployed or underemployed, for instance; the GI Bill was a joke that would barely (or not even) pay for a State College education; and society in general and employers in particular regarded vets as having 'wasted' their service years.

Not that there weren't veterans who were traumatized by their Vietnam experience. But the idea that all the psychological problems that appeared after the war stemmed from experiences during the war was a convenient cover for not dealing with the then-current mistreatment of veterans.

[Ernst Blofeld]

The symptoms of what we call PTSD have been observed in just about every large scale modern war. In WWI it was called shell shock; in WWII combat fatigue. Humans don't deal well with the prospect of being violently killed and some percentage will eventually break down. It's frequency is affected by a lot of factors, including primary unit bonding and morale and civilian world support for the ends of the war.

[Nichevo]

Spencer, have you been getting into Kerry's stash? President Bush STARTED his trip in Latvia, where he spoke forthrightly of the bad bargain of Yalts and how the Baltics did not necessarily see the Soviet reconquest as a jubilee. But don't let facts get in your way. Or do you think V-E Day is no cause for celebration at all?

[will]

I did AIT at Ft. Ord in spring of '67 and 1969 to my ets in 1971 at Ft. Ord as well. During those 2 periods I never experienced any treatment that was less than freidnly simply becasue I was in uniform or had close cropped hair. I hitchhiked around CA extensively. I never experienced any recriminations when I said I was in the army. I won't deny anyone's experience but can only say that I never experienced being spit on in uniform or had to endure any hostility.

[Geo]

Well, kiddies, I was sent to Vietnam for my midshipman training cruise and took part in an opposed landing. When I got back to the U.S and got off the plane in San Francisco, I was wearing my uniform. One concerned citizen took it upon himself to spit on me.

The incident did not make the papers.

[syn]

Well, what else do we expect from anti-American Marxist professors such as Lembcke to declare such things as myth since the only thing Marxists can do effectively and efficently is lie.

Marxists have been using the masses to march in protest against war as a guise to attack capitalism by using politically manufactured lies as their weapon of choice.

The truth is that Marxists are politically manipulating liars, it is in their blood.

[cris]

I saw it happen. GI in unform, getting spit on his back. At least Jane got it in the face. What goes around comes all the way around.

[Anarchus]

I did a couple of years post-Vietnam at the Air Force Academy 1976-1978, including a stateside summer assignment at the old George AFB in California. No spitting back then, but we were often encouraged not to wear our uniforms some locations, and I was at the bus station in Amarillo TX traveling in uniform coming back from CA when a Greyhound agent warned me not to go outside because a couple of local youths were stalking me and would probably try to beat me up.

Too much emphasis on spitting stories he said-she said from my perspective - Jane Fonda is a pathetic excuse for a human, but she's not worth thinking about or spitting on, and the idea that spitting on soldiers was a Vietnam era urban myth is a lame metaphorical attempt to deny that Vietnam era soldiers were treated very, very badly by American society.

[Lurking Observer]

It is inconceivable to me that veterans would be spat upon by the anti-war Left, since they were natural allies.

Similarly, it is utterly inconceivable to me that famine would be deliberately induced, since the ones who would suffer would be the workers and the peasants, the very people who were natural allies of Communists and the agrarian and industrial reformers.

And the idea that this might occur not only in the cradle of Communism (i.e., Soviet Russia, itself inconceivable) is trumped only by the laughable idea that it might then be replicated in other nations, which would surely have learned from their predecessors' mistakes (thus, it could not possibly have occurred in Mao's China or Mengistu's Ethiopia, and certainly not in North Korea).

It is just as inconceivable to me as the idea that ideological opponents who loathed each other would work together. I mean, can you imagine Communists and Nazis being in cahoots? Why, the very idea that, for example, there would be trade in strategic materials or strategic joint planning in dismembering a country is simply laughable, when the two sides could barely stand each other.

In. Con. Ceivable.

[Andy Freeman]

> I hitchhiked around CA extensively. I never experienced any recriminations when I said I was in the army.

Outside of urban CA, that's to be expected.

CA has been (at least) two states for decades. And, when someone talks about CA and doesn't mention that, I'm always somewhat surprised.

[R J Del Vecchio]

"Fonda's right to have and exercise her opinion whether we agree with it or not" Sure, no problem with opinions, but some actually consider going to NVN and giving direct support to enemies and contributing thereby to the suffering of American POWs to be quite a bit past offering an opinion. It was reprehensible behavior, and her continued defense of everything she did except getting her picture taken entitle her to the scorn of Vietnam vets and plenty of others besides. Dr. Lembke is a nice guy personally (we've met, I give guest lectures on the war at Holy Cross), but has an agenda. Not many vets were actually spit on or at, but some were, and that was just the most dramatic element of a very poor reception many experienced. I know from my own experience and that of many vets I know well.

[Insufficiently Sensitive]

"It is inconceivable to me that veterans would be spat upon by the anti-war Left, since they were natural allies."

That's what one would expect to hear from some Inexperienced Leftie Theorist looking to organize the next revolution. Remember that those ILTs in the 60s decided without consultation that members of labor unions would be their natural allies, too. How shocked they were when they went to construction projects to round up some hardhats for the next riot, and got beaten up for their pains.

But my problem is that I took the Lurking Observer as a straight man would, and failed to see his superb irony at first. What he's done in three paragraphs is the finest indictment ever of those ILTs, by exposing what lefties do to the world when they acquired power over others.

A long and happy career of lurking and observing to you, and happy Mother's Day while we're at it.

[Billy Hank]

USAF sent me thru a special two month graduate course in public communications at Boston University prior to my assignment to SEA. We were required to wear our uniforms every Thursday. One Thursday in November 1967, I was walking to class when a coed walked towards me on a collision course. I moved to step aside and she hacked up a glob of spit. Being shorter, she got only the tip of my chin, throat, and shirt collar. She spun around and ran about 15 yards to a waiting boy and, giggling together, the pair ran away. There had been policy statements through various AF channels that advised us not to respond to taunts, etc. I wiped the stuff off with my blouse sleeve and went on to class.

After 22 months in SEA, I stepped off the airplane at Travis and three days later started graduate classes at USC in Cinema. I had no overt reaction from any of my fellow students, most of whom were virulently anti-war. A couple of the professors were snippy. The real problem was finding any job. "Vietnam Vet" does not sell well in Hollywood employment efforts. After a few years of scratching at the underbelly of the beast, I wound up with the FAA.

Those Boston folks always were trend setters. I don't know whether I'd feel better if I'd chased after her and pounded her and her silly boyfriend. But I will now offer to meet any thumb sucker who says that people in uniform were not spat upon. I'll even let you swing first.

[74]

I returned from a tour in Vietnam in 04/69 and got out to attend school. No, I was never spit upon. But I did suffer many other indignities. People at school would think I was a pretty good fellow, until they discovered I wasn't a senior, but a freshman instead. Then you could see the hate rising. Within seconds I would go from being a buddy to being a baby killer. What really got to me was that these were the same people who had been saying how non-judgemental they were. That is when I learned that being a liberal and being well educated does not automatically make one a thoughtful person. I'm thankful I attended an Ag/Engineering school where the vast majority of the student body were pragmatic sorts. If I had gone to UCLA instead of Cal Poly, I would have had to go underground to survive. Thats pretty much what most of us did more or less. We ducked down, kept our mouth shut and made the best of things. I never thought I would ever be thanked for my service. So, after 9/11, it came as a great shock when people started publicly approaching me and thanking me for being a Vietnam Vet. To this day, I am unable to avoid a certain embarrasment when that happens.

[Bruce Hayden]

I think that maybe a better way to read Kerry's comments about drug use in Vietname and by Vietnam vets is that he working off of 2nd, 3rd, etc. hand information fed to him by his VVAW cohorts, just as he did with his testimony on there being routine autrocities there. The problem was that he made it sound like it was 1st hand info.

I think the one poster had it right - that he has been the squarest peg throughout his life. I am reminded of a skit (SNL?) where Kerry, Bush, and Clinton meet in a bar back then (New Haven?). The later two are trying to get laid. Kerry is clueless. An apparent lesbo (i.e. Hillary) needs an escort home. Kerry is talked into it, while the other two have more important things to do.

[dadmanly]

To 74 and all the Vietnam Vets who have responded,

As a soldier serving in Iraq, who serves alongside soldiers who likewise served in Vietnam, allow me to tell you all, thank you for your service to your country.

I receive more support and appreciation and gifts and prayers and goood wishes than any soldier deserves. We are the ones who should feel embarrassed. Most of us have it much much easier than what you had to put up with, and few of us have to really put our butts on the line in combat. You guys were and are heroes, and those of us who have followed you learned a great deal about humility, and what it means to serve when few appreciate the service.

One thing more: I think a BIG reason the American people shower us with good will and support is precisely because many of us are ashamed at the way we as a people treated Vietnam Vets. They want to make sure that no soldier ever has to feel like his country is anything but grateful.

So please, know that your sacrifice has made our jobs so very very much easier. God bless you!

[Bill]

Lembke's history is hogwash. His theory that PTSD was developed as a theory to discredit VVAW is laughable, in the that Robert Lifton, the psychiatrist most responsible for developing the theory of PTSD was also a primary supporter of VVAW. In fact, one of the VVAW's main goals (see Kerry's New Soldier book) was to set forth the theory that Vietnam had turned a generation of young American's into mindless killers who would not be able to adjust normally to life back in the United States.

[TM]

The NY Times ancient archives may be a treasure trove, although budgetary concerns may limit my research.

On the theme that the image of the "psycho-vet" was a creation of the late 70's, how about this story abstract from 1972:

Post-Vietnam Syndrome

Steve stiffened, looked around fearfully, and thought, "These people all look alike. How do I know who's friend and who's enemy?" Then he shook himself, remembering: "They are all your friends. This is Times Square, U.S.A." Eighteen months after a nonpsychiatric discharge following four years Marine combat duty in "the Nam," Steve still suffers unpredictable episodes of terror and disorientation.

[RebeccaH]

My husband was stationed at an army base in the south during the Vietnam War, and we lived in off-base housing, but shopped in the commissary for our food. The main gate was a routine gathering place for college-age protestors dressed in fringed ponchos, sandals, and long hair, and guess what? Being their age, I dressed that way too. But my car had a base sticker in the corner of the windshield identifying its driver as The Enemy, and as I drove through the gate one day, one of the girls yelled something (I couldn't make it out), and spat at the car.

I wasn't a soldier. She didn't spit on me personally. But I certainly recognized the intent.

[Ginny]

Aside: Spence must not have read Bush's speech in Latvia. He's settling old scores verbally from WWII. (And doing so eloquently.) This is being sold as an apology and in some ways it is - but one to the Baltic nations.

[Ofc. Krupke]

I remember reading a book while in college that was a sort of veteran's oral history of the Vietnam War. It had an entire chapter dedicated to dispelling the notion that veterans being literally spit on was some kind of myth.

Can't remember the title, though. I don't think it was Mark Baker's "Nam", which was a similar type book.

Any way you look at it, Lembcke is appalling. "If it didn't make the papers, it didn't happen." Unbelievable.

[Ofc. Krupke]

I remember reading a book while in college that was a sort of veteran's oral history of the Vietnam War. It had an entire chapter dedicated to dispelling the notion that veterans being literally spit on was some kind of myth.

Can't remember the title, though. I don't think it was Mark Baker's "Nam", which was a similar type book.

Any way you look at it, Lembcke is appalling. "If it didn't make the papers, it didn't happen." Unbelievable.

[RLD]

Can Lembke's Vietnam service be authenticated? After all, VVAW had any number of frauds such as Al Hubbard (an Air Force NCO who claimed to be a B-52 pilot, and who was never in Vietnam) and the people who testified at the Winter Soldier investigation, any number of whom turned out never to have served in the military. I was too young to have served in Vietnam. I have, however, been able to talk to any number of people who did. The overwhelming majority regarded their service as nothing more than as a mostly prosaic interruption in their lives. They served well and honorably, are proud of what they did, and got on with their lives.

[Iron Teakettle]

On the subject:

One of the Swift Boat Veterans, I believe the gunner in Senator Kerry's boat, related, on the Rush Limbaugh show, late in the Presidential campaign, that he was flying home, in his uniform, and a lady travelling with her children asked the stewardess to change her seat because she did not want to sit with a "baby-killer". And from somewhere, I have an image of war protesters greeting returning veterans as they debarked from their plane with "Baby-killer please, kill yourself not VietNamese".

[Jerry]

The left appears now to have adopted pies instead of spittle as a means of expressing opinion. Who can blame Jerry Lembcke for wanting to rewrite history? Roundly abusing the vets when they returned is nothing very much to proud of, except perhaps in the academy where I'm sure it gets a lot of sympathy.

[bg Guardino]

I'm 55, was anti-war in the 60's, and went to college in New York. I'm not a scholar, but I lived through many of these protests, these are my impressions.

1. Most people in the anti-war movement marched because they were tired of seeing people they knew coming home from SE Asia in body bags.

2. If you were arrested on Federal drug charges in the 60's, you could plea bargain your sentence by becoming a "radical" and reporting on other radicals. The more outrageous the behavior you would report, the lighter your drug sentence would be. The line between "reporting" and "provoking" behavior becomes blurred when you are facing prison time. The experience of seeing someone act vary radical to establish some credibility, then walk around asking people for their first and last names was very common. I knew people who did this.

I don't know anyone who actually spit on soldiers but it was the kind of thing that such people would do to establish credibility.

3. Vietnam era soldiers were not admired by American women. The importance of this in terms of morale has always been underestimated.

[G. Hamid]

If the comments on this thread show anything it's that the treatment of Vietnam vets upon our return varied from place to place and time to time. I was never directly subjected to disrespect, but I didn't feel my service was particularly appreciated. The important thing was that I knew I did my duty with honor and dignity.

On the other hand, it doesn't seem right to consider the anti-war crowd as monolithic either. It was a strange time. In February '71 I returned from Nam to my parents' home in Princeton, NJ and, a few days later, went to visit a good friend who attended the University. Amazingly, that very night Jane Fonda was scheduled to speak there and somehow my friend talked me into going with him. When we arrived at the event it was standing-room only, several thousand young men (Princeton was still all-male then) were crammed into the hall. After a few minutes someone announced that Fonda would not be there due to illness and would be replaced by another anti-war luminary. Upon hearing this at least two-thirds of the attendees headed for the exits, my friend and I included.

I suppose there's a moral to this story, but I try not to dwell on it. However, to this day, it still makes me chuckle.

George Hamid III 67th Evac Hospital, Vietnam '70-'71

[me]

A Google Search turned up many more stories of spitting at a Sean Hannity discussion site:

http://www.hannity.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4560&goto=nextnewest

[G. Hamid]

dadmanly,

I think I speak for all Nam Vets in accepting your heartwarming thanks. It's been 35 years but whenever someone thanks me (it happens every now and then) I get chills up my spine. Believe me, it's never too late.

As for anything good that comes to you because of your service, you not only deserve it, you've earned it. Thank you. This may say it better.

[Kev]

I was in high school then. I and some friends saw a returning soldier get spit on. He walked away; we got arrested.

I have 2 friends who tell of being spit on when they returned home. One tells of a crowd chanting "baby killer" when he got home to NJ.

You know if you don't look, you can't see it.

[Jerry]

"Vietnam era soldiers were not admired by American women. The importance of this in terms of morale has always been underestimated."

I assume the author of this posting is referring to women attending college, a small fraction of the female component of population. Because they and males of that cohort are disproportionately represented in published accounts of the period -- itself a skewed representation -- it is perhaps possible to actually believe this.

[Brainster]

As I put it in a post on my blog, if you believed what John Kerry and others were saying about our soldiers being monsters who raped, cut of ears, taped wires from portable phones to human genitals, etc., then why in the world would you NOT spit on soldiers? Because you knew it wasn't politically smart? Like those grungy protestors were thinking further ahead than their next joint.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Hell, I was spat upon and called "baby killer" during Viet Nam and I was just in high school Junior ROTC.

[TomC]

During the late 60's - early 70's I was a college student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I spent many weekends with friends up in Berkeley. I opposed the war and participated in some minor protests.

I recall at the time hearing criticism of people spitting on vets returning from Vietnam. Those reports always seemed to be second hand and lacking in details, so I was skeptical that they were true.

I believe that most of my fellow students who opposed the war had sympathy, not contempt, for the men in service. It seemed criminal that so many were being killed and maimed to support a pointless war. Without a student deferment, the basic choices for a draft-age male were simple: go to Vietnam, seek asylum in Canada, hack off a toe or do something else outrageous to earn your 1Y or 4F deferment, or go to jail. Given those options, it was hard to blame someone for choosing to serve. Even the gung-ho vets were still viewed more as misguided than despicable. Our enemy was the government that had forced the war on us, LBJ and his henchmen.

There were some hard-core, probably communist, anti-American types in Berkeley who hated everything American and might indeed have spit on returning soldiers. (Jane Fonda’s husband Tom Hayden might have been one of those, I don't know.) They didn’t represent the mainstream of the Bay Area anti-war movement that I knew.

Near the end of the Vietnam war, I paid a few dollars to see Jane Fonda speak at a private home in San Diego. Donald Sutherland was also supposed to speak, but he didn't show up. Fonda described how the war was being automated, how machines continued the killing as U.S. troops were withdrawn. She didn't rail against the vets as baby killers, none of that. She just wanted the U.S. completely out of Vietnam. At the time I agreed with her, and despite my many years as a conservative, and my current contempt for Fonda’s actions in North Vietnam, even now I would probably agree with most of what she said that day.

[John Boyle]

I posted this comment on the SwiftVets and POWs Bulletin Board before the last election. It says all I want to say about PTSD and the treatment we received after we came home, which was an important part of a carefully crafted psychological warfare operation, make no mistake about it. The revision of that history is another part of the same game. The case histories of abuse, disrespect and marginalization of veterans of Vietnam are legion and irrefutable. Lembke is a Marxist hack propagandist and why any so-called Cathloic college would have him on its faculty is a real question – maybe the Jesuits really have sold out to communism (a/k/a/ "liberation theology"), as has been alleged. And I say that although my late brother was a Jesuit for 50 years!

I commented:

“It was a shock to me how deeply this whole matter (the Kerry candidacy) has provoked me. After seven years of intensive therapy, revisiting all of the horrors of Vietnam and "reprocessing" them (all of them perpetrated by the enemy, by the way, on us and on the Vietnamese civilian population - I was a medic and never fired my weapon) - it was a shock to discover that I had not really "recovered" emotionally as I had thought. Why? Because one of the worst traumas of the entire experience did not happen in Vietnam - and I never knew that until Kerry's candidacy reawakened it all. It happened here, at home - after my war. And it was ongoing. The ringmaster was John Kerry, and now he is back. It is like an Orwellian nightmare - this monstrosity from my worst imaginings is now to sit in the Oval Office?

”A veteran of combat cannot survive intact emotionally unless the larger society validates his sacrifice, the losses he witnesses, and his actions. That is why we have medals and parades and veterans organizations and the VA, etc. This is a very sophisticated idea, and the enemies of this country understand it very well. It is explored at length by psychiatrist Jonathan Shay in numerous books and articles - this necessity for "validation." This was their avenue of attack, and John Kerry was their weapon. In a sense, Vietnam Vets were also used as unwitting weapons against the country they had defended with their lives; by discrediting them, Kerry discredited the foundation of the country. This was the most perverse and demonic twist of all. We who had sacrificed so much for our country were portrayed as examples of the country's alleged evil essence. And there was no other weapon that could discredit us entirely besides another authentic, heroic veteran - because no matter who attacked us, we'd always have each other - unless a Kerry could be found to deprive us of even the harbor of comradeship. And Kerry stepped up: "Reporting for duty!" The crap about protesting the policy but not the soldiers, the crap that ex-Congressman McCloskey repeated on TV last night, is just that. Crap. The warriors are the war. You cannot tell a soldier in Vietnam (or in Iraq) that he's doing good in the eyes of his countrymen, but that his country is evil, his war is evil, his actions are evil. This is what they did to us. Is it any wonder morale in the ranks went to hell late in the war? My God, that was their objective!

”Beware. They will do the same thing to the troops in Iraq. It has already clearly started. And be sure of this. Kerry will not side with the troops or the war. He will lay us open to the same kind of policies that Carter and Clinton used to make us vulnerable, or even helpless, before our enemies. Remember McGovern's admission in the mid-90s about Vietnam: “’We didn't want America to win the war.’”

And I have to add that I am not impressed or interested in anyone's "thanks" now. It is way too late and too many of us have gone to early graves never having been given any break. What I want to know from the American people - not just their pied-pipers in the anti-war mopvement - is where the hell were you when we needed you? Don't come near me now with some limp, shamed hand shake and a self-conscious, fake smile.

Amoral nitwit assholes like Lembke continue on, laying salt into the wounds, now convincing generations who were not there that even about our dishonoring by the ignorant and ungrateful masses we are liars.

Do what you can to make sure it does not happen again to this new generation. Although, in that, you have your work cut out for you.

[twolaneflash]

Having been a soldier from 1969 to 1973, I was particularly gratified to hear my son tell of his experience in 2004 at the Atlanta Midtown Music Festival. Wearing his green t-shirt with "ARMY" stencilled in 18 inch letters, and sporting his Advanced Infantry Training haircut from Fort Benning, this 19 year old (who possesses mad skills with his fists)had his path blocked by an "anti-war protestor", who then spit on my son. Hesitating long enough to say "Aw, hell no!", my son sent the spitter, bleeding from a busted nose, to the concrete with one straight right. A nearby spectator yelled: "Go ARMY!". The policeman who observed it all just smiled as the crowd move on past. I told my son that he had made that coward a hero in that group, and guaranteed him being laid that night, so whether the benefit was worth the risk was in question. My son is now at a forward danger base in Iraq with 3rd ID; I wonder if the uncivil and indecent protestor's family & friends are as proud of what he is doing as my son's are of his efforts for democracy and freedom. One is a patriot by act and sacrifice; the other is willing to accept the gift and spit upon the giver. So, spitting on soldiers still goes on, unreported. I'm glad my son didn't land in jail, and I hope the protestor has his nose permanently bent out of shape as a reminder that not everyone will tolerate bad behavior, even in the name of peace.