Returning Vietnam GIs Spat Upon: Urban Legend?

The anti-war protests this weekend brought up another mention by a journalist of American soldiers being spat upon and denounced as baby killers by anti-war protesters when they arrived home from Vietnam to U.S. airports. I've often wondered about this but trying to imagine the airport scenes brings me up short. Soldiers were rotated home from Vietnam after one year's service there and as the big day of return came near, they counted the hours until they stepped on the U.S. bound plane. After arriving at west coast airports, San Francisco, etc., they stepped aboard another plane and fanned out across the country. Often, each one was the only soldier arriving at a home town airport. In fact they arrived home almost surreptitiously and many veterans since have decried the absence of any kind of welcome--bands playing music, etc.

It seems unlikely that protests were scheduled to meet a plane with perhaps one or two soldiers on it at airports around the country. No doubt, a few lone men were on the receiving end of an expectoration from a rude person, but I'm convinced that lone acts like that have been blown out of proportion. The logistics for arranging groups of protesters to meet planes arriving all over America seem daunting, to say the least. Yet what we continue to hear is that mobs spat upon them and called them baby killers.


It's important for proponents of the current war in Iraq to keep this story going, as a method of persuading Americans to give our soldiers full support. Yet, as the news from Iraq gets increasingly somber, we find that many of our soldiers are committing hostile acts and even atrocities against the people of Iraq. Some of our men have already been tried for rape and murder against Iraqi civilians. Others' antics were exposed at Abu Garaib.

On You-tube you can see this morning on tape the bestial beating of an male suspect by Iraqi soldiers while being cheered on by a truck full of Americans. Not one American soldier intervenes. Instead, they whoop, comment, and holler as though they're watching a cartoon. As the requirements for enlistment are consistently being lowered, men with criminal records, very low IQs, and the worst kind of rednecks are being recruited by the Army. As news footage shows (and of course that footage is heavily censored), some of our troops are indeed baby killers.

Following is an examination of spitting on troops:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam is a 1998 book by Vietnam veteran Jerry Lembcke, which argues that the common claim that American soldiers were spat upon and insulted by anti-war protesters, upon returning home from the Vietnam War is little more than an urban legend and that posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, was more political invention rather than any real mental health affliction.

One of Lembcke's conclusion in Spitting Image is that there was not even a single media report to support the claims. Lembcke claims that the reported "spitting on soldiers" was a mythical projection of those who felt "spat-upon" and was meant to discredit future antiwar activism. He suggests the image of pro-war antipathy against anti-war protesters helped contribute to the image. Lembcke argues that memories of being verbally and physically assaulted by anti-war protesters were largely socially constructed, noting that not even one case could be documented. [1]

Spitting Image asserts that the claims of abuse of soldiers only became ingrained in the American consciousness some years after the war had come to a close; Lembcke attributes its growth to films relating to Vietnam, notably Rambo. He says that these claims were used by President George H. W. Bush as a way to help sell the Gulf War to the American people. Lembcke believes that the "myth" is involved in helping to promote the yellow ribbon campaign; it has led some to think that for one to support troops, one must therefore also support the war, because it ties together the ideas of anti-war sentiment and anti-troop sentiment.

Lembcke also argued in Spitting Image, that PTSD was a political invention, designed to castigate returning Veterans and mentally unbalanced. This was done, according to Lembcke, as another way to discredit veterans in the Anti-war movement.

A persistent criticism leveled against those who protested the United States's involvement in the Vietnam War is the complaint that protesters spat upon and otherwise derided returning soldiers, calling them "baby-killers", etc. Lembcke says he found no evidence to suggest this ever happened, and suggests it may have come in part from the common retort made by protestors to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, "Hey hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"

Spitting Image contrasts with author and columnist Bob Greene's book Homecoming in which Greene interviews several dozen Vietnam veterans and focuses on firsthand accounts of mistreatment from anti-war protestors.

Review of Jerry Lembcke's book

A Los Angeles Times book reviewer wrote:

"The image is ingrained: A Vietnam veteran, arriving home from the war, gets off a plane only to be greeted by an angry mob of antiwar protesters yelling, 'Murderer!' and 'Baby killer!' Then out of the crowd comes someone who spits in the veteran's face. The only problem, according to Jerry Lembcke, is that no such incident has ever has been documented. It is instead, says Lembcke, a kind of urban myth that reflects our lingering national confusion over the war." ISBN 0-8147-5147-4

Cinematic depiction of veterans' experiences

The notion of soldiers being spat upon was featured in a number of American movies, including the Rambo series. According to the Digital History Project at the University of Houston:

In First Blood (1982), John Rambo captured the pain of the returning veterans: "It wasn't my war--you asked me, I didn't ask you...and I did what I had to do to win....Then I came back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting on me, calling me a baby-killer...." [2]

The 1977 film Tracks features a fictional anti-war activist who spits on his opponents.

In the film Forrest Gump, a protester calls Forrest (in uniform) a baby-killer.

See also

• Sociology of memory

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