Of late, it’s become important to some lefties to try to debunk – 30-odd years after the event – the notion that anti-war protesters ever spat upon returning Vietnam vets.

Jack Shafer in Slate continues what is, apparently, a crusade for him:

The myth of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran refuses to die. Despite Jerry Lembcke’s debunking book from 1998, Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, and my best efforts to publicize his work, the press continues to repeat the fables as fact.

Earlier this month, Newsweek resuscitated the vet-spit myth in a dual profile of John McCain and Chuck Hagel. Newsweek reports: “Returning GIs were sometimes jeered and even spat upon in airports; they learned to change quickly into civilian clothes.”

Nexis teems with such allegations of spat-upon vets and even includes testimonials by those who claim to have been gobbed upon. But Lembcke—a Vietnam vet himself—cites his own research and that of other academics to assert that he has never uncovered a single news story documenting such an incident.

Lembke’s book asserts that, since he never uncovered a news story about veterans getting spat upon, it must never have happened – that it’s all an urban legend.
It’s possible.

It’s also a very odd standard of evidence; presence in the news media is the threshold of truth.

Lembcke writes:

If spitting on veterans had occurred all that frequently, surely some veteran or soldier would have called it to the attention of the press at the time. … Indeed, we would imagine that news reporters would have been camping in the lobby of the San Francisco airport, cameras in hand, just waiting for a chance to record the real thing—if, that is, they had any reason to believe that such incidents might occur.

Maybe. Quite possible, in fact. Urban legends do take on lives of their own.

But let’s tackle Lembke’s – and Shafer’s – assertions; that…:

1. …if it didn’t pop up in Lexis/Nexis, it probably never happened
2. …some intrepid reporter would surely have been camping out waiting to verify the story

Picture the scenario; you’re just back from ‘Nam. You’ve spent the past year slogging through jungle, dodging booby traps, getting into firefights at “inside-the-phonebooth” range, patrolling and ambushing and sitting up at night watching for infiltrators. Then you fly home. Some fly-eaten piece of vermin spits at or on you. What are you going to do? Go to the police, much less a news reporter? In those circumstances, does it occur to you to take official action over spit?

As to the media of the day – the idea that an old school editor would assign anyone to stake out the airport looking for people spitting on people beggars my imagination, but I suppose anything’s possible.

But as I said, it’s entirely possible that the spit stories are urban legends. To dismiss the claims (as so many leftybloggers are curiously racing to do today) ignores the reason urban legends occur in the first place.

Then, starting around 1980, members of the Vietnam War generation began sharing the tales, which Lembcke calls “urban myths.” As with most urban myths, the details of the spat-upon vets vary slightly from telling to telling, while the basic story remains the same. The protester almost always ambushes the soldier in an airport (not uncommonly the San Francisco airport), after he’s just flown back to the states from Asia. The soiled soldier either slinks away or does nothing.

I love the scare italics around “ambushes”; you’re a pencil-necked, drug-addled piece of yippie vermin; you’re going to cruise around the airport carrying a “Will Spit On Vets For Patchouli” sign, chasing after guys who’ve spent the last year fighting a war?

Yippies were dumb, but they weren’t suicidal. They weren’t going to all that trouble dodging the draft just to get their brains beaten in by some Marine who’d had a bad week.

But I digress. Urban legends happen for a reason. They often reflect some underlying part of a society’s, or group’s, zeitgeist.

I remember clearly as if it were yesterday the news coverage of some “peace” activist shortly before the Vietnam POWs came home. “They were never tortured! You can see,they’re all in great condition!”, she blathered. And yes, the hippies and protesters attacked soldiers as individuals as well as an institution.

And those critics – those who slandered those who fought – went on to positions of great power…:

Call it “rhetorical spit”. 

Even if no single yippie ever actually spat on a returning veteran, the figurative spitting – the endless “babykiller” references and John Kerry’s “Jinjiss Kahn” references being good places to start – would provide fertile, understandable ground for a more direct-sounding “legend”. 

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 9:40 am and is filed under History And Its Making. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.