THE SPITTING IMAGE:
Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam
By Jerry Lembcke
New York University Press, 217 pages, $24.95
“It wasn’t my war. You asked me, I didn’t ask you. And I did what I had to do to win. But somebody wouldn’t let us win. Then I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport. Protesting me. Spitting. Calling me baby killer. … Who are they to protest me? Huh?”
–Sylvester Stallone as John Rambo in the movie “First Blood” (1982)
A few years ago I took my daughter to the Memorial Day observances on the village green of the small community where we live. When I was young, I always enjoyed the ceremony of decorating the graves of veterans with wreaths and American flags, and so was happy, decades later, to begin sharing the familiar rituals with my own child. Happy, that is, until the main speaker at the observances on the green, a man who, like my father, was a veteran of World War II, began to talk about an incident during the Vietnam War. In a voice choked with rage, he recounted how “a band of hippies” boarded a hospital ship in San Francisco Bay just returned from Vietnam. Chanting anti-war slogans, the protesters, according to the speaker, threw bags of excrement on the badly wounded soldiers and Marines who lay helpless on the deck on stretchers. My daughter, who knew that I, too, had opposed the war, stared up at me with wide eyes.
To answer her unasked question, I called up the Army’s Office of Military History in Washington, D.C., the next day to see if it had a record of any such incident. It did not. What’s more, I learned, the event could not have taken place as it was so vividly described for us that Memorial Day. Unlike during World War II, servicemen wounded in Vietnam did not return to the U.S. on hospital ships, but by air. But the legend of the ship-storming hippies will doubtless live on to be repeated on other such occasions by other angry speakers.
What my daughter and I had encountered was an extravagant version of what sociologist Jerry Lembcke describes in his new book as the “cultural myth” of the spit-upon Vietnam veteran. In its usual and somewhat tamer version, an American fighting man just back from a year of hazardous service in Vietnam in the late 1960s or early 1970s steps off an airplane (usually in San Francisco) and is immediately set upon by an anti-war protester–usually a woman who calls him “baby-killer” and spits in his face.
Lembcke, a veteran of the war, shows all due respect to those of his fellow veterans (few, he thinks) to whom such incidents actually occurred, but still questions the general reliability of the spitting stories. In “The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam,” he notes, “Almost all such reports came years after the incidents were alleged to have occurred, while in the actual time frame in which men came home from Vietnam there are no such reports” Not a single photograph, news broadcast, newspaper or magazine article, or any other piece of contemporary evidence has survived to record this supposedly archetypal encounter of veteran and protester.
Then why is this story so often retold and so generally believed in the United States, nearly three decades after the end of the Vietnam War? Lembcke explores mythology and history for the answer. The act of spitting has deep and long-standing symbolic significance in Western culture, he observes. “In the biblical account of Christ’s Crucifixion, for example, Luke writes that Christ was spat upon by those who betrayed him.” Throughout recorded history (and even before, going back to the time of Odysseus), soldiers on the losing side have reported similar instances of disrespect and disdain on the part of those for whom they had gone off to battle in the first place. German soldiers returning from the trenches of the Western Front during World War I found it hard to accept that they had been defeated by the combined armies of the U.S., Britain and France; rather, many chose to believe they had been “stabbed in the back” by disloyal citizens on the homefront. Military veteran and Nazi leader Hermann Goering would rant that “young boys, degenerate deserters, and prostitutes tore the insignia off our best front line soldiers and spat on their field gray uniforms” when they returned home after World War I.
Historical memory is selective. As a nation we “remember” certain things because those details fit the mood of our own times and because the media, the entertainment industry, politicians and other interested parties choose to remind us of some events and not of others. We either choose, or have been cued, to remember the spit-upon veterans while forgetting the thousands who returned to the U.S. and expressed their disillusionment with the war they had been sent to fight, through organizations like Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Lembcke reminds us of the “mutually supportive” ties between the anti-war protesters at home and anti-war veterans and even active-duty GIs. Incredible as it may seem to a generation raised on the mythology of the spit-upon veteran, Life magazine reported from Vietnam in October 1969 that ” `many soldiers regard the organized antiwar campaign in the U.S. with open and outspoken sympathy.”
The myth of the spit-upon veteran is not only bad history, but it has been instrumental in selling the American public on bad policy (or at least on policies that would have been difficult to sell on their own merits). This process began with President Richard Nixon, who wanted to continue the Vietnam War long after most Americans had decided that the conflict’s original rationales (defending the boundaries of the Free World, preserving the credibility of the United States, whatever) were no longer worth the price being paid. In spring 1969, Lembcke argues, Nixon began to redefine the war. From then on:
“(T)he war was going to be first and foremost about the men who were being sent to fight it (and not, mind you, about the people who sent them there). . . . Our boys in Vietnam, (Nixon) argued, whether they were in prison or in the field fighting, could not be abandoned. Funding for the war would have to be continued, lest the safety of the troops in the field be undermined; rhetoric against the war would have to be curbed, lest the enemy be encouraged and our boys feel betrayed.”
In 1990-91 President George Bush sold Operation Desert Storm to the American public on nearly identical grounds. Having moved several hundred thousand American troops into harm’s way, he then turned to Congress to ask if it approved of the now-imminent conflict in the Persian Gulf. The decision was never much in doubt. The administration’s justifications for the war, Lembcke notes, “conflated the objectives of war with those who had been sent to fight the war. By thus dissolving the distinction between ends and means, the framework within which people could reason about the war was destroyed.”
The most potent symbol of support for the war in the Persian Gulf was the yellow-ribbon campaign. Americans were encouraged to display the ribbons to show their support for the young men and women who had been sent to do battle in their name. The last time yellow ribbons had been used in such a fashion, it was as a gesture of support for the American Embassy hostages in Iran in 1979-1981. Thus, Americans were being summoned to think of the troops as hostages and victims. And that, in turn, tapped into the widespread sense of national shame over the treatment of the veterans of the last major war the U.S. had fought. The myth of the spit-upon Vietnam veteran returned with a vengeance. As one young soldier stationed in the Persian Gulf told a reporter: ” `If I go back home like the Vietnam vets did and somebody spits on me, I swear to God I’ll kill them.’ “
It is still hard to think about the Vietnam War dispassionately. The wounds go deep–for individuals and for the nation. But someday, I hope, we will recognize that those who fought the war and those who opposed it (not to mention those who did both) have much in common. For Vietnam veterans and protesters alike, the war was the defining event of our generation, and something more than spit ties us together.
