Believing that they have all but won the War on Losing the War, those who Support Our Troops But Not Their Mission are now trying to shape the post-war environment.
The first task of course is to make sure that returning troops are treated with “dignity and respect and all that crap.” To do so, they need to disassociate themselves from the anti-war protesters of the last generation, who got a nasty reputation for spitting on returning Vietnam war veterans returning from the front.
Unfortunately, that’s proving hard to do since there is a significant amount of overlap between the current generation of anti-war activists and the previous one.
Which is damned inconvenient, but never mind: Holy Cross sociologist Jerry Lembecke has found away around this inconvenient fact – deny everything. Troop spitting? Never happened. Per Lembecke, the stories didn’t start popping up until the 1980′s, with few or no references in the newspapers of the day:
Implicit in (the pro-troop rhetoric) is the assumption that someone doesn’t support the men and women in uniform. Behind that supposition lurk the myths and legends of homefront betrayal that have bedeviled American political culture since the Vietnam War, and which have been resuscitated recently by rumors of hostility toward military personnel…
Many of the current stories are accompanied by stories of spat-upon Vietnam veterans. The recent story of spitting in Asheville, for example, was traced to a local businessman who says he is a veteran who was also spat upon and called a “baby killer” when he returned from Vietnam. An Associated Press story of April 9 reported stories of spat-upon Vietnam veterans surfacing in several cities including Spicer, Minnesota whose mayor said he was spat upon in the San Francisco airport while coming home from Vietnam in 1971.
Similar stories became quite popular during the Gulf War of 1991 which raised my curiosity about where they came from and why they were believed. There is nothing in the historical record ‚Äî news or police reports, for example ‚Äî suggesting they really happened…
Stories of spat-upon Vietnam veterans are bogus.
Which stark assertion he has spun into a book - the man is an academic: Publish or perish, you know – and a “scholarly” paper which purports that many of the stories revolve around San Francisco International Airport and were therefore bogus because no soldiers landed there. He also asserts that the spitting meme has a deep, psychological basis:
The element of spit in the coming-home stories of veterans who feel betrayed reveals a binary, man-nature dichotomy that lies at the heart of our understandings of human existence. When and how did mankind separate from nature? The answers are provided by creation myths that entail stories about the emergence of mankind from the sea. The prominence of water in creation stories correlates with the scientific understanding that human life emerged from aquatic life, but its psychological origin may have derived from the experience of biological birthing in which life emerges out of the amniotic fluid of the mother. Subconsciously, the individual feels a primal connection with the warmth and dampness of that in utero existence, and perhaps even desires to return to it, while consciously recognizing that life itself depends upon successful separation from the safety and comfort of that watery world.
Well, maybe. Primal connections to watery worlds and amneotic fluids could explain it. I guess.
On the other hand Occam’s razor might suggest to us that Vietnam veterans were claiming to be spat upon because, well: People spat upon them. But that kind of narrative doesn’t sell many books, now does it?
You’ve a right to be suspicious when a sociologist dabbles in the work of historians to influence thinking about a current debate. I was only a wee nobbut in the 60′s and early 70′s, but I remember the times differently than Lembecke’s skeptical narrative would suggest. There were curfews and the whiff of tear gas in the streets, clenched fists and “Burn it Down” in the air. “Revolutionaries” kidnapped heiresses and killed bank clerks. Greying, ponytailed activists may want to fondly remember it as a time of peace and love, man, and Speaking Truth To Power but as someone who had not yet formulated a political belief system, I remember the times quite differently. Spitting on troops doesn’t seem so unlikely to me.
And as it turns out – unfortunately for Lembecke – his thesis is counterfactual. The Volokh Conspiracy’s Jim Lindgren has a great deal more, including numerous contemporaneous citations of spitting stories and the not-so surprising revelation that many, many returning Vietnam veterans came home aboard commercial flights through the west coast’s largest international airport. If you can believe that.
Lundgren concludes:
On the issues raised by Professor Lembcke, I have to say that I’ll take the world of Congressional Medal of Honor winners and Pulitzer-Prize winning journalists for the New York Times and Washington Post over the professor’s armchair speculations–especially since many of the former actually witnessed the events they described, while the professor appears not to have made a serious attempt to review the available evidence before publishing his book.
Ah, well. You can’t win them all.
I grew up outside of Worcester, MA – and I can say with authority that the city barely tolerates the presence of H.C. When Route 290 was built (http://www.bostonroads.com/roads/I-290_MA/), the school refused to move their athletic field, causing a dangerous S-curve to be constructed in the highway. 3 men were killed during construction, and I have no idea how many have been killed in accidents on that S-curve, but it would be a sizeable number I’m sure.
This guy is proof that the college really is out of touch with its surroundings. They were back in the early 50s, when construction began on 290, and they are now. They are an elitist school in a working class city. (No slight intended for any of Lex’s audience who graduated from H.C.)
So is this sort of like one of those inconvenient truths? Can you just wish away history that doesn’t appeal to you? How well has that been working for those who deny the Holocaust? Sure, its different……..or is it?
I don’t know about all those fancy theories about being spit upon, but if one of those fine young people spits on me, I’m going to teach him some dance moves he won’t forget for good while.
Spitting on someone, AIDS aside, is an insult. It is a DEEP insult to do it to a servicemember coming back from deployment. I will not tolerate in my presense. That is the least I can do for those fine people.
From 1970-1974 I was a cadet in USAF ROTC, Det 825, the University of Texas at Austin.
I lost count of the times people called me names when I wore the uniform each Tuesday.
We had a custom of long standing to lower and raise the flag each day in front of the UT Main Building.
In December 1972 hippies began ‘marching’ along side of us, spewing vitriol, knocking our hats off, or just forming a human chain in front of us. I had beer thrown on me once.
We wound up stopping the formal flag lowering and raising by the three ROTC dets for several months, instead janitors did it early in the morning and late at night.
Gawd, this is getting sickening. They keep repeating the same BS…”urban myth”…”there are no police reports”…”no service members were ever spit on because it wasn’t in the news“. Pu-lease. It happened and it didn’t stop with the end of Vietnam, either. I graduated Navy boot in 1975 (after the “official end”) and got spit on walking through Chicago O’Hare. Posted a comment about this on Blackfive the other day:
Gawd, this is getting sickening. They keep repeating the same BS…”urban myth”…”there are no police reports”…”no service members were ever spit on because it wasn’t in the news“. Pu-lease. It happened and it didn’t stop with the end of Vietnam, either. I graduated Navy boot in 1975 (after the “official end”) and got spit on walking through Chicago O’Hare. Posted a comment about this on Blackfive the other day:
I was a student in Cambridge, Mass. at the school without a football team, but with an ROTC battalion (if that’s the right term) from 1970 to 1974. I was active in some anti-war demonstrations. I do remember specifically that while my crowd thought the war was wrong, we strongly disavowed all actions and comments like spitting on or confronting soldiers or cadets at all. Of course, this was in the days of the draft (one of my brothers was drafted, and the other joined when he got re-classified 1A to get the MOS he wanted), and when we looked at the soldiers we figured “there but for the grace of God ….”
In November, 1965, The Midway and CVG-2 returned to Alameda from a long and bitter westpac deployment. I had been granted a 30 day post deployment leave to go pick up my family in PNS. I left SFO the afternoon of 25 Nov in my service dress blues. I was spit upon by a young female who was in company with two other young male beatnicks,
the term hippie had not yet been created. I proceeded to spit back at the young female with a very ample luggie, right in her face. One of the young men swung on me and I hit him full on right in the nose, he went down like a puppet with the strings cut. The second fellow started to swing on me but was cold cocked by a very large marine corporal standing near by. We shook hands and proceeded to our gates. I have no idea what actions resulted. I felt very proud of what we both accomplished.
Bravo Zulu, Bill.
Regrettably once again, as happens every few years, the ‘mostly’ urban myth of spat-upon Vietnam vets comes bubbling to the surface. And again, nothing good derives from this now irrelevant debate.
This spat about spit occurs for two reasons:
1. Apocryphal or not, spitting incidences are a reprehensible and vile act. Thus they make for a superb weapon to demonize the anti-war Left.
2. Spitting is a poignant metaphor for the more common insults, animosity, and blame our Vietnam Veterans unfortunately had to endure from misguided anti-war protesters.
I returned twice from Vietnam ?
Regrettably once again, as happens every few years, the ‘mostly’ urban myth of spat-upon Vietnam vets comes bubbling to the surface. And again, nothing good derives from this now irrelevant debate.
This spat about spit occurs for two reasons:
1. Apocryphal or not, spitting incidences are a reprehensible and vile act. Thus they make for a superb weapon to demonize the anti-war Left.
2. Spitting is a poignant metaphor for the more common insults, animosity, and blame our Vietnam Veterans unfortunately had to endure from misguided anti-war protesters.
I returned twice from Vietnam – once on a stretcher – and later traveled on leave across our country in uniform. While no one ever thanked me for my service nor ever bought me a beer, and civilian friends questioned why and how I could serve in such a war; I never once was spat upon, nor do I personally know anyone who was. Nor was I ever harassed in any way, ever, by protesters.
Nevertheless, I do know many who were indeed unconscionably insulted, berated, and had epithets hurled at them from protesters. With a majority of college campuses being hotbeds of anti-war sentiment, ROTC students (as has already been mentioned here) probably bore the brunt of these insults and harrassment.
As lex correctly remembers (except for Patty Hearst and the SLA – that was later), it was a bitter and chaotic time. Barricades on campuses, tear gas in the streets, night-stick beatings at the Democratic Convention, and “four dead in Ohio.” Our angry country was literally being torn apart. There was no peace and love; it was hate and discontent. There was a specter of anarchy.
How refreshing it is today, unlike that terrible period before, to see our men and women in uniform appropriately respected and honored by all factions of today’s war debate. That is some real progress. But debating who spat upon whom years ago isn’t progress.
And while the anti-war Left has thankfully made some real progress in its relationship with our military personnel since Vietnam, our “politics of war” and ability to execute counterinsurgency warfare seem still mired in that troubled Vietnam era.
fliterman, first, thank you for your service. from the heart.
second, you say…
“How refreshing it is today, unlike that terrible period before, to see our men and women in uniform appropriately respected and honored by all factions of today?
fliterman, first, thank you for your service. from the heart.
second, you say…
“How refreshing it is today, unlike that terrible period before, to see our men and women in uniform appropriately respected and honored by all factions of today’s war debate.”
Son, you need to get out more.
[...] Behind that supposition lurk the myths and legends of homefront betrayal that have bedeviled American political culture since the Vietnam War, and which have been resuscitated recently by rumors of hostility toward military personnel … – Read More – [...]
“Four Dead in Ohio”; Believe it or not, I first heard about that in AFROTC class, early one morning in the bowels of the Knowles Bldg at Ga Tech. CAPT Pollard called us to attention, sat us down, then asked us what we thought about what had happened. Most of us were like, Huh? WTF?
He then proceeded to explain it to us while castigating us for being narrow-minded technicians, nerds and geeks, not paying attention to important things going on in the world.
He then recounted his riot experience at Ga. Tech back in 1948 I think when one of the Talmadges was “occupying” the Governor’s office. (The Secretary of State took the State Seal home, to avert crazy Govt. acts.)
It seems some Ga. Tech students went down to the Capitol to demonstrate against the Talmadge, CAPT Pollard among ‘em, but there was some kind of police scare and everybody ran away in a panic.
CAPT Pollard said he had no memory of running back from the State Capitol until he got to the Varsity (fast food joint), but he obviously must have done so.
He advised us not to involve ourselves in any kind of riotous crowd-like activities, as nothing good could come of such things.
Best advice I ever got
[...] Many of the current stories are accompanied by stories of spat-upon Vietnam veterans. The recent story of spitting in Asheville, for example, was traced to a local businessman who says he is a veteran who was also spat upon and called a … — more — [...]
…many returning Vietnam veterans came home aboard commercial flights through the west coast?
…many returning Vietnam veterans came home aboard commercial flights through the west coast’s largest international airport. If you can believe that.
And there was a shuttle that ran from Travis AFB to SFO every hour. I rode it twice, once in ’70, and again in ’71, when returning to CONUS from Japan. By that point in time the “word” had gotten out about the hassles one could expect at SFO. The men’s room in the Travis MAC terminal was crowded with guys changing out of their Class A’s into civvies. OTOH, you had guys who wore their Class A’s in the hopes of getting into it… Takes all kinds.
I traveled a lot on commercial airlines during Vietnam, both in and out of uniform (there was once a time when you had to be in uniform to get the 50% military discount; the policy changed in the early 70s). Although I received a lot of hard looks and heard a bit of mumbling, I was never directly accosted. Unlike fliterman, an ol’ geezer actually did buy me a beer…once. In the New Orleans train station bar, in 1963.
And yeah, times have changed. Both sons have lotsa war stories to attest to that fact.
Web Reconnaissance for 02/09/2007…
A short recon of what?ǂ
Web Reconnaissance for 02/09/2007…
A short recon of whats out there that might draw your attention….
fliterman Says:
First, thank you for your service (if in fact you are not FOS). But I have to take exception with some of your comments.
fliterman Says:
First, thank you for your service (if in fact you are not FOS). But I have to take exception with some of your comments.
‘mostly’ urban myth? I remember very well washing that “‘mostly’ urban myth” off of my uniform in the mens room at Chicago O’Hare.
now irrelevant debate?
Cpl. Joshua Sparling for a more recent example. We need to make sure this is not irrelevant. We need to make sure this doesn’t happen to this generation of soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and coastguard.
Kry in your kewlaide. It’s all about demonizing the anti-war left isn’t it.
a poignant metaphor? Metaphors don’t leave stain on your dress whites.
Thus you cannot know how insulting it is.
Lucky you. We were were told not to wear our uniforms off base so as not to be “harassed in any way”.
No. Active duty got it just as much. Haircuts were the giveaway.
Kent State was very much a real tragedy and should not have happened. Barricades, tear gas, night-stick beatings…brought upon by thier own actions.
I’m not so sure about the “all factions” part.
(paraphasing-too lazy to look it up) Those who do not remember the lessons of history are bound to repeat the mistakes of history.
Because those of us from that era who endured the BS from the angry left won’t let them get away with it again.
It’s the angry left’s most recent playbook. They do not remember the lessons of history.
fliterman, I think you should get off campus more often.
Rick – I’m sorry for your most unfortunate experience. However, no matter how disgusting and revolting it may have been, being an isolated incident, I do not believe it was representative of that period in our history.
More importantly and thankfully, notwithstanding the alleged and slightly different but still revolting Joshua Sparling [spit at the ground and not at him] incident, I am not aware of many if any similar incidents occurring today. Are you?
Now if you really want to revive and discuss the more serious and much more disgusting issues of that long ago period ?
Rick – I’m sorry for your most unfortunate experience. However, no matter how disgusting and revolting it may have been, being an isolated incident, I do not believe it was representative of that period in our history.
More importantly and thankfully, notwithstanding the alleged and slightly different but still revolting Joshua Sparling [spit at the ground and not at him] incident, I am not aware of many if any similar incidents occurring today. Are you?
Now if you really want to revive and discuss the more serious and much more disgusting issues of that long ago period – some of which are still quite relevant today – then there were far more egregious atrocities committed than your own isolated incident:
I.e., Leaving and abandoning some of our POW’s, abandoning the Hmong tribesmen, abandoning many of our Vietnamese counterparts, micro-managing the war from Washington, politicizing the war, failure to understand China, escalating without a true plan, overemphasis on body counts, lying to the nation, not being able to win against a 3rd world country, Agent Orange, and finally cutting and running which allowed the mass murder and imprisonment of many South Vietnamese. . .
. . . and AFTER OVER 58,000 U.S. DEAD, allowed exactly what the war originally was intended to defeat!
Should I go on?
You know, I’m really not sure I want to go there but…….fliterman, your last paragraph, it could, perhaps, be said that at least some of those “egregious atrocities” you list might be relevant to the present war in Iraq.
I take it then by what I have read that you definitely would NOT be a proponent of the US pulling out of Iraq and risking the increased death that many fear would come to Iraqi citizens in that scenario. You know, like a repeat of Vietnam? And about “politicizing the war”, well, I guess history really does repeat itself, doesn’t it
Michelle ?
Michelle – Good insight, and good question. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers.
Despite being somewhat left-leaning, anti-war, and against this Iraq war from the start, you are correct. I am definitely NOT a proponent now of an immediate – or even a later withdrawal – until certain changes are effected.
And yes, you infer correctly. Although this war is far different in most aspects, my Vietnam experience definitely influences my current position.
However, while I believe we must stay “there” for some period of time, I also know what we have been doing in Iraq has not been working. In some ways, it has actually been counterproductive.
I also worry about waning home support, even from the old reliable hawks. I worry too about what the future of terror will look like if we leave prematurely, and before some stability evolves in the country and region. I’m not sure what a “win” in Iraq might look like, or how or if we can ever achieve an acceptable one. But I believe in continuing to try. There is more at stake than many know.
Fair enough, I suppose. Considering we seem to agree on this point.
Filterman, an old Master Chief once told me “When you’re walking on eggs, don’t hop. You’ll break plenty just walking.” For what it’s worth…
I would add fliterman that mechanically saying: “thanks for your service” and then metaphorically (is dat the rifght word Lex?) “spitting” on us vets ain’t quite right. Not that you would do any such thing, being a vet yourself. Right?
At least that dude Arkin was honest about his true feelings.
b2
Actually, fliterman has been remarkably moderate in his tone of late, a courtesy for which he has my thanks.
I never did mind someone disagreeing with me, but there was all that other jazz schmeared on top of it that was off-putting. I’m glad to have (hopefully) seen the last of that.
fliterman
Did you go to and read the post on Volokh Conspiracy?
fliterman
Did you go to and read the post on Volokh Conspiracy’s site that Lex linked?
Click the “show the rest” link near the bottom. The post cites several newspapers by name and date of spitting incidents. It wasn’t as isolated as you may think. And while you may not believe it, it doesn’t mean is isn’t true.
alleged. Well it was in the NY Times…it must be true, right? Spit at the ground towards him. Slightly different, yes. The sentiment is the same.
You also didn’t seem to be too aware of many if any similar incidents occuring back then either. I’m not aware of other more recent incidents either…yet. It is possible the angry side of the left has learned something.
As for the rest of your “now let’s just change the subject” comments, they are not the subject of the post.
Ooops, fliterman, like flak, got me off target.
For the record Holy Cross used to have a robust ROTC program in my day. Knew quite a few Marine aviators who matriculated there. No longer?
One more thing: isn’t Sociology like Scientology? Just more B.S. getting ink that someone without critical reasoning powers may read.
b2
[...] veterans. The recent story of spitting in Asheville, for example, was traced to a local businessman who says he is a veteran who was also spat upon and called a … — more — [...]
[...] Many of the current stories are accompanied by stories of spat-upon Vietnam veterans. The recent story of spitting in Asheville, for example, was traced to a local businessman who says he is a veteran who was also spat upon and called a … — more — [...]