Spit and Spin: Rival “Memory Narratives” of Veteran Abuse
In this essay, anthropologist Tad Tuleja explores the varying perspectives related to Vietnam Veterans being spit on after returning from the war.
This essay first appeared in our latest issue, Volume 15.2.
My memory says I did that. My conscience says I could not have done that. Eventually my memory yields.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
In a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.
—Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
It’s an often-cited moment in an iconic film. Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo, having recently returned from Vietnam and having more recently unleashed mayhem on an American town, is confronted by his former Green Beret commander, who tells him, “It’s over, Johnny. It’s over.” The anguished veteran replies:
Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don’t turn it off. 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 and all kinds of vile crap. Who are they to protest me? Huh? Who are they?
First Blood, where this famous scene occurs, came out in 1982. Sixteen years later, sociology professor and Vietnam veteran Jerry Lembcke published The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. In it, he argued that the image of protestors spitting on soldiers returning from Vietnam was a fabrication encouraged by the Nixon administration to marginalize dissenters, certified by films like First Blood, and cynically exploited by the first Bush administration to justify the 1991 invasion of Kuwait: “It was the myth of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran,” Lembcke wrote, “that galvanized the sentiments of the American people sufficiently to discredit peace activists and give George Bush his war” (1998, 17).
Lembcke was not the first scholar to question the plausibility of the “spat-upon” story. In 1990, Bruce Jackson, writing in the Journal of American Folklore, had described such war narratives not as personal recollections but as “strategic devices” essential to identity management (402). Six years later, in her “Military Folklore” entry for a respected encyclopedia, Carol Burke noted both that the story “defies reality” and that it had been told decades earlier about Korean War vets (485). To folklorists, even those who like Jackson and Burke were sympathetic to veterans, the tale had all the trappings of an urban legend.
Lembcke went further, suggesting a political rationale for the story’s popularity. In his analysis, the spitting image shifted blame for the loss of Vietnam away from national leaders and onto domestic scapegoats—the “somebody,” in Rambo’s words, who “wouldn’t let us win.” As he told a reporter when his book first appeared, “The country is still trying to come to terms with the fact that we lost to this small, underdeveloped nation of Asians. So the alibi is that we were not defeated by the Vietnamese, but we were defeated on the home front. We were betrayed by the antiwar movement. The story of the spat-upon veterans fits as part of that” (quoted in Ulin 1998, E1).
As a challenge to one master narrative—the idea that peaceniks had demoralized our troops and thus lost the war—The Spitting Image reflected a progressive ideology that saw US foreign policy as fundamentally imperialist and manipulative. At the same time, it resuscitated what Lembcke saw as a suppressed counter-narrative: the story of Vietnam veterans, disgusted with the war, joining the peace movement in a grand alliance to bring their brothers home. Central to this story was Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), an organization whose most famous—to some most infamous—spokesperson was John Kerry. VVAW was clearly the hero of Lembcke’s tale: the book aimed not merely to correct the spitting myth but to restore dissident veterans to their rightful place at the resistance table.
Liberal reviewers received the book warmly. Thomas Beamish, for example, was a sociologist whose own research (Beamish, Molotch, and Flacks 1995) had prefigured Lembcke’s conclusions about “protestor-troop antagonism” being a government invention; he wrote of Lembcke’s “significant contribution to our understanding of a politically powerful wartime legend” (Beamish 1999: 433). Other reviewers referred to The Spitting Image as “an important contribution to creating a more complex analysis of the experience of Vietnam veterans” and “a brilliant cultural exploration of the social construction or misconstruction of
meaning” (Sturken 2000, 577; Karner 1999, 389).
If you listened to veterans, though, you got a different picture. A few years after the book came out, I started searching online for threads about “spitting” and “Vietnam” and found virulent rhetoric condemning Lembcke, fellow academics like John Llewellyn (who seconded Lembcke’s argument), the mainstream media (the notorious MSM), and—with telling frequency—John Kerry. A good sampling of this contrary discourse was posted on Free Republic (Freep), self-billed as “America’s exclusive site for God, Family, Country, Life & Liberty constitutional conservative activists.” Freep members asserted that spitting was rife in the Vietnam years, citing either personal experience or journalist Bob Greene’s 1989 book, Homecoming, which recorded dozens of first-person accounts of spitting incidents. Some questioned scholarly methodology in refusing to take seriously this body of evidence. For example, when Llewellyn claimed that there is “a common sense method for debunking this urban legend,” one poster replied bluntly, “Which seems to be anything but surveying veterans.”
But the debate over evidence was less striking than the emotions that Freep bloggers invested in “debunking the debunkers.” Consider for example the Free Republic posts responding to an article Llewellyn published on Veterans Day 2004. There were hundreds of these appearing under a headnote of search words like academiccesspool, hanoijohnnyacademic, idioteducator, leftspeak, and whaledungexpert. “I just knew,” said the person who forwarded the article to her fellow Free Republic readers, that “y’all would appreciate the opportunity to educate the so-called educator.” They did so with considerable vitriol:
“The author of this article needs a good swift kick in the face . . . . Notice this puke publishes this crap on our birthday! Semper Fi.”
“He’s calling me a liar. I wish he would do it to my face.”
“Hey buffoon go peddle your crap somewhere else, how dare you add salt to the wound.”
Other comments, aimed at the ivory tower’s “lying, amoralistic academic nutjobs,” denounced Llewellyn for illustrating “all that is wrong with advanced reasoning as it is represented in academia today.” On his admission that you can’t prove a negative, and that therefore someone somewhere might have been spit upon, one poster replied, “In other words, the label [urban legend] is utterly worthless. Thanks, perfesser.” In response to his comment that “I have studied urban legends for nearly twenty years and have been certified as an expert on the subject in the federal courts,” a poster identified as Texas Cowboy replied, “And you’re still an idiot.”
In a 2005 Op-Ed piece for the Boston Globe, Lembcke defended his thesis, going so far as to suggest that spitting stories should be seen as “fantasies conjured in the imaginations of aging veterans” (A13). Free Republic again rose to the bait. Because Lembcke had written a history of the International Woodworkers of America, many Freepers seized on his apparent Marxism. One, after recounting his “humiliation” by a hippie couple at San Francisco airport, commented, “But hey, what do I know? I’m only a veteran not a brilliant Leftwing journalist trying to impress my boss with my anti-American/anti-military psychobabble.” (After his name appeared the tag line “We did not lose in Vietnam. We left.”) Others reflected the distaste for “JFK 2,” which was particularly strong in the wake of the Swift Boat campaign that helped to derail Kerry’s 2002 presidential bid:
Hanoi Jane and Hanoi John slandered the thousands of US servicemen who served in Vietnam as war criminals, rapists, murderers. They are responsible for the spitting—they created the propaganda which motivated it. They should be in Leavenworth for treason, as they actively gave aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war. Comrade Lembcke is recommended reading on the CPUSA site.
Much of the anger you heard on these sites was directed against an arrogance of intellectual power that permitted academics to tout their research as more reliable than eyewitness memories. But what was really at stake here was neither methodology nor the reliability of memory but the coherence of two polarized world views—views that were grounded in mutually exclusive “memory narratives.” What was most important in these narratives, I suggest, was not their overt content but what each one left out or suppressed.
For liberal revisionists like Lembcke and Llewellyn, the narrative was one of brotherhood betrayed. Once upon a time, warriors and peacemakers joined ranks against an imperial juggernaut. Those who had resisted the war at home and those who had experienced traumatic events in-country came together in order to speak truth to power. Soldiers recognized protestors not as antagonists, but as a loyal home front working on their behalf. Protestors recognized soldiers not as willing agents, but as coerced or misled victims of a duplicitous government. That government was the serpent pushing a counterfeit history in which brother was turned against brother and loyal opposition was reimagined as betrayal.
For the conservative audience of Free Republic, the memory narrative was one of abandonment. In ancient Israel, a scapegoat, or “escape goat,” was a sacrificial animal staked out in the wild, thought to carry the sins of the community to the jaws of wolves and thereby to ensure atonement in the eyes of the Lord. In the Freep narrative, soldiers were cast out in like fashion, but with a terrible twist: Their sacrifice was rejected by the home community, and they were condemned to live out their lives as pariahs, dishonored, unsung—and spat upon. In this story, the role of serpent was taken by an unholy alliance of protestors and antiwar vets that stabbed our boys in the back. This was, of course, a conventional—perhaps the conventional—story of the returning vet, and it remains today, despite the current infatuation with military heroism, a defining memory narrative of the Vietnam period.
The conventional Freep narrative and Lembcke’s revisionist narrative both worked as narratives, with a well-defined cast of characters, a visible structure, and even a moral—or at least a political lesson—to be drawn from each. But their coherence depended not on an authentic engagement with complexity, but on a decision to “disappear” uncomfortable facts, to embrace a memory which was also, necessarily, a forgetting. Let me clarify this point by identifying what each story leaves out.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Consequence to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.