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Drooling on the Vietnam Vets

Jack Shafer
Posted Tuesday, May 2, 2000, at 7:49 AM ET

Last week, both the New York Times and U.S. News & World Report reprised the horrific accounts of Vietnam War protesters spitting on returning servicemen. In a piece about West Point's post-Vietnam mood (April 28), timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Times reporter John Kifner writes:

Much has changed since Lt. Col. Conrad C. Crane ('74) watched on television here as the war wound down, a time he remembers as "almost a siege mentality" at West Point, when cadets could not wear their uniforms off campus for fear of being spat on.

Amanda Spake of U.S. News quotes (May 1) Terry Baker of the Vietnam Veterans Association about the disgraceful behavior:

"When the WWII guys came back," Baker adds, "they were able to talk about the war. With Vietnam, vets had to change their clothes in the bus station because people would spit on them."

Although Nexis overflows with references to protesters gobbing on Vietnam vets, and Bob Greene's 1989 book Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam counts 63 examples of protester spitting, Jerry Lembcke argues that the story is bunk in his 1998 book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (click here to buy it). Lembcke, a professor of sociology at Holy Cross and a Vietnam vet, investigated hundreds of news accounts of antiwar activists spitting on vets. But every time he pushed for more evidence or corroboration from a witness, the story collapsed--the actual person who was spat on turned out to be a friend of a friend. Or somebody's uncle. He writes that he never met anybody who convinced him that any such clash took place.

While Lembcke doesn't prove that nobody ever expectorated on a serviceman--you can't prove a negative, after all--he reduces the claim to an urban myth. In most urban myths, the details morph slightly from telling to telling, but at least one element survives unchanged. In the tale of the spitting protester, the signature element is the location: The protester almost always ambushes the serviceman at the airport--not in a park, or at a bar, or on Main Street. Also, it's not uncommon for the insulted serviceman to have flown directly in from Vietnam. In the most dramatic telling of the spitting story, First Blood (1982), the first installment of the series about a vengeful Vietnam vet, the airport is the scene of the outrage. John Rambo, played by Sylvester Stallone, gives a speech about getting spat upon. Rambo says:

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?

Of course, the myth of the spitting protester predates the Rambo movies, but how many vets--many of whom didn't get the respect they thought they deserved after serving their country--retrofitted this memory after seeing the movie? Soldiers returning from lost wars have long healed their psychic wounds by accusing their governments and their countrymen of betrayal, Lembcke writes. Also, the spitting story resonates with biblical martyrdom. As the soldiers put the crown of thorns on Jesus and led him to his crucifixtion, they beat him with a staff and spat on him.

Lembcke uncovered a whole lot of spitting from the war years, but the published accounts always put the antiwar protester on the receiving side of a blast from a pro-Vietnam counterprotester. Surely, he contends, the news pages would have given equal treatment to a story about serviceman getting the treatment. Then why no stories in the newspaper morgues, he asks?

Lastly, there are the parts of the spitting story up that don't add up. Why does it always end with the protester spitting and the serviceman walking off in shame? Most servicemen would have given the spitters a mouthful of bloody Chiclets instead of turning the other cheek like Christ. At the very least, wouldn't the altercations have resulted in assault and battery charges and produced a paper trail retrievable across the decades?

The myth persists because: 1) Those who didn't go to Vietnam--that being most of us--don't dare contradict the "experience" of those who did; 2) the story helps maintain the perfect sense of shame many of us feel about the way we ignored our Vietvets; 3) the press keeps the story in play by uncritically repeating it, as the Times and U.S. News did; and 4) because any fool with 33 cents and the gumption to repeat the myth in his letter to the editor can keep it in circulation. Most recent mentions of the spitting protester in Nexis are of this variety.

As press crimes go, the myth of the spitting protester ain't even a misdemeanor. Reporters can't be expected to fact-check every quotation. But it does teach us a journalistic lesson: Never lend somebody a sympathetic ear just because he's sympathetic.

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Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.
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Reader Response from The Fray:


I served the in U.S. Army during Vietnam. While attending night class at Boston University in 1969--in uniform--I was spat on by two female students, and called a `fascist.' I was also called a `baby killer' on another occasion. I had friends in the military who recounted similar experiences.

--Eric Margolis

(To reply, click here.)
[This was one of several messages from Vietnam veterans who had been spat on, or from eye-witnesses to such incidents.]


I have never been one to support urban myths, but I would like to illuminate the quote from me used in the article. I was indeed spat upon in my uniform. It happened near the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City during my plebe year. Plebes were required to wear their Dress Gray uniform on trips, and a scruffy-looking individual decided to use me to make a point. We had been warned this might happen by upper class cadets who claimed to have had similar experiences, and while I cannot verify theirs, I can vouch for mine.

--Lt Col Conrad Crane

(To reply, click here.)


Jack Shafer is right to take the press to task for its continued use of the spat-upon veteran trope. But I think the "crime" is more than a misdemeanor. The press is a major player in how America is remembering the war in Vietnam and the notion of veteran disparagement on the home front helps construct the alibi that we lost the war not to the Vietnamese but to betrayal at home. The alibi is dangerous because it keeps alive the mistaken idea that the war could have been won if we had not beaten ourselves.

In this time of remembering how we got to the peace, it is important that we not allow people like John McCain to undo it. In my Monday op-ed in Newsday, I noted the troublesome revisionism at work in the journalism around the 25th anniversary of the war's end. Myths like that of spat-upon veterans have displaced the real history of the war and created a black space in our public memory about the war that can now be filled-in. The old war-time U.S. propaganda line that the war was about the North having invaded the South is being trotted out again, this time to make the point that, while "South Vietnam" suffers under communism imposed by the North, it remains resistant to that "foreign" domination and open to Western solutions to its problems. How this country remembers the war is very, very important. Journalists are major players in the construction of that memory and we need to hold them accountable for their work

--Jerry Lembcke

(To reply, click here.)


I am struck by the number of Fray posters whose message is basically "So what if the stories aren't true?" Well, for one thing, people who tell the spat-upon stories are conveying a message both about the suffering of the Americans who served in Vietnam and about what they see as the reprehensible character of antiwar protesters. If the stories are not true, or if only a vanishingly small fraction of them are true, that doesn't diminish the suffering of American servicemen but it does change the alleged moral calculus between pro- and anti-war factions.

The stories are important for what they tell us about the national mood, in much the same way as the clearly bogus "live POW" stories do: they are an attempt at historical revisionism. This is dangerous, because it raises the possibility of blinding us to the immorality of the American war against the Vietnamese people. It is important to keep repeating that those of us who protested the war were correct, not just because, in the fashionable re-interpretation of the facts, we were not committed to win it, but because it was evil in itself, an imperialistic war that should never have been fought.

--Jack McCullough

(To reply, click here.)


It's good to see somebody do a fact check. But you missed some facts. Anybody who gave a spitter a mouthful of bloody Chiclets was in trouble himself, particularly officers. I got several lectures on that. Thus, the lack of dead and crippled spitters teaches us less than that it hardly happened. In addition, it would happen in airports because that's about the only place, outside of just off-post in military towns, that a serviceman in those days would wear his uniform.

Whether there was less spit than popularly remembered, there was certainly vile behavior and insults. I did not go to Vietnam, but was careful about going off post in my uniform. When I did, I was subject to insult and obscene gesture. That it didn't get worse I suspected was because I was not in a wheelchair. Nobody said those hippies were dumb. I also went to a coffee house in Fayetteville, NC, near Ft. Bragg, whose purpose was, presumably, sedition, and was treated with courtesy and friendliness. Nothing is all or nothing, but the insult short of spitting is true. I've experienced it.

--Richard Aubrey

(To reply, click here.)

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