The Spitting Image

My quote of James Wolcott's sputtering claims about spitting on Vietnam vets elicited more comments than any other aspect of yesterday's interview with Michael Tucker. That doesn't surprise me, but it certainly made me realize the issue deserved some space of it's own here.

Wolcott on spitting:

No matter how many times this urban myth gets debunked, it's dug out of the closet yet again and dusted off to condemn the antiwar movement and an ungrateful America. It's the sort of thing one expects from rightwing talkshow/columnist hacks, but I thought Ken Tucker was brought better than that.

I've heard this sort of thing before from the gang at the kiddy table, and though grown ups find the exercise silly we could possibly do their young minds some good by investigating the claims. This Slate piece from 2000 is the source of Wolcott's prodigious knowledge of the life experiences of every Vietnam era vet:

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. 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.

Shades of Winter Soldier - the left is eager to believe that American troops like John Kerry and his cronies slaughtered babies with wanton abandon, but dismisses the thought that any of their class would waste a drop of precious phlegm to welcome the sick brutes home.

Speaking of which, the piece then quotes Rambo - oddly enough the movie that more than any other is a definitive compilation of many "real" urban legends about 'tripwire' Vietnam veterans; those homeless masters of the art of the kill.

Appropriately the piece concludes with a thinly disguised bit of literary spitting on Vietnam veterans - who we all know are murderous baby killing bastards after all:

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.

In spite of the gratuitous and pathetically wimpy "of course we can't prooooove anything" disclaimer this sort of thing is accepted as incontrovertible proof by the Wolcotts of the world. And undoubtedly if he has readers they don't bother to even follow his link - his word that there is something that proves his claim is all these sorts of people need. Poorly educated, easily led as they say.

Here's Wolcott's bottom line - the point he really wants to make, and the obvious reason he needs that spitting stuff to be a big fat lie. It's this business about the troops being innocent - merely pathetic victims of the Darklord Bush, you see. We need to stop that talk now; these guys are stormtroopers, don't you know.

No one wants to "bash the troops," but excusing their behavior as the hothead reaction of "kids who happen to have guns" "blowing off steam" and "luckless souls" makes them sound like the juvenile delinquents in fifties dramas and sociology, not bad, just misunderstood--products of a sick environment.

Nice try - embracing the nature/nuture claim from the right. Guess he's not familiar with the Abu Ghraib trials. Or the less press-worthy (no pictures) murder trials currently ongoing. No one's "being excused" for anything.

"No one wants to bash the troops, but..." Great preface to some troop bashing. The spit fest is coming.

Like I said - the Wolcotts of this world believe what they read without seeing for themselves. You aren't like that, so please don't take my word for it. Visit Wolcott - and read the Slate piece too.

Just be careful you don't end up spitting on your computer screen.

Update: How could I fail to mention a book I brought with me to Baghdad - B. G. Burkett's definitive work Stolen Valor : How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History. He recounts his own welcome home in the prologue:

At the dinner hour, the airport restaurant was half empty. I threw down my duffel bag, sat, and tried to catch the waitress's eye. "Miss, Miss," I said. The waitress, a woman in her thirties, was only a few feet away. But she pointedly ignored me and began waiting on people who had come in after me.

Finally a younger waitress came over. "Oh, don't mind her," she said. "She's got this antiwar thing. She won't serve anybody in uniform." The second waitress rook my order, brought me the food, and I put the other woman's rudeness down to a personal quirk.

After eating, I sat at the gate and waited for the plane. When they called the flight, to my relief I was one of the standbys who made it aboard.

After I found a seat, the man next to me said, "Oh, you're stationed at Fort Dix?"

"No, I just got home from Vietnam," I said.

"Oh, a big war hero?" announced the man across the aisle. He had obviously been on the plane from a previous leg, nipping at those little bottles of Jack Daniel's. "Hey folks, we've been sitting here on the runway waiting on a big goddamn war hero." I grimaced but said nothing. It was May 1969. I had been back un the United States fewer than twenty-four hours after serving a tour of duty in Vietnam as an ordnance officer. First the waitress and now this.

The guy refused to let up. "Hey bucko, you spent a year killing women and children, "he said. "Make you feel like a big man, did it? You got your drugs with you , you f*****g pothead?" The entire flight continued that way. For more than an hour, he constantly needled me. I knew if I decided to take the guy out he was dead meat. But punching him would have confirmed all of his prejudices, I refused to do that.

What made me most angry was that no one on the plane said anything to him. None of the other passengers defended me. I felt like a pariah. If I had been a veteran of World War II, coming home after serving my country, somebody would have slugged the guy.

As I stood up in the aisle after the plane landed, the idiot continued his goading, his voice following me long after I waked off the plane. It aggravates me still. That personal insult was directed thousands of times in thousands of ways toward the men and women who served in Vietnam. In the decades after the war, the negative attitudes and assumptions of those times unfortunately became cemented in the American psyche.

No spitting there.