War Stories

The image is ingrained: A Vietnam veteran, arriving home from the war, gets off a plane only to be greeted by an angry mob of antiwar protesters yelling “murderer!” and “baby killer!”

Then, out of the crowd comes someone who spits in the veteran’s face.

Over the years, this vivid scenario of rage and betrayal has become a metaphor for the deep divisions caused by Vietnam. The only problem, according to Holy Cross University sociologist Jerry Lembcke in “The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam” (NYU Press, 1997), is that no such incident ever has been documented. It is instead, Lembcke says, a kind of urban myth that reflects our lingering national confusion over the war.

“I think the country is still trying to come to terms with the fact that we lost to this small, underdeveloped nation of Asians,” says Lembcke, himself a Vietnam veteran who eventually joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War. “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.”

Shad Meshad is president and founder of the National Veterans Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles serving more than 150,000 veterans and their families. A former social work psychology officer in Vietnam, he has spent the last 27 years working with veterans. When he and Lembcke spoke this week about “The Spitting Image” and the lingering ramifications of the war on American society, Meshad argued that spitting and other forms of abuse indeed took place--but said that antiwar protesters were far from the only ones at fault.

Jerry Lembcke: I got interested in this during the Gulf War period, when references to the spat-upon Vietnam veterans proliferated in the press. Those stories just didn’t resonate with me as being true. I didn’t know of any historical material in which one would find this. The first question I went after when these stories surfaced was: Where and when did these things begin to be said? It was very elusive. I wasn’t able to pin it down.

But the key finding was that when I went back to the late 1960s or early 1970s, when these incidents are supposed to have happened, I found no reports. There are no reports in newspapers, for example, of antiwar people spitting on Vietnam veterans. There’s nothing I found in historical accounts or secondary accounts. So sometime between the end of the war and roughly 1980, these stories began to come out. They’re all past tense. Why is it that by roughly 1980, so many people believed them?

Shad Meshad: I’ve had conversations with over 15,000 of our brother and sister vets, and for many of them, part of the returning home process involved spitting and cursing and blaming and scapegoating.

I interviewed vets who were having severe readjustment problems. This is 1971 to 1979, up to 1980, the time you’re talking about. By 1980, you were hearing these stories. But my vets were mostly combat vets who came back, and in their therapy, they talked about spitting, particularly in the first year. I don’t just want to use the word “spitting,” but spitting is the ultimate negative insult. There are other ways of spitting, which were common, too. But you’re speaking to one who was spat on twice his first month back--by people my parents’ age.

JL: Were these antiwar people who spit on you?

SM: No. It was just the way I looked. I had come back and I was wearing my Vietnam gear, and I looked kind of scruffy, I was growing my hair long. It was just general anger.

Whether we agree or don’t agree on the spitting, it was part of the anger and frustration by Americans, whether they were World War II vets, Korean vets or non-vets who spat on us, or people who spat words of degradation or scapegoating. I experienced it, and it was reported to me by so many, this negative attitude toward veterans, particularly in their vulnerable years, the first three to four to five years back. It seemed to be very common in interviewing / counseling sessions. Not necessarily the spit per se coming out of the mouth, but things like “Get a job” or “Why didn’t you do this?”

JL: On the reentry question, whatever we could agree on as having been problematic for Vietnam veterans coming back, you can’t attribute that to the antiwar movement. That’s part of the mythology that gets created.

SM: I agree with that. I don’t think that the major problem was the antiwar thing. There was a multitude of things. First of all, it was a hard war. The mental anguish in that type of environment was as hard as any war anywhere. Were you ever in the triple canopy jungle? Did you ever have to hike three klicks [kilometers] through there not being able to see the enemy, the most sophisticated booby traps in the world, snipers? Taking hills one day, giving them up the next day, taking them again, never seeing the enemy? I think psychologically and physically, it was more wearing than almost any war in the history of our country.

Also, there was Kent State and all the other protesting going on. We were getting mixed messages. And as it got more unpopular, particularly after Tet 1968, the mental anguish got worse. You didn’t even want to go out. Why should we take this hill again? We’re going to be killed; we’re never going to see the enemy. The whole thing was body count.

JL: First of all, only 15% of the men in Vietnam saw combat, and an even smaller percentage saw sustained combat. So, granted that the images you’re presenting here are accurate, the percentage of men with problems because of that would be very small. There are also Senate reports from 1972 on the conditions of Vietnam veterans, and in a couple of the testimonies by psychiatrists or psychiatric workers who worked in Vietnam, they said that a very small percentage of the men they treated for psychiatric problems were combat people.

SM: So?

JL: So in those testimonies, what they’re telling the Senate committee is that psychiatric techniques and measures were being used to handle disciplinary problems. They were being used to handle conflict between GIs.

SM: I was on a psych team, and there weren’t a lot of us; there were only two in Vietnam. But when I was there in 1970, there were major racial problems, major drug problems, major disciplinary problems. It was all about morale. There was this whole embarrassment, this whole confusion. Most of us weren’t sophisticated enough at 19 years old to sort through it.

There were those who hated the protesters initially, and eventually joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and became some of the best protesters of the war. I ran into soldiers who thought Jane Fonda had done the right thing, and I know soldiers today who would kill her if they saw her.

But that whole confusion, that anxiety, and the instability it created in the minds of the soldiers, was devastating. And they came back to that. There was so much anxiety. How to look, how to act. Avoid the Vietnam question, particularly if you’re a vet. And that to me was part of the war at home.

JL: There’s a U.S. Senate report from 1972.

SM: I remember the report.

JL: This is Harris Poll data from 1971. Ninety-nine percent of veterans polled describe their reception by close friends and family as friendly, while 94% said their reception by people their own age who had not served in the armed forces was friendly.

SM: Let me give you the reality behind that. I know these people. These reports were during the war. Congress was demanding this. You want to talk about covering up and sugarcoating and making these Vietnam vets look less hostile? That was going on. I don’t buy any of that. I didn’t then.

JL: The more important part of this, I think, is how and why we remember these things the way we do. For me, it’s really important that this is a generation of Vietnam veterans who turned against a war they’d been sent to fight. And before the war was over. Certainly, it was split. But when I came home in February 1970, I was making statements like, “Nobody who is there supports this war.”

My sense was that, in the unit I left, lots of people were planning to get involved in the antiwar movement when they got home. And that image, that historically grounded memory, is expunged from our consciousness by the image of the victim veteran.

People in this country today don’t remember, have never heard of, Vietnam Veterans Against the War. It’s not part of our legacy. It’s not part of what we remember. But it’s important, especially for the next generation of men. After all, we are what we remember. What I mean is that our identity as a people, our sense of role models, of how to behave, are shaped by these kinds of memories. And when our consciousness about our history is manipulated, as I think it is by this image of the spat-upon veterans, we lose all that.

Certainly, the damage done to the antiwar movement is enormous. They are enormously disparaged by the idea that they spat on people. It intimidates younger people from getting involved politically. We know that. We know that it was useful during the Gulf War period to motivate people to support the war. But as I see it, all of this is based on a false rendering of history. A misunderstanding, a forgetting of what really happened.

I think Vietnam left the country in search of meaning. We lost our sense of destiny with the war. Myths like this may help people process that, but they don’t solve the problem, they don’t deal with the reality. They enable people to stay in denial about what happened in Vietnam.

SM: I believe that the victimization of veterans has to do with the type of war and the situation we were put in, as well as the coming home process, coming back to a country that didn’t want to welcome you. As far as the Gulf War--you don’t recruit guys by talking about the negative. You talk about the deal up front. Look at the sexy commercials and ads: That’s what you’re sold on at 17, 18 years old. “Be all you can be.” Look at the Marine commercial, the shining sword; he’s like Rambo. This is all brainwashing. People are brainwashed to think that.

And, of course, every administration is going to put Vietnam far behind, and if they have to bring it up, they’re going to guarantee you that it will never happen again. We’re going to do it right this time. So come join, come fight. Go to Bosnia. Go wherever we’re going next. Fight. But what you’re saying is so true: It’s major denial. This country has never looked at what happened. America is afraid to look. People realize that if they look, they’re going to get dirty, they’re going to be guilty. They feel like it’s going to be unresolved, like that war was.

It went on and on, and the leadership in this country couldn’t ever give anybody an answer. So what do we do? We turn on the TV and look the other way. That’s why I think many of the things we struggled to do as Vietnam vets, coming back against all odds, are not reported. They’d rather take a vet, flipped-out, on top of something, shooting up, killing.

JL: We probably have another front here of the culture wars in America. And it’s the struggle for control of memory and representation of our own history. It’s not a new front, but I think it’s one that popular culture is making more serious for us to pay attention to.

The power of popular culture, the power of mass entertainment media, is just overwhelming whatever other resources we have in this country to shape our own images of ourselves, to record and pass on our own traditions, to tell who we are as a people. It’s a more difficult challenge now than ever before. We’re becoming so dominated by film culture, by television culture. But we need to demystify war.

SM: Look at the World War II films.

JL: Exactly. Like the idea that war is hell. Of course, war is hell. But repeating this is not the way to peace. It’s not the way to end war. It adds to the allure. There are a lot of other dimensions to war, and we need to let people see that.

We need to let them see, for example, that a lot of men resist war, and that we did in Vietnam. We need to let them behind the curtain to see how complex a situation like Vietnam really was.

* The National Veterans Foundation’s toll-free hotline is (888) 777-4443.