When Vietnam vets came home (Soldiers being spit on is just an urban myth)

WINSTON-SALEM -- Last week voters went to the polls to select a vision for the future. Now Americans must find a way forward together. This week, as we honor service and sacrifice on Veterans Day, an image from this political season must be put to rest.

The presidential campaign featured the resurgence of a myth from the early 1990s. That myth is that soldiers returning from Vietnam were spit upon by citizens or war protesters. That claim has been used to turn honest differences of opinion about the war into toxic indictments.

As a scholar of urban legends I am usually involved with accounts of vanishing hitchhikers and involuntary kidney donors. These stories are folklore that harmlessly reveals the public imagination. However, accounts of citizens spitting on returning soldiers -- any nation's soldiers -- are not harmless stories. These tales evoke an emotional firestorm.

I have studied urban legends for nearly 20 years and have been certified as an expert on the subject in the federal courts. Nonetheless, it dawned on me only recently that the spitting story was a rumor that has grown into an urban legend. I never wanted to believe the story but I was afraid to investigate it for fear that it could be true.

Why could I not identify this fiction sooner? The power of the story and the passion of its advocates offer a powerful alchemy of guilt and fear -- emotions not associated with clearheadedness.

Labeling the spitting story an urban legend does not mean that something of this sort did not happen to someone somewhere. You cannot prove the negative -- that something never happened. However, most accounts of spitting emerged in the mid-1980s only after a newspaper columnist asked his readers who were Vietnam vets if they had been spit upon after the war (an odd and leading question to ask a decade after the war's end). The framing of the question seemed to beg for an affirmative answer.

In 1998 sociologist and Vietnam veteran Jerry Lembcke published "The Spitting Image: Myth, Media and the Legacy of Viet Nam." He recounts a study of 495 news stories on returning veterans published from 1965 to 1971. That study shows only a handful (32) of instances were presented as in any way antagonistic to the soldiers. There were no instances of spitting on soldiers; what spitting was reported was done by citizens expressing displeasure with protesters.

Opinion polls of the time show no animosity between soldiers and opponents of the war. Only 3 percent of returning soldiers recounted any unfriendly experiences upon their return.

So records from that era offer no support for the spitting stories. Lembcke's research does show that similar spitting rumors arose in Germany after World War I and in France after its Indochina war. One of the persistent markers of urban legends is the re-emergence of certain themes across time and space.

There is also a common-sense method for debunking this urban legend. One frequent test is the story's plausibility: how likely is it that the incident could have happened as described? Do we really believe that a "dirty hippie" would spit upon a fit and trained soldier? If such a confrontation had occurred, would that combat-hardened soldier have just ignored the insult? Would there not be pictures, arrest reports, a trial record or a coroner's report after such an event? Years of research have produced no such records.

Lembcke underscores the enduring significance of the spitting story for this Veterans Day. He observes that as a society we are what we remember. The meaning of Vietnam and any other war is not static but is created through the stories we tell one another. To reinforce the principle that policy disagreements are not personal vendettas we must put this story to rest.

Our first step forward is to recognize that we are not a society that disrespects the sacrifices of our servicemembers. We should ignore anyone who tries to tell us otherwise. Whatever our aspirations for America, those hopes must begin with a clear awareness of who we are not.

(John Llewellyn is an associate professor of communication at Wake Forest University.)

About 5-6 years ago, I guess I was sophmore in college, I had a history class at Monmouth University in NJ with a left wing professor (although I didn't realize it at the time).

I remember very clearly the day he told the class how he and his wife were invited to a dinner party at the house of a friend of his wife's. They went in and were sitting down and the conversation turned to the husband of the host. The husband mentioned that he flew B-52s (or whatever the big bombers were called) in Vietnam. My professor then told us that he stood up and cursed the guy and dragged his wife out of the party.

From how he told the story i gathered that this event took place long after the Vietnam war was over.

After he finished telling it I remember how animated and angery he was. This made an impression on me as it is one of the only things I remember about his class! None of us knew what to say, we were just young stupid kids and didn't really have a clue what he was talking about.

In any case, if the hatered and rage that this professor showed NOW was any indication of the attitude back in the 70s then I certainly believe the other testimony posted here.

Just recently, after doing some research myself, I found the actual history of the Vietnam war to be quite different then what I was taught in both high school and college. It was written in terms of Kerry's positions before the election so apologies to those sick of seeing his name:

http://www.neoperspectives.com/johnkerry.htm

Becoming their spokesmen, he famously testified on national television before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, headed by Liberal Democratic Senator William Fullbright.

At this time, American prisoners of war were being held in atrocious conditions by the North Vietnamese. Subject to daily torture, starvation, and disease, they were forced to sign confessions of war crimes and were subjected to continuing propoganda by the North Vietnamese. Senator John McCain, who spent 6 years in captivity, wrote in the May 14, 1973 issue of U.S. News & World Report:

"All through this period," wrote McCain, his captors were "bombarding us with anti-war quotes from people in high places back in Washington. This was the most effective propaganda they had to use against us."

"They used Senator Fullbright a great deal." (1)

Testifying before the committee Kerry said:

I would like to talk on behalf of all those veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.

They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country. (2)

War is hell and in any prolonged engagement in the midst of a civilian population there are going to be some atrocities and civilian casualties, and there are documented instances of American atrocities (My Lai), but certainly nothing was occurring that remotely resembled what Kerry reported to the nation. In the United States military, if a soldier witnesses a war crime, he is required to report it to his commanding officer. If Kerry witnessed (or committed) war crimes he never reported them to his superiors. Thirty years later in Iraq, Kerry and his surrogates have similarly played up the relatively isolated misconducts by American soldiers in the Abu Graib prison. In fact, Kerry called for Defense Secretary Rumsfeld resignation over the scandal.

In reality, American forces generously built schools, hospitals and roads to try to win the 'hearts and minds' of the South Vietnamese people and attempted to minimize civilian casualties. North Vietnamese P.O.Ws were generally treated humanly. Kerry's comments were widely played throughout the media. Public opinion, already turning against the war, began to shift even faster. Moral plummeted on the front lines. Returning soldiers were asked by friends and family if they had committed war crimes, veterans seen in uniform were sometimes booed. This deep resentment and feeling of betrayal is why only 4 out of 20 swift veteran captains who served with Kerry support his candidacy. Hundreds of swift boat veterans, including all of Kerry's surviving superior officers formed a '527' organization, 'Swift Boat Veterans For Truth' to run ads against Kerry during his run for the presidency.

Subsequent military and FBI investigations found that a number of the 150 VVAW veterans whose testimony Kerry cited, including the co-founder, were not even veterans and many had never even seen combat. The investigations also discovered that almost all of their testimony was either blatantly falsified, or uncorroborated. Kerry has never apologized for his actions, but has said he regretted his word choice.

In 1970 Kerry traveled to Paris to visit secretly with two Communist North Vietnamese peace delegations. This action may have been illegal according to US code 18 U.S.C. 953, which states that a U.S. citizen cannot go abroad and negotiate with a foreign power. The penalty for violation is a maximum of three years imprisonment. (28) Kerry has never been charged.

A few years after Kerry's Paris trip, the United States and the North Vietnamese Communist government signed a peace agreement and the United States withdrew from South Vietnam. The Communists immediately violated their agreement, attacked South Vietnam, and entered Saigon on April 30, 1975.

When asked about possible repercussions against the South Vietnamese Kerry answered:

"Having done what we have done to that country, we have an obligation to offer sanctuary to the perhaps 2,000, 3,000 people who might face political assassination or something else."

That same week, he appeared on the Dick Cavett show. "There'd be no interest on the part of the Vietnamese to start massacring people after the U.S. has pulled out," Kerry told Cavett. (5)

Prior to 1975 the North Vietnamese Communists had already killed between 50,000-100,000 of their own citizens in purges, terrors and 'land reforms'. (3) Upon reuniting their country, the North Vietnamese killed or sent to labor camps hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese citizens. Millions of refugees have since fled Vietnam. Known as 'the boat people', they sought refuge wherever they could. At least 100,000 people drowned fleeing the Communists. Others were attacked by pirates, or were repatriated to the hellish labor camps of Vietnam. Today, over 1.2 million South Vietnamese refugees live in the United States. Yet Kerry seemed to believe the primary threat to the Vietnamese people was that posed by the armed forces of the United States.

In December 1975, just months after Saigon fell, the government of neighboring Laos fell to a Vietnamese backed Communist force. Hundreds of thousands were killed in war, famine and political assassination (3). The Hmong tribespeople, loyal American allies before the pullout, were decimated, an estimated ten per cent of them were killed by Communist forces. (6)

On April 17th, 1975 the Khmer Rouge, a Communist guerrilla group led by Pol Pot, overthrew the US backed government (weakened by the US withdrawal) with the help of the North Vietnamese government and China. They forced all city dwellers into the countryside and to labor camps. During their rule, it is estimated that 2 million Cambodians died by starvation, torture or execution. 2 million Cambodians represented approximately 30% of the Cambodian population during that time. (7)

In sum, the American withdrawal left over 3 million dead and caused millions more to flee their homes. Today South East Asia is still impoverished and undemocratic. Growing up, we are taught that the 'domino effect' was a foolish, flawed theory. In reality, it was a perfect predictor of what came to pass. South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia fell to the Communists within a year. Burma battled Communists insurgencies, even while embarking on an even harsher form of socialism that starved it's population. Communist insurgencies, although not ultimately successful, increased in intensity in Thailand. It's possible that Communism could have spread even further and the insurgencies been more successful if the newly formed Communist nations hadn't turned on each other in another orgy of violence.

As these events unfolded, America suffered a terrible weakening of our national pride and our moral leadership in the world was shaken. We were not defeated on the battlefield, we were defeated by weak national leadership and by public opinion here at home. Kerry has never apologized for his actions or testimony, although he admitted he 'used a poor choice of words'.

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