[News] The Myth of the Spat Upon Vets

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/philion10132006.html

October 13, 2006


An Interview with Jerry Lembcke


The Myth of the Spat Upon Vets

By STEPHEN PHILION

Jerry Lembcke is the author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0814751474/counterpunchmaga>The 
Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of 
Vietnam, He teaches Sociology at Holy Cross University.

Q: In the recent days the British general 
responsible for British troops in Iraq has make 
remarkably strong 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0%2C%2C1921450%2C00.html>calls 
for British troops to be removed from Iraq. So 
it's pretty timely to have a discussion like 
this, since I'm finding that there are quite a 
few students who are opposed to the US occupation 
of Iraq, but are afraid to "go against" the 
soldiers, many of whom are friends or relatives. 
First thing, though, is, for the sake of 
Counterpunchers who haven't read your book The 
Spitting Image, maybe you could give a quick 
intro to the key arguments of the book.

Lembcke: I got interested in this topic in the 
runup to the Persian Gulf War in 90-91. There 
were students who were opposed to the war, but 
afraid to speak out because of what they had 
heard about the antiwar movement and veterans 
during the Vietnam War era. These stories of 
'<http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0430-21.htm>spat 
upon' vets were beginning to circulate in the 
news and students on campuses were picking up on 
these stories. I had never heard these stories 
before. So I got interested in where they were 
coming from, how long they had been told, who was telling them and so forth.

One thing led to another and I kept looking back 
in the historical records, when people were 
actually coming home from Vietnam and I found out 
that no, there was no record. Not only was there 
no record of people spat on, but none of anyone 
claiming that they were spat on. So then I got 
interested in the stories as a form of myth and 
found out that in other times and other places, 
especially Germany after WW 1, soldiers came home 
and told stories of feeling rejected by people 
and particularly stories of being spat on.

Like with the case of the Vietnam stories many of 
the 'spitters' were young girls and knowing that 
these things happened at abother time and place 
supposedly, I found out about a Freudian 
psychologist who wrote about male fantasies and 
treated these stories as fantasies, expressions 
of the subconscious, men who felt they'd lost 
manhood in the war. When I told a psychologist 
friend of mine in womens studies, she asked me 
who the spitters wereshe too thought it was 
likely a myth since the spitters were women, an expression of loss of manhood.

Looking a little further, I found that French 
soldiers returning from Indochina after defeat at 
Dien Bien Phu also told stories of being treated 
badly, rejected by women, attacked by women on 
the streets, having to take their uniforms off 
before going in public, being ashamed of their 
military service. These were very similar to 
stories circulating in the 1980's in the US. The 
time gap between the end of the Vietnam War and 
when the stories began to be told is also a sign 
that there is something of an element of myth or 
legend. That's the key part of the book, not 
whether or not such things, since it's hard to 
refute what isn't documented, ever happened, as much as the mythical element.

And of course we see how the rise of the myth had 
an effect on support for the war in Iraq.

Q: And what is the link that you see?

Lembcke: In a nutshell, most people remember 
there was pretty widespread opposition to the US 
going into Iraq with huge demos in March and 
April of 2003. And then there were a good number 
of 'support the troops' rallies that tapped into 
the popular sentiment that something bad happened 
to the troops when they returned from Vietnam. 
The very slogan "support the troops" with the 
yellow ribbons and all that sort of presumes that 
someone doesn't support the troops and that 
presumption is based on that sentiment, belief 
that when people came home from Vietnam they were 
treated badly and we don't want to do that again this time.

By having these rallies in 2003, the people who 
supported the war use support the troops as a way 
to support the war. A lot of these rallies told 
stories of Vietnam vets who had been spat on. I 
got calls from people in Florida, North Carolina, 
Vermont,news reporters who had been at these 
rallies and asking me, "What about these 
stories?". Sometimes they would even have men who 
said they were vets or family members who claimed 
they remembered someone being spat on. The myth 
was used to drum up emotional troops for the 
troops, or better said, to dampen down opposition 
to the war. Again, the same way it worked during 
the Persian Gulf War, some were afraid of being 
outspoken against the war lest they be accused of being 'against the troops'.

I teach at Holy Cross College and just the other 
day in one of my classes, in the context of 
talking about the context of the Bush 
administration's strategy of being very 
accusatory toward critics of the war policy as 
being 'cut and run' Democrats, 'soft on 
terrorism'With no more context than that, one of 
my students said she was 'undecided about the 
war, but as long as the troops were fighting it 
was really important to 'support the troops and 
we have to support the mission'Now is not the 
time to be critical of the war, it was, in her mindall mixed together.

That's the way it works on people's emotions. It throws them off-target.

The target is the war itself and what we need to 
be doing is opposing the war itself. Often 
emotions get kind of confused with this stuff 
about 'supporting the troops'. It creates just 
enough space for the administration to push on ahead.

Q: Yes, it seems to be a good strategy to 
distract from the main issue, namely the policy 
of making war itself. I never quite understand 
why it's so important to focus on the supporting 
the troops as so central an issue. It doesn't 
really matter, since the troops in fact have 
little, in fact no say, in war policies to begin with.

Lembcke: Yes, it confuses the means and ends of 
war, it becomes a form of demagoguery. It makes a 
non-issue an issue, 'support or not supporting 
the troops'. At a humanitarian level, none of us 
wants to put people in harm's way. The people who 
oppose the wars are most strident in that 
objective of keeping people out of the war. 
That's not an issue, but it keeps us from 
focusing on the war itself and talking about it. 
And one of the things I'm concerned about now is 
a certain strain of the anti-war movement ahs 
gotten caught up in this itself. There's a 
certain group of antiwar types who focus on what 
happens to the soldiers, how they're damaged 
psychologically, physically,I've been to a number 
of anti-war rallies now where all they talk about 
is PTSD and what happens to 'our boys' when we 
send them off to war. It's sort of a mirroring of 
the political right's approach. They make the 
'support the troops' ideology the basis for 
supporting the war, and some strands in the 
anti-war movement now mimic that we need to 
oppose the war by 'supporting the troops' and, 
I've been to some antiwar protests where very 
very little is said about the war itself!

We hear instead about getting the troops the help 
they need and heart rendering stories of parents 
of sons who have committed suicide after they 
come home, etc. That stuff from the anti-war left 
is as beclouding as similar rhetoric from the 
right, in that it takes us away from a political 
discourse, which we need in order to focus our 
energies around stopping the war and its causes.

Q: What's your sense in terms of how this myth is 
replayed now with vets coming home from Iraq and 
claims of their being 'abused' by the antiwar movement or sentiment?

Lembcke: I've heard a few of these stories. 
Again, in the spring of '03, stories circulated 
about soldiers being spat on. In New Hampshire a 
story went around that a woman in the National 
Guard had been pelted with a box of stones by 
antiwar teenagers. None of these stories have 
turned out to be supportable by any sort of 
evidence. And then, periodically, other stories 
like one in Seattle of a guy who was back from 
Iraq marching in a parade, 'spat on', 'booed', 
'called baby killer', etc. The same, no serious evidence.

Occasionally then I get reports of these, but 
I've always suspected if the war goes down as a 
'lost war', we'll hear more such stories, but the 
more important point, I think, is that the image 
of spat on Vietnam Vets is so engrained and part 
of the American memory and cultural sub-text, it 
almost doesn't have to be reaffirmed through 
stories of Iraq Vets being 'spat on' or 
'mistreated'. It's almost as though the Vietnam 
Spitting myth is a background that everyone 
'knows' about and when the President talks of 
Democrats not supportive of the war or otherwise 
baits antiwar people, the background that makes 
that resonant is the belief that something untoward happened to Vietnam Vets.

So it's not necessarily good news for the 
anti-war movement if we don't hear stories of 
Iraq Vets being 'spat on'. My fear is the 
mythical spat on Vietnam Vet is now so 
internalized as something that "happened', it 
doesn't have to be spoken anymore as a contemporary phenomenon.

Q: What's the significance of the documentary 
"<http://www.sirnosir.com/>Sir! No Sir" , which 
tells the story of the GI antiwar movement during 
Vietnam, in terms of what that film can tell 
students trying to organize antiwar movements on campuses across America today?

Lembcke: Oh, I think it's terribly powerful. Even 
thought there's no mention of Iraq, Afghanistan, 
or the War on Terror in the film, it seems that 
everyone that sees the film can extrapolate from 
it to the ways it applies to the wars that we're 
currently involved in. Probably the greatest 
impact it has is on young people in the military 
today. I've done quite a bit of public speaking at showings of the film.

First of all, it reminds even those of us 
involved in the antiwar movement as vets of stuff 
that they had forgotten about or informed us 
about things that were going on at that time that 
we didn't know about. They're kind of surprised 
to find out quite a few things about the GI 
antiwar movement that they didn't know.

Q: One of the things I was surprised to learn of 
was the extent of support shown to Jane Fonda by 
American soldiers stationed in Asia during the 
war at the 
"<http://www.rottentomatoes.com/click/movie-10000934/reviews.php?critic=all&sortby=default&page=1&rid=820716>Free 
The Army" tour that she, other famous actors such 
as Donald Southerland, and soldiers/vets 
organized at US bases. Considering all the media 
discourse about vets' anger at Fonda , I had no 
idea that some 60,000 soldiers had attended and 
enthusiastically received her at those shows, 
which served as an alternative to Bob Hope's 
pro-war tours at the time. Also the extent of 
African American soldiers in the antiwar movement 
was something I never fully heard about in 
histories of the antiwar movement, which the 
movie makes clear was very deep and militant.

Lembcke: I was in Vietnam in 1969 and got 
involved in Vietnam Veterans Against the War once 
I returned and yet there were things in that film 
that I had not known about at the time. On the 
one hand there was a lot in the news in the 
papers about the vets antiwar movement at the 
time, which I know now just from researching it. 
I don't think there was a blackout at all, often 
it was front page news and people knew about it.
One of the things I found interesting was looking 
at Stars and Stripes, the civilian published but 
military supported publication that soldiers got 
in Vietnam and it was all antiwar stuff. It 
reported the story of Billy Gene Smith, the GI 
accused of fragging an officer, which is featured 
in Sir! No Sir!. It had stories about soldiers in 
Vietnam wearing black armbands in support of the 
1969 anti-war Moratorium back home. It turns out 
Stars and Stripes is a pretty good source for 
information on the vets' and soldiers antiwar 
sentiment and movement back then!

So people knew of these things then. The more 
important story is what's happened to that in 
people's consciousness and memory. It certainly 
is gone now, even from people who were active in 
the vets antiwar movement then. Sir! No Sir! has 
helped to bring it back into the public memory 
and showing that a vets antiwar movement can 
happen now is very helpful for people teaching in 
college and high school. They can take this 
knowledge into the classroom and that part of the 
history can get back into the curriculum. Younger 
people will now get a different view of what happened then.

I've talked to a few soldiers back from Iraq, one 
a Holy Cross University Law School graduate who 
was an ROTC cadet who is back from Iraq and has 
spoken after showings of Sir No Sir! and likewise 
didn't know about the GI antiwar movement during 
Vietnam. She reports that there is a lot of 
opposition to the US occupation of Iraq among US 
soldiers in Iraq but it doesn't express itself 
because there's no organization, no organized 
communication between people. Maybe the film will 
play a catalyst role, if people see this film 
about organized GI opposition to the Vietnam War, 
it might inspire and even spark their imagination 
about the kinds of thing that can be done to 
oppose the war from within the military.

Q: And the significance of that for today?

Well, the GI antiwar movement became a vitally 
important part of the antiwar movement during 
Vietnam. And that is likely to be the case today 
also. Lots of people are asking what's the 
difference between today and Vietnam? Why isn't 
there a movement today? One possible answer is 
that the movement within the military is not 
quite congealed yet, but that the potential is 
there. Hopefully Sir! No Sir! can have an effect 
on accelerating that development a bit.

Q: One of the things that struck me about the 
film is that you saw that soldiers were not just 
protesting the war because of their equipment 
issues or technical matters about how the war was 
being conducted, but actually because they were 
against what was happening to the people of 
Vietnam because of the war and they were 
learning, while deployed there, about the actual 
history of the Vietnamese people's struggles 
against foreign occupation as opposed to what 
they were brainwashed to believe in boot camp or high school teachers.

Lembcke: Here's a big difference, namely the 
nature of the 'enemy' and how it's perceived. In 
the later years of Vietnam we came back rather 
sympathetic to the cause of the other side. One 
of the vets interviewed in the film, David Klein, 
talks of how he was shot and how he had shot a 
Viet Cong soldier. He then recalls how he looked 
at the fellow he had shot dead and realizes that 
this man was fighting for his country too, for 
freedom. That was a real consciousness raising 
moment for him and he dedicated moments like that 
to doing something to honor the loss of that 
man's life, namely to end the war and 
contributing to the other side's fight for 
freedom. I certainly came back in February 1970 
with such sentiments, though I'm not sure exactly 
how it happened. Surely conversations with other 
GIs and my own reading at the time helped with that.

But today it is harder to portray the 'enemy' in 
Iraq or Afghanistan in that kind of sympathetic 
way, there's a political challenge there for the 
American antiwar movement to understand what the other side represents.

It needs to get some grasp on what is supportable 
in what the other side is doing in Iraq and 
Afghanistan, like we did in the Vietnam War. 
Recall in the early phases of the Vietnam war, Ho 
Chi Minh and the Viet Cong were called terrorists 
and there tactics were called tactics of terror. 
Today we talk about the roadside bomb in Iraq, 
but during Vietnam there was the satchel charges 
were one of the main Vietnamese War.

Q: For those of us who haven't fought in a war, what is a Satchel Charge?

Lembcke: A briefcase that would be loaded with 
explosives, dropped off some place and would 
explode. The point I'm making is that early in 
the war in Vietnam the Vietnamese and the 
Vietcong weren't as viewed sympathetically as 
they were by the early 1970's. What changed was 
how they were represented in terms of what they 
were all about. I think we need to go through 
that rethinking process on Iraq now, though I'm not sure where that goes.

We don't right now have an embraceable 'other' as 
we did in Vietnam and what the complexity of the 
other side means, how it's to be sorted out, 
what's supportablebut we need to find if there is 
something there to be supportable and that can 
have a big impact on the military elements 
against the war, namely that there is an 
honorableness to the 'enemy' on the other side as 
was the case for GIs against the war in Vietnam.

Q: I always find it interesting to focus on what 
happens with US when it does negotiate with the 
armed opposition in Iraq, what the US's key 
demands are during such negotiations and how the 
US can't meet the oppositions' demands because of 
that oppositions' demands, no matter how low the 
bar is set, because those demands go against the 
interests of the US, given its actual goals in Iraq.

Lembcke: Most of us understand the war ended when 
the Vietnamese people won. And when we recognized 
that the sooner the other side wins, the war is 
over. The US is not gonna stop fighting until it 
stops, when the US is unable or unwilling to win 
the war. That conclusion is very sobering if it's 
applied to the war in Iraq. That's a pretty 
sobering thought, is this war going to go on 
until the US can't do so anymore and at what 
point is the US antiwar movement going to see 
that the war won't end until the other sides win 
and who is the other side? It's very complex, the 
other side is very divided, not a monolith. So I 
don't know how that lesson from Vietnam 
translates into something we can act on to inform our political work today.

Q: There's plenty of writing out there on the 
liberal left that we can't leave now because of the nature of the opposition.

Lembcke: Yes, there is that, but you know the 
pro-war elements during Vietnam used that logic 
too. They often said we can't leave now, we'll 
have so many losses or the 'bloodbath' that would happen if we left too soon

Q: I find that when I deal with people on the 
liberal-left who will argue that calling for 
leaving Iraq immediately is 'isolationism'. But 
if you argue back that this is not isolationism 
we are arguing, but that the US should pay 
massive reparations to the people of Iraq for the 
damage the US invasion and occupation has caused 
the Iraqi people-no reply forthcoming. They have 
no answer as to why we know that that is not 
going to happen if the US stays there or if it leaves!

But it opens up the question that people on the 
liberal-left who support staying there that the 
pro-war or lukewarm "anti-war" liberal left have 
no answer for, namely what is the purpose of what 
the US is doing in Iraq? It's just set in stone 
for them that if we leave things will be worse, 
even though the evidence now is so overwhelmingly 
that the US occupation is the key source of the 
violence we see in Iraq today. So much so that 
the argument that once was so common among the 
liberal left, "well the Iraqis want us to stay" 
has really collapsed under the weight of Iraqi 
realities. Now even the Iraqis polled are saying 
in big majorities in 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/26/AR2006092601721.html>US 
State Dept. commissioned polls that they want us 
to leave now and it's ok to shoot US soldiers.

Lembcke: The NYT kind of buried that story on the 
inside, but the antiwar movement can use that 
information. We shouldn't have to make that 
argument, it should be apparent we're not 
welcome, but sometimes data helps to persuade.

Q: It also throws the light back on Iraqis, which 
the 'supports the troops' antiwar movement focus 
doesn't do. The focus is so often only on 
Americans as though the only impact is on 
Americans or it's the only one that matters, 
except for small periods like Abu Ghraib or Haditha

Lembcke: Yes, the war becomes all about us and 
erases Iraqis, much like we did during Vietnam 
erasing the agency of Vietnamese people.

Q: Yes, it's interesting that in the process, 
ironically, it ignores the agency of the soldiers 
and their potential role in stopping the war and 
recognizing the actual roots of war itself.

Lembcke: Yes, you know one of the best new 
sources of information for the antiwar movement 
is another film called 
"<http://www.sonyclassics.com/whywefight/>Why We 
Fight". I saw it with two classes and they 
haven't stopped talking about it. If they had 
heard before about the term 'military industrial 
compex", now it makes it more real. Now they 
think about the war beyond the slogans of "the 
war is for freedom, democracy'which is all most 
Americans know. The oil thing too has also become 
a kind of cliché they don't think about much. For 
my students those bumper stickered explanations 
are erased and the film puts the war in a much 
more material and realistic framing. It's a film 
that might have as important an impact as Sir! No Sir!

Stephen Philion is an assistant professor of 
sociology at St. Cloud State University in the 
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, 
teaching social theory, sociology of race, and 
China and Globalization. His writings can be 
found at his 
<http://stephenphilion.efoliomn2.com/>website. He 
can be reached at: <mailto:stephen_philion at yahoo.com>stephen_philion at yahoo.com


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