There is a flap about whether returning Vietnam veterans were really spat upon (via Instapundit). One commenter at Countercolumn says that Bob Greene, a former Chicago columnist, wrote a column in the 1980s saying that it was a myth. He received so many stories of spitting that he interviewed the purported victims and wrote a book concluding that many such stories were probably true.
Then Jerry Lembcke wrote a book saying it was a myth, that he researched news stories and they started appearing around 1980. I have no independent source of information on this, but having done literally thousands of WESTLAW and LEXIS/NEXIS searches, I can say that when something starts appearing in the press in the early 1980s, that is almost always a function of when these two news services started including the full texts of major newspapers. (I find a clear Feb. 1, 1981 reference in the New York Times.) Although I can't say for certain that Jerry Lembcke made this error in his research, I can say that my students make this error all the time. I haven't yet read either Greene's or Lembke's book, but in my experience when someone says that a word usage or a story starts appearing around 1980 or in the early 1980s, they are almost always reflecting the limitations of their online search database, rather than the origins of the phenomenon they are tracing.
I'm suspicious of the coincidence between Lembke's account and the beginning of full-text coverage in WESTLAW and LEXIS. In other words, did Lembke's research show that such stories began appearing in the early 1980s, or did his research show that by 1981-82, when the major newspapers came online in full text, the story was already well known?
UPDATE: In the comments below are several seemingly credible first-hand accounts of being spat on. In addition, several note a bunch of 1971 published stories (I found one in the June 2, 1971 Chicago Tribune) involving the claims of an anti-John Kerry serviceman that he was spat on.
I was also able to confirm my speculation above that the spitting meme may have been spread long before 1980. Alfred Kitt, after he had resigned as General Counsel to the Army and was working at Yale, wrote a heartfelt Sept. 15, 1971 op-ed in the Washington Post, looking back on working in a situation in which many thought him a war criminal--and even his own family was against him. Kitt also discussed the plight of the ordinary soldier, including this sentence: "You can’t be fond of being spat on, either literally or figuratively, just because of the uniform you’re wearing."
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yes, because as we know, all people who hold similar viewpoints have the same behavior. Thus we know that all on the right are valiant defenders of america, and all of those on the left are disrespectful of the military. Sheer genius.
Stupid, broken, and drinking your meals through a straw are no way to go through life, son.
I just looked up the Lembcke book on Google Boock Search. He cites a 1995 study by Beamish, Molotch, and Flacks, available on JSTOR. They, in turn, looked at a sample of contemporary newspaper reporting on Vietnam protests, examining the specific articles to see whether they described "anti-protester" words or actions. Their conclusion was generally "no," and they found no accounts of protesters spitting on troops in their sample.
I first saw this in Shafer's column in Slate. Here is part of what I wrote him:
One criticism I have heard of post-dated accounts was directed specifically at the LAX account. According to the 'spittle-deniers', when the soldiers came home on leave, they almost were uniformly flown into the airbases, and not LAX. I am not denying the validity of your story, but I was wondering if you could comment as to the prevalence of direct flights back to American airports. As Mr. Shaffer remarked:
Well, yes. Sounds like a definition!
I mean, if one vet got spit on, and refrained from reacting, we could applaud him for exercising reason and self-control when nobody else did.
But of all of the countless stories of vets getting spit on, not one includes retaliatory violence? I'm curious about that.
K
Although I never thought about it consciously, I think I always viewed the "spitting on our veterans" meme as being principally metaphorical, and in that sense certainly true. Why is it important to determine exactly how much literal spitting occurred, when it is universally acknowledged that much worse things took place?
You betray your lack of knowledge of military affairs. And, yes, you are denying the validity of my story.
It is indeed true that Vietnam vets were flown from the RVN (with a stop on Okinawa for the naval service) via charter aircraft to various Air Force bases. On arrival, the vets were then processed either for separation (largely Army draftees) or, like me, for leave. Either way, we vets had to get home from the Air Force Base of arrival.
Here is how it happened: after processing, we were taken from the AFB via bus to the appropriate civilian airport (LAX for me) to fly home on regularly scheduled airlines. (Except for the lucky guys who lived in southern California and were picked up by their families) I spent several hours in LAX waiting for my flight. LAX was crawling with uniformed military personnel.
The Air Force may have done things differently, but that is how the Army &Marine Corps did it.
KevinQ:
There are few stories of vets retaliating with an assault because it rarely happened. Most vets were adults and used to being disciplined in the face of adversity. And, if still on active duty, they would be court-martialed for various offences.
It never occured to me to retaliate, let alone with force, or even say anything. I just went home and sent my uniform out for cleaning. It astonishes me that you would think otherwise.
Well, then, as I said above, congratulations for exercising reason and self-control when the other person failed to.
However, I still maintain my incredulity that there are no stories of vets, friends of vets, or people around vets, who did respond with violence.
K
Perhaps because the anti-war protesters who worked up the "courage" to spit usually were part of larger groups?
You're barking up the wrong tree. It is possible to do computerized searching of newpapers much older than 1980.
In fact, you can do such a search right now very easily, and it documents a spitting incident involving a Vietnam vet in 1971 (this is not the CBS TV report that some folks have mentioned).
More details here.
As someone who would walk from Mass to sunday school with someone in dress blues in the late 60's (Im putting this 68 by memory) I'd say that any presumption that if it was not in the papers, there was no spitting going on is credulous in the extreme. I remember asking him why they did this. I also remmeber thinking that my uncle was a man of extreme self control.
Oh come on, we're supposed to believe the Army was letting a barely ambulatory soldier whose bleeding is not even under control (apparently from more than one wound) fly on a commercial flight? From your description the guy should have still been in the hospital, not wandering around an airport.
It makes us question the veracity of your whole story.
No real, actual facts, but because it conveys an 'essential truth', it must be an 'actual truth'. Hmmm... this seems like something those vested interests would normally deplore.
Again, go to the deeper question of why... why is it important for the left to debunk the individual 'fact' of the spitting incidents (a tactic the right normally uses... discredit a small part of the narrative in order to dismiss the entirety of the narrative). Meanwhile, why does the right cling just as tenaciously to the idea of this 'essential truth', which is normally something you would see in Mother Jones?
Finally, what does this say about the actual narrative of memory, as experience (something the left often uses and the right dismisses). If a soldier, because the story has repeated so often, and because it represents his feeling, internalizes this story and repeates it, does it then become the truth?
Nick
Oddly enough for most blogs I would be ok with this type of thing, but Volokh seems to run itself by much higher standards.
Did it ever happen? Probably. Just about everything bad has happened once.
But was it even remotely widespread?
No way.
It's a lie. Period. End of story.
And probably the most convincing argument (mentioned above) is what pot-dazed hippy is going to be stupid-enough to take on a battle-tested soldier?
Amazing example here. The relationship between the poster and the person the story is about changed over the course of two paragraphs.
Source: Washington Post, Dec 29, 1967
It wouldn't take much to turn that request from being directed at the President, whom it is difficult to approach, to the instruments of his policy, the soldiers returning from Vietnam, as they were much more numerous and accessible.
Link to an image of the article.
In other words, I agree with LTEC's assertion that this meme is mostly a metaphor with regard to the treatment of returning Vietnam veterans. I applaud any Veteran that withstood a barrage of spit without losing his control and attacking the spitter. I applaud Jane Fonda for not wanting to press charges against her spitter. I would applaud her spitter if he had spit on her AND stood his ground in defiance instead of running away from his actions.
Please. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The "researchers" are looking only to secondary &tertiary sources. There is lots of primary source material they seem to ignore.
I know what happened to me and what I saw. If one is so immature and ignorant of military culture as to assume that soldiers retaliated with violence, then there is no hope for you.
I didn't call the cops or the media. A jerk being a jerk is not a crime and is not newsworthy. (Well, it was neither then!) A Marine striking a citizen would be a crime, newsworthy, and get me in a pile of trouble. Since I'd been taught self-control, it was easy to continue on to my plane and fly away. Left a bad taste in my mouth, as I'd been warned that it might happen, and I hadn't believed the warning.
I think that there were probably far more non-spitters than spitters, and some who are ashamed of the spitting are trying to make it look to history that there was no spitting at all.
The myth is that there was no spitting; there was.
Oh, dear. Just maybe the soldier preferred to recuperate near home &family? There were two Navy corpsmen, one Army medic, and one Navy doctor close by. If he needed to go to a hospital, they would have intervened. Soldiers take care of each other.
Some years later I was in an accident. I had a cast with blood stains for a while. And my dressings sometimes oozed. I did not have to go to the hospital. In fact, I went to work.
However. I wonder why the question is limited to spitting.
What about being flipped off at twenty feet? Mocked with a sneering salute? Those happened, as well, as I know since they happened to me.
One of Greene's stories referred to a vet who, when leaving church, found that the pastor would not shake hands with a killer. Some words like that. I checked it out and heard from his mother, who confirmed it, and a church employee, ditto. The head pastor at the time was elsewhere, but he said the replacement would never have done such a thing. I could not track down the replacement pastor.
I also challenged a SDS leader about such goings-on and he admitted there was a lack of discipline in the organization that resulted in their getting some unnecessarily bad PR.
My opinion is that if spitting on soldiers did occur, it was by very misguided individuals acting by themselves in isolated incidents. It certainly was not encouraged or approved by New Left anti-war organizations, and it certainly was not an organizational tactic.
Minarik was a cofounder, with John O'Neill, of Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace.
VVJP was set up by Nixon for the purpose of discrediting Kerry. This is documented on a Nixon tape.
I think this calls into question the authenticity of the story Minarik told, which was apparently witnessed by no one.
The instructor's name was SGM Jeffries(never knew his first name), and while I guess he could have made it up, I have no reason to believe that he did.
Are all those from the left "spitters?" Of course not. However, spitters do seem to come exclusively from the left. Just as those on the right have to work doubly hard to overcome certain steroetypes about being bible-thumping fundamentalists, the same is true for the left about disrespect towards soldiers.
I am sure that is true. While it happened to me, & someone else who commented here, I have no evidence that it was all that common. I went through LAX in uniform a number of times in the late 60's &early 70's. It only happened once to me (& once at SeaTac).
Another reason why looking to press reports would likley tell one nothing about the reality.
Thanks very much for the JSTOR link. I will look at it.
Jim Lindgren
One criticism I have heard of post-dated accounts was directed specifically at the LAX account. According to the 'spittle-deniers', when the soldiers came home on leave, they almost were uniformly flown into the airbases, and not LAX.
I flew about 10-20 times a year as a student in the early 1970s. I saw lots of soldiers in uniform on commercial flights to and from Chicago.
I raised a question based on my experience in doing searches. I didn't say that Lembcke made this error; I said that I was suspicious of the coincidence. I ordered the book earlier today.
One commenter (James Grimmelmann) came forward to suggest some of Lembcke's evidence. If you know of more, please fill us in.
Jim Lindgren
That said, there is a documented hostility toward American servicemen (as opposed to the people running the war).
For example, Jackie Cooper recounts in his autobiography that when he asked the cast of M*A*S*H (the TV series) to send Christmas greetings to the troops in 1973, only Wayne Rogers and McLean Stevenson would do so. At least according to Cooper, the rest of the cast refusedto say anything as simple as "Merry Christmas and I hope you come home safely and soon."
"I was spit on before I went to SEA. November, 1967. Air Force sent me to a graduate communications course for two months at Boston University. We had to wear our uniforms on Thursday. Walking to class one morning, a coed walked straight into my path and spit at me. She was shorter and couldn't spit very well so I just got a little on my chin and most on my shirt. She turned and ran off, laughing, to a boy standing about 30 feet away and they both ran off together.
Later,at USC grad school for three years, no spitting incidents but lots of worry that I was a narc.
As I recall, we had strict guidance about not responding to provocation."
I didn't think too much about it. There was no demonstration going on. Just seemed isolated to me. In a hindsight, that was probably an early example of the behavior. I don't recall hearing anything about spitting in the media until late '68 and into '69. I recall stories about organized gauntlets at SEATAC, SFO, and LAX, but have no personal knowledge of same. Seems to me there was some written command guidance from the Pentagon about not responding and a truth seeker might do some research in the Pentagon archives rather than LexisNexis. That, however, would require a little work instead of cheerily spouting opinions for or against.
"As someone who would walk from Mass to sunday school with someone in dress blues in the late 60's (Im putting this 68 by memory) I'd say that any presumption that if it was not in the papers, there was no spitting going on is credulous in the extreme. I remember asking him why they did this. I also remmeber thinking that my uncle was a man of extreme self control."
Amazing example here. The relationship between the poster and the person the story is about changed over the course of two paragraphs.
It's the same person. The commenter is from Tennessee.
The apologetics for Shafer don't cut it.
Shafer has no interest in examining the claim in depth to see if details are true, to verify everything that can be verified, to evaluate the credibility of the claimant, to ask if the claimant knows of other witnesses, etc.
He instead has figuratively put his fingers in his ears and is chanting "Nyah, nyah, nyah. I can't hear you. You're not real."
Nick
I saw lots of soldiers on commercial aircraft during the Sixties and Seventies. I had friendly conversations with a few of them, those that sat in the same row as I did.
Part of the New Left tried to recruit soldiers, not by spitting at them but with friendliness and genuine sympathy. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War had close ties with the New Left and actually was part of it. Ron Kovic of Born on the Fourth of July fame was a friend. I used to run in to him occasionally on the Venice Beach.
I defended quite a few soldiers who were in trouble at courts-martial throughout Southern California. I didn't respect military justice as an institution, but I certainly came to respect some of the people who were part of the military justice system.
My only point is that the New Left was not at all hostile to soldiers in the ranks. There may have been a few people who were part of the New Left who were of a different mind, but they must take individual responsibility for that. It was not a New Left thing to spit on soldiers or to show them any personal hostility. In fact, to those of us in the New Left who were political creatures--as opposed to those who were just in it because they were opposed to getting drafted or because of their lifestyle (dope-smoking hippies)--showing personal hostility to soldiers would have been unthinkable.
If it was common enough in 1971 that the NY Times could without controversy make that statement, then surely it was not invented in the 1980s.
That is a completely different argument. You are now suggesting that veterans who were documented in the late 60s and early 70s claiming to have been spat upon are lying. That's not the issue. The point of contention is that supposedly no Vietnam veteran reported being spat upon at the time and that it was invented in the 1980s to discredit the left. Now regardless of whether the veteran was lying at the time, finding instances of veterans claiming to have been spat upon in the public press at the time disproves the argument that "veterans being spat upon" was an urban legend invented in the 1980s.
His book is divided into three sections -- one for soldiers who had positive experiences, ones who were spat on, and one for things "worse than being spit on."
Lembcke, OTOH, simply ignored the first-hand accounts of the veterans as untrustworthy (something no historian would do) and instead took the position that if it wasn't in the Times, it didn't happen. Hard to do, as Mr. L says, if the archives are limited before 1980. You could "prove" that there was no sexual harassment in the 60s and 70s that way, too.
I'm a Vietnam vet and never got spat on, but did get called a baby killer and war criminal a lot. Hard now to describe the sort of visceral hostility to anyone in uniform in those days.
No question that some vets brought this up to show how badly they'd been treated, but it's also true that leftist academics and journalists ignored any evidence that got in the way of debunking this "myth" and selected anything that supported it.
Not exactly. Only those like Minarik who seem to have been political operatives for Nixon.
"Now regardless of whether the veteran was lying at the time, finding instances of veterans claiming to have been spat upon in the public press at the time disproves the argument that 'veterans being spat upon' was an urban legend invented in the 1980s."
Sorry, but that's sort of nonsensical. You don't get to say "regardless of whether the veteran was lying at the time." If the veteran was lying at the time, then it wasn't "an urban legend invented in the 1980s," but it was an urban legend invented "at the time."
Anyway, it's helpful to see some instances of contemporaneous evidence pop up. I think that's what's relevant.
Ahh, but the evidence used to justify calling it an urban legend to begin with was that there were no contemporaneous reports -- that they all appeared in the press sometime after 1980 -- which as you can see, is not true.
I guess my point is that there's not much meaningful difference between the following two statements:
A) there were no contemporaneous reports
B) there were no contemporaneous reports other than one or two that have marginal credibility
For that matter, I think there's not much difference between these two statements, either:
A) there were no contemporaneous reports
B) only a very small number, at most, of credible contemporaneous reports have come to light, as of 2/5/07, despite the research tools that are currently available (which definitely encompass pre-1980 newspapers and magazines, notwithstanding Lindgren's statement on that point), and despite an army of righteous righty Davids (including, for example, some portion of Glenn's 150,000 daily readers) presumably eager to prove Lembcke is an ass.
By the way, I think it might be helpful to review what's been found so far, as far as I can tell, with regard to contemporaneous reports:
A) Several stories about Minarik (see here), who seems to have been a Nixon operative
B) a story about how "a student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) official advocates spitting on President Johnson" (referenced here)
C) a report by CBS News, 12/27/71 (see here, here)
D) Alfred Kitt, 9/15/71, WaPo (see Jim's update)
E) L. James Binder, 11/30/71, NYT (see here, here)
As far as I can tell, D and E are generic references; i.e., they don't attempt to name the spittee or describe other details, such as place or date. In my opinion this tends to create the impression that they are possibly echoes of the story that Minarik told. It seems that he started speaking up just a few months before D and E appeared.
C is potentially interesting, but it's only a cryptic summary of a six-minute news report. Perhaps some intrepid person will get their hands on the videotape (which is apparently available) and create a full transcript. And/or put it on Youtube. This could be a credible, relevant report. Then again, it could be a story about how Pickett attended a war protest and was spat upon by Minarik. Or by Schuman, the guy who spat on Sen. Bayh. Or it could be that Pickett was inspired by Minarik, and made up an unwitnessed incident. I think it's intereresting that C, D and E are clustered together in time, and are all shortly after Minarik spoke up. Why are all these stories clustered within a 7-month window?
If C checks out, then we have one credible, specific, personal, contemporaneous report. In this context, I don't think the difference between zero and one is terribly material. Especially because there's a highly credible contemporaneous report of the spit flying in the opposite direction. In other words, the score seems to be 1-1 (unsanitary war supporters vs. unsanitary war protesters).
By the way, I've plowed through many, many comments at many righty blogs, on this subject. I have come across many people who seem to be totally oblivious to the concept of contemporaneous evidence, but I have not come across any contemporaneous evidence, other than what I listed above.
I apologize for not having had the foresight to run after that chiclet and her brave boyfriend, create an inappropriate scene, and get it into the Boston Globe so you could Google it some 40 years later. Personal testimony aside, I have no other first hand knowledge of spitting events.
As I suggested, a more definitive answer to the question could be found by searching Pentagon archives and reviewing a variety of memoirs and letters. I think you will find many contemporaneous accounts there. Recall that we identified the media as an enemy long ago and would have been unlikely to think we would find a sympathetic ear in the nearest Timesman.
The contemporaneous media portrait in newspapers, books, TV shows, and movies of the returning Vietnam veteran was that of a drug crazed psychopath who actually relished killing babies although in only a few instances did he actually descend to cannibalism. He was the standard villain and/or victim and certainly no one wanted to give him a job. Witness the left's own model of probity, John Kerry, with his fantastical tales before a Senate committee and various other Winter Soldier frolics.
You and others who want to deny/minimize contemporaneous demonizing treatment of Vietnam veterans are just shoveling your collective behavior,shameful by my standards, laudable by yours, down the memory hole.
Other than pointing you to potential rich sources of enough evidence to slake an honest observer's thirst for truth, I'll go no further. I doubt any evidence would convince you, so needy are you for validation of your own prejudices.
Well, looks like, having erased the Vietnam eeperience, you are now free to repeat it. Go for it, Juke, but, this time, don't be surprised if I, comfortably retired, spit back.
How did I survive Vietnam? I didn't. The closest I got to Vietnam was northern California. Yes, I spent most of my two years working on a screwed up research project in Northern California or doing computer programming.
When I arrived in northern California I had never been politically active. I considered myself an antiwar Republican. I thought nuclear warfare was a really bad idea.
While there I finally did encounter a member of the War Resisters League -- a thoroughly pacifist group that was as pro democracy and freedom as any of my right wing friends are. She was involved in doing informational picketing outside the Presidio. Once the poor woman got over her shock at hearing my story -- it was pretty damned weird -- she recommended that I head on down to the WRL office in San Francisco. That's how I got involved in the New Left, at least that part of it that supported liberty and democracy.
What did I see as someone who was, in some fashion, active in the New Left (at least the pacifistic, democratic, liberty loving part) while being in some fashion a soldier? The people I hung out with could not have been friendlier to any soldier. I don't know about the authoritarian/totalitarian lefties. My friends, I recognize now, deliberately kept me away from those people. Did we ever argue about anything? Well, I firmly expressed the view that the Apollo project (the first landing happened my last couple of months in the Army) was both good and important for the human race. Some people disagreed with me. But even they respected my position.
Did I ever encounter any hostility? Well, when I moved back east, I did run into some of the more authoritarian leftist types. Some of them were pretty hostile. No one every called me a "baby killer" to my face, though. That could be due to the fact that these encounters were a part of the normal life of a physicist now a civilian, not a soldier in uniform.
What do I make of the spitting and other stories reflecting hostility to the troops? There's probably some truth to them. I also suspect that some people are hyping them to advance a political position. I'd take the whole controversy with more than a grain of salt.
I don't know if I'll check back in here to see reactions. I might, but I'm pretty busy these days. I do try to see what kind of reactions I do get when I make a blog posting.
It's not just that you didn't do that. It's that apparently no one, or almost no one, did that. This tends to create the impression that it didn't happen nearly as often as some people claim.
Also, creating "an inappropriate scene" is far from the only way that something like this gets into the press. Here's another way: you tell someone, and a reporter hears about it, and they call you and get details because they decide it's worth mentioning in a story. It turns out that reporters have a lot of space to fill and are always on the lookout for something, anything, they can put in that space.
By the way, it's not just the absence of newspaper/magazine articles. Contemporaneous evidence potentially comes in many other forms, such as police reports, hospital reports, and personal letters.
"a more definitive answer to the question could be found by searching Pentagon archives and reviewing a variety of memoirs and letters. I think you will find many contemporaneous accounts there."
If there are indeed "many contemporaneous accounts" in those places, it's interesting to note how many of those accounts have been located so far by the countless righty bloggers and commenters who are excited about this issue: zero.
"Recall that we identified the media as an enemy long ago and would have been unlikely to think we would find a sympathetic ear in the nearest Timesman."
Recall that Nixon was reelected by a landslide in 1972. I think it's fair to guess that the number of newspapers that endorsed him was some integer significantly larger than zero. I realize that righty victimology requires believing that all newspapers are owned by Commies, but it's not actually true.
"You and others who want to deny/minimize contemporaneous demonizing treatment of Vietnam veterans"
I deny nothing which is proven. I am skeptical about things that are not. This has to do with being rational, not with being right or left.
I understand your being skeptical; you're just wrong in your conclusions. Spitting wasn't a crime, assaulting a citizen would have been. We had enough self-control to ignore the former and avoid the latter. The myth is that it did not happen, it did. I suspect that it probably did not happen as much as some say it did, but it definately happened more often than those who deny it will admit.
I see this as a rather noisy attempt to rewrite history by those who've become ashamed of their previous behavior.
Question: What is a guy to do if it happened to him?
Begin to doubt? Consult you to get his mind right?
As I said earlier, I got some hostile and venomous reactions thrown at me. A friend got a real ration of crap when on a civilian flight within the US, while in uniform.
Of course, in those days, anybody with thick arms, flat belly, short hair and a shower within the previous week was pretty obviously a soldier. There being few others looking the same. Which is probably the reason I got some crap from some girls when I was walking in a park in jeans and pullover. They were going canoeing, and upon seeing me, began doing smart-ass imitations of a manual of arms, and laughing.
But not spit upon.
IMO, the differentiation between spitting and other hostile acts is solely because the deniers think they can make a case that spitting didn't happen, and by means of planted axioms, that the other stuff didn't either.
I call bullshit and deliberate bullshit. In other words, you(all) know better.
Really, to say that "if it wasn't in the papers we checked it didn't happen" is a bit much.
Reminds me of another academic exercise some years ago when some dons wanted to disprove the "myth" of indigenous cannibalism. They started by dismissing all European accounts on the grounds that the Europeans had used accusations of cannibalism to justify imperialism, so they were obviously lying. As for the native accounts, they were to be interpreted metaphorically.
Presto! No evidence of cannibalism! All a myth.
Seems like Lembcke is doing the same thing -- selecting a source of information that just happens to confirm *his* beliefs, and ignoring everything else. Not exactly good sociology, but not unusual these days either.
At one base, Rep. Conyers had a conference about how bad it was to be black in the military. One soldier said, it was reported, that he had been refused admission to the base hospital because he was black. The Detroit News reported that. I called them and told them we didn't have a base hospital. I asked them what they planned to do about the story. I don't know what they did, but the person I talked to said that the story was already out and there was nothing they could do about it. So I should go whining to a reporter?
Worse than spitting: My brother was killed overseas and the usual notice appeared in the papers. My folks got some calls saying he deserved it. How about it,Jukebox? Is my father lying?
Or does this not count?
Here is further confirmation that the meme was well-established long before 1980. It appears in a Senate sub-committee publication from 1971.
Drug Abuse Prevention and Control:
United States Senate: Committee...
U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1971.
OCLC: 251394
Google Books Page
p. 388
"In one sense one could argue that it would not be vastly different from another war. In World War II people suffered incalculable hardships, however they had one sustaining hope. The war was only one slice out of the pie of their lives, it would be over at a certain point and they would return to a different sort of world where what they had done would be appreciated and rewarded. The Vietnam veterans consistently report an incident that goes something like this:
For the men in Vietnam what incidents like that represent is that the war is not going to be over as far as they're concerned. Rather than coming home and being rewarded for their participation, they are going to be hated, despised almost as thoroughly as they are by the people they are now forced to live among in Vietnam."
Probably not proof that it occurred. But, pretty good proof that Lembcke's study is shoddy work. But, he gets cited as the final authority on this issue with numbing regularity. Just check Google Books.
But one thing is beyond dispute. The returning soldiers did not get the same sort of welcome home that soldiers returning from other wars got. I think that was a contributing factor to the large incidence of post traumatic stress disorder and other psychiatric illnesses among returning Viet Nam veterans. They got little reinforcement and a lot of negative feelings when they returned home after experiencing the traumas and stresses of war.
In about 1974 I represented a guy who had been sentenced to prison for committing four armed robberies in two weeks. He failed to surrender himself and became a fugitive. I became his lawyer after he was captured. The court gave him probation. I put on evidence that he had won two Silver Stars in combat in Viet Nam and, through a Veterans Hospital counsellor, that he suffered from post-Vietnam stress disorder. In a short period within a year after his return from Viet Nam, he had lost his job, his home, his wife. It was then he committed the four armed robberies. He went on to a productive life.
Perhaps Lembcke's worst trangression as a scholar is missing the January, 15, 1979 episode of Lou Grant, entitled "Vet"
from which Rambo's speech in "First Blood" was almost directly stolen.
If, as Lembcke suggsts, the urban legend of anti-war spitting began around 1980, he should probably blame Ed Asner.
Really? I think that probably varies from place to place. In Mountain View, CA, assault is defined as follows: "physical attack on another person. Includes domestic violence. Includes attacks with hands, feet, firearm, knife, or other objects. Includes minor assaults such as spitting or slapping."
Anyway, reporters (especially in local and regional papers) write about all sorts of things that aren't crimes. And police reports document all sorts of things that aren't crimes. If you go down to your local police station and tell them you're upset because your neighbor looked at you sideways, here's what they're probably going to do: file a report (although if you did it every single day they would stop after a while).
Guess what happens to those reports: they probably never get thrown away. They're not reachable via google, but it's about time someone looked around and found one (especially because there's probably a lot of social overlap between cops and vets).
richard: "What is a guy to do if it happened to him?"
Simply this: tell someone. Anyone. A friend, family member or colleague. People love to talk. Word spreads. Someone from the local paper hears about it and calls you to ask some questions. This is a very simple, non-exotic scenario, and it doesn't require you to slug anyone, or call 911, or call (directly) a reporter.
fredr: "to say that 'if it wasn't in the papers we checked it didn't happen' is a bit much"
The papers "we checked?" That's disingenuous. It's not just absent from the papers Lembcke checked, or I checked. It's also pointedly absent from the papers that lots of righty bloggers are checking, right now. I'm sure Glenn (et al) has lots of eager readers who would like to go down in history as the key player in Lembckegate.
And, as I've said, contemporaneous evidence comes in many forms other than newspaper reports.
"Seems like Lembcke is doing the same thing -- selecting a source of information that just happens to confirm *his* beliefs, and ignoring everything else"
Ignoring "everything else?" What am I "ignoring?" I'm open to any source of information that's contemporaneous. Show me.
And what would a reporter say, presuming he wasn't the caller? "Mr. Aubrey says, etc, although it cannot be confirmed and the local chapter of the SDS denied doing it, while smirking and chuckling."
The fact was, we talked to each other, and, when we thought nobody was watching, we even talked to [looks both ways] civilians. The knowledge of the spitting and such other crap was so widespread when I was in--1969-1971--that any time you said you'd experienced it, the response was to shake the head, as in, one more, huh?
Perhaps the reason it didn't make the papers was that it was so common as to not be newsworthy. We never figured it was newsworthy. As the man says, we don't report all the airplanes that land safely.
Abuse happened, it happened to me and to my family and my friends and that it's possible to avoid finding it reported, that's meaningless.
I will tell you, this country is fortunate the troops took the abuse personally and not corporately.
That would explain why the hundreth incident didn't get reported. It wouldn't explain why the first ten were ignored. Before something becomes commonplace, it's not.
"I didn't hear about it for years. ... I don't think he'd be talking about that with his golfing buddies ... we talked to each other"
Sorry, I'm confused. First you suggest that this was a kind of painful experience that no one would ever talk about. Then you say "we talked to each other." A bit of a mixed message.
You know the 'net acronym for "deliberately obtuse"? IT's "DO"
"We" meant soldiers. My father didn't tell me about the calls until years later. Big difference.
It never occurred to me to call a reporter. I trusted them then as much as I do now, which is to say, not at all. I can't speak for others, but the general social view of reporters is down with used car salesmen. So I guess it wouldn't make much sense to expect soldiers to talk to reporters.
In any event, there are numbers of contemporaneous references to the issue that any reporter who was interested and energetic and thought he wouldn't be fired for looking into it would have had all he needed to start. Nobody called me, and nobody I know said they were contacted by hungry journalists.
So. You have a bunch of lame reasons why it should have made the papers. The implication is that, because it didn't make the papers, it didn't happen.
You can push that all you like. Just remember, I am not required to modify my own personal history to mesh with your revisionism. Nobody is. So I suggest you keep it up. You know, holes and sending out for more shovels and so forth. Keep it up.
The number of times it made the papers seems to be very close to zero. The implication of this is not that "it didn't happen." The implication of this is that it was far from "common" (your word).
There is no earthly reason to tell a reporter about this sort of thing. Among other things, it would be whining, which is not considered respectable. And you really don't want the hippies to think they hit where it hurt. Not that it did, but they'd certainly take it that way.
Sorry, Juke. You're wrong. But, as I say, it would be great if you kept up trying to convince us we didn't see it and it didn't happen.
You wrote: First you suggest that this was a kind of painful experience that no one would ever talk about. Then you say "we talked to each other." A bit of a mixed message.
Not a mixed message at all. We talk to each other about a lot of things we wouldn't bother talking to people like you about. Running to a reporter or a cop wouldn't be worth our time.
There's a story about Satchmo Armstrong which, if not true, ought to be.
When asked to define jazz, he replied, "Cat gotta ask, ain' nevah gonna know."
You ever get that feeling on various blogs?
The number of times it made papers which are now online and readily available to Internet researchers is very low. Can you start from the top of this thread and read it all again? The main point is that most newspapers are not indexed on-line from anytime before 1980. A few are, but most are not. That's the inherent bias in the research. We have shown that even in the very small subset of the ones that are available, there are several incidents listed. I'm sure that if someone were to spend significant time in hundreds of newspaper morgues and go through old microfiches and files by hand, the results would be drastically different. You could research about a week per day of work, maybe two after you got the hang of it. I don't have that kind of resources.