Now think of a "hippie" crossing his path. Picture a burly member of the Green Berets, in full uniform, walking through an airport. So-called "hippies," no matter what else one may have felt about them, were not the most macho people in the world. Also, when one thought realistically about the image of what was supposed to have happened, it seemed questionable. "Bring the boys home." That was the message. One of the most popular chants during the anti-war marches was, "Stop the war in Vietnam, bring the boys home." You heard that at every peace rally in America. It was the leaders of government, and the top generals-at least, that is how it seemed in memory. In 1987, columnist Bob Greene noted:Įven during the most fervent days of anti-war protest, it seemed that it was not the soldiers whom protesters were maligning. Other observers had already noticed the proliferation of stories and questioned whether the spitting stories even made sense. Lembcke was motivated to look further into the truth and origins of this spat-upon veteran myth, and the contradiction between historical fact and popular collective memory. To the contrary, one of the hallmarks of the period's anti-war movement was its support for the troops in the field and the affiliation of many returning veterans with the movement. As both a Vietnam veteran and a member of the anti-war movement, Lembcke knew this criticism ran counter to what he personally experienced and witnessed. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, years after the Vietnam War ended, the proliferation of these spitting stories increased greatly. Lembcke details the resurrection of the myth of the spat-upon veteran during subsequent Gulf War efforts as a way to silence public dissent.Ī persistent but unfounded criticism leveled against those who protested in opposition to the Vietnam War is that they spat upon and otherwise derided returning soldiers, calling them "baby-killers". Lembcke equates this disparagement of the anti-war movement and veterans with the similar stab-in-the-back myth propagated by Germany and France after their war defeats, as an alibi for why they lost the war. The book also documents efforts of the Nixon Administration to drive a wedge between military servicemembers and the anti-war movement by portraying democratic dissent as a betrayal of the troops. Lembcke contrasts the absence of credible evidence of spitting by anti-war activists with the large body of evidence showing a mutually supportive, empathetic relationship between veterans and anti-war forces. The book examines the origin of the earliest stories the popularization of the "spat-upon image" through Hollywood films and other media, and the role of print news media in perpetuating the now iconic image through which the history of the war and anti-war movement has come to be represented. The book is an analysis of the widely believed narrative that American soldiers were spat upon and insulted by anti-war protesters upon returning home from the Vietnam War. The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam is a 1998 book by Vietnam veteran and sociology professor Jerry Lembcke. For other uses, see Spitting Image (disambiguation). This article is about the Jerry Lembcke book.
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