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kate
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 Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 11:17 pm Post subject: For The Record > Spitting on Vets a Myth? |
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For The Record
In the MYTH corner, we have
Jerry Lembcke, associate professor of sociology at Holy Cross College, wrote ''The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam.", in which he states, ie
| Quote: | | What I did find is that around 1980, scores of Vietnam-generation men were saying they were greeted by spitters when they came home from Vietnam. There is an element of urban legend in the stories in that their point of origin in time and place is obscure |
Note Lembecke's assertion that this myth phenomenon came about in the 1980s
John Llewellyn is an associate professor of communication at Wake Forest University. He presents himself as a scholar of urban legends, and even certified as an expert., essentially backs up Lembcke's assertions.
In the Debunking corner we have quotes from Senators John Kerry & Bob Kerrey, Congresssmen Sam Johnson & Steve Pearce, cites from a pulitzer prize winning journalist, Medal of Honor winners, an AP religion writer, a newspaper city editor, a museum, the governments of the State of California & Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a law professor, CBS news, and other tidbits too numerous to mention (check for updates)
Forum discussionshere and here
This thread is to gather some notable quotes for the record, Debunking their assertion that this is a MYTH...
especially contemporaneous, published records or accounts, from the late 1960s, early 1970s era
Update: Since this thread was started in 2005, contemporaneous accounts have been found.
Thanks to the internet and the blogosphere, the MYTH guys have been Debunked
let the Debunking continue...
>If anyone finds contemporaneous resources, we'll be glad to archive them here
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kate
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| Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 11:25 pm Post subject: |
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MYTH corner
BostonGlobe
| Quote: | Debunking a spitting image
By Jerry Lembcke | April 30, 2005
STORIES ABOUT spat-upon Vietnam veterans are like mercury: Smash one and six more appear. It's hard to say where they come from. For a book I wrote in 1998 I looked back to the time when the spit was supposedly flying, the late 1960s and early 1970s. I found nothing. No news reports or even claims that someone was being spat on.
What I did find is that around 1980, scores of Vietnam-generation men were saying they were greeted by spitters when they came home from Vietnam. There is an element of urban legend in the stories in that their point of origin in time and place is obscure, and, yet, they have very similar details. The story told by the man who spat on Jane Fonda at a book signing in Kansas City recently is typical. Michael Smith said he came back through Los Angeles airport where ''people were lined up to spit on us."
Like many stories of the spat-upon veteran genre, Smith's lacks credulity. GIs landed at military airbases, not civilian airports, and protesters could not have gotten onto the bases and anywhere near deplaning troops. There may have been exceptions, of course, but in those cases how would protesters have known in advance that a plane was being diverted to a civilian site? And even then, returnees would have been immediately bused to nearby military installations and processed for reassignment or discharge.
The exaggerations in Smith's story are characteristic of those told by others. ''Most Vietnam veterans were spat on when we came back," he said. That's not true. A 1971 Harris poll conducted for the Veterans Administration found over 90 percent of Vietnam veterans reporting a friendly homecoming. Far from spitting on veterans, the antiwar movement welcomed them into its ranks and thousands of veterans joined the opposition to the war.
The persistence of spat-upon Vietnam veteran stories suggests that they continue to fill a need in American culture. The image of spat-upon veterans is the icon through which many people remember the loss of the war, the centerpiece of a betrayal narrative that understands the war to have been lost because of treason on the home front. Jane Fonda's noisiest detractors insist she should have been prosecuted for giving aid and comfort to the enemy, in conformity with the law of the land.
But the psychological dimensions of the betrayal mentality are far more interesting than the legal. Betrayal is about fear, and the specter of self-betrayal is the hardest to dispel. The likelihood that the real danger to America lurks not outside but inside the gates is unsettling. The possibility that it was failure of masculinity itself, the meltdown of the core component of warrior culture, that cost the nation its victory in Vietnam has haunted us ever since.
Many tellers of the spitting tales identify the culprits as girls, a curious quality to the stories that gives away their gendered subtext. Moreover, the spitting images that emerged a decade after the troops had come home from Vietnam are similar enough to the legends of defeated German soldiers defiled by women upon their return from World War I, and the rejection from women felt by French soldiers when they returned from their lost war in Indochina, to suggest something universal and troubling at work in their making. One can reject the presence of a collective subconscious in the projection of those anxieties, as many scholars would, but there is little comfort in the prospect that memories of group spit-ins, like Smith has, are just fantasies conjured in the imaginations of aging veterans.
Remembering the war in Vietnam through the images of betrayal is dangerous because it rekindles the hope that wars like it, in countries where we are not welcomed, can be won. It disparages the reputation of those who opposed that war and intimidates a new generation of activists now finding the courage to resist Vietnam-type ventures in the 21st century.
Today, on the 30th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam, new stories of spat-upon veterans appear faster than they can be challenged. Debunking them one by one is unlikely to slow their proliferation but, by contesting them where and when we can, we engage the historical record in a way that helps all of us remember that, in the end, soldiers and veterans joined with civilians to stop a war that should have never been fought.
Jerry Lembcke, associate professor of sociology at Holy Cross College, is the author of ''The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam."
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for his Myth he's also using the assumption....that Vets didn't land at civilian airports...
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kate
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| Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 11:34 pm Post subject: |
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More from the MYTH guy
Holy Cross
| Quote: | We Are What We Remember
By Jerry Lembcke, Associate Professor of Sociology
<snip>
In February 1991, I was asked to speak at a teach-in on the Persian Gulf War in the Hogan Campus Center Ballroom. My presentation focused on the image then being popularized in the press of Vietnam-era anti-war activists treating Vietnam veterans abusively. After sending troops to the Gulf region in August, the Bush administration argued that opposition to the war was tantamount to disregard for the well-being of the troops and that such disregard was reminiscent of the treatment given to Vietnam veterans upon their return home. By invoking the image of anti-war activists spitting on veterans, the administration was able to discredit such activism and galvanize support for the war. Drawing on my own experience as a Vietnam veteran who came home from the war and joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), I called the image of spat-upon Vietnam veterans a myth.
After seven years of research and writing, my book, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam was published in August 1998, by New York University Press.
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VVAW....such notable credentials
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kate
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| Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 11:39 pm Post subject: |
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The MYTH guy gets backup from a "certified urban legend expert"
News Observer
| Quote: |
POINT OF VIEW
Published: Nov 10, 2004
Modified: Nov 10, 2004 8:01 AM
When Vietnam vets came home
By JOHN LLEWELLYN
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.) |
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| Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 11:47 pm Post subject: |
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DEBUNKING quote, from none other than John Kerry
hat-tip to our Lew Waters for finding this
This article posted on Kerry's senate website, is an op-ed he
wrote for the Boston Globe about Bob Kerrey
John Kerry senate website
| Quote: | Boston Globe
4/29/2001
The War That Will Not Go Away - Bob Kerrey's Account of Murdered Civilians Underscored How Little We Understand the Vietnam Experience - If We Understand War at All
America learned last week that, in 1969, a Navy SEAL unit commanded by Lieutenant Bob Kerrey killed Vietnamese civilians in Thanh Phong village.
Precisely what happened is obscured by murky memories, but the central fact - that American military killed women and children - is not in dispute. In official accounts, the dead were listed as Viet Cong.
We probably would not have read about Thanh Phong last week if that unit's commander had later been killed, as he very nearly was; or if the 25-year-old Kerrey had not subsequently earned the Congressional Medal of Honor; or if he hadn't somehow managed to leave a military hospital in Philadelphia, reenter civilian life supported by the love of family and his brothers-in-arms; or if his love of country had taken him no further in his political career than the governor's mansion in Nebraska.
Thanh Phong is dominating headlines because Bob Kerrey is now a respected and accomplished political leader.
But if the fact that innocent people were killed in Vietnam is the news, it is hardly a revelation to the villagers of Thanh Phong, nor to the many Americans who listened to us speak out 30 years ago about our experience. It's certainly not news to America's Vietnam veterans, who have never stopped wrestling with the slippery truths of our nation's least understood war.
The reality is that there were many Thanh Phongs, literally thousands of cases where shots were fired, bombs dropped, and rockets launched without any sure knowledge of the targets' loyalties, capabilities, intentions, or age. People shake their heads and ask how the boys next door could have done such things.
They forget - or perhaps can never really know - what Vietnam was. Americans were outsiders in a complex war among Vietnamese. Our allies were corrupt. Our adversaries were ruthless. Enemy territory was everywhere.
Reporters have been busy researching the rules of war as though it were a board game. The truth is, there were no rules - only instinct and minute-by-minute, second-by-second judgments that we carry around inside for the rest of our lives.
It is easy today to forget that a free-fire zone was just that. Imagine a unit of seven young men venturing alone in the pitch black of a moonless night, believing because it was true that any sound could mean death, with no helicopter backup, no margin for mistakes, no time for hesitation, and no knowledge of what might happen in the next moment.
With cause - having heard shots ring out - or out of fear when you thought you heard shots, you fired your weapon. We tried to protect innocent people, but sometimes danger and confusion prevailed. As Neil Sheehan documented so pointedly, the "bright shining lie" that evolved in military doctrine was, simply, "if they're dead, they're V.C."
It has long been evident that American soldiers have truths to tell. Thirty years ago, a number of us, as self-proclaimed "winter soldiers," testified that there were terrible things happening in Vietnam. Some veterans have taken longer than others to come to terms with the war; others still have not done so. Either way, they have paid a high personal price.
"I lived with this privately for 32 years," my friend Bob Kerrey (who retired from the US Senate last year after two terms) said last week. "I can't keep it private any more. My conscience tells me some good should come from this."
It is never too late for Americans to understand the anger that many Vietnam veterans - myself among them - felt toward the body-counting, career-promoting leaders sitting safely in Washington, and of the unfairness of sending to the killing fields troops that were disproportionately poor and black.
I wonder, still, how we could ask anyone to be the last man to die in Vietnam; the last man to die for a mistake.
It seems almost cliched to talk about the death of innocence. But what else is it when the children of America are pulled from front porches and living rooms and plunged almost overnight into a world of sniper fire, land mines, ambushes, rockets, buddies going home in body bags, explosions in the night, sleeplessness, and the confusion created by an enemy who was sometimes invisible firing, and sometimes right next to you smiling?
If innocence died, it was replaced by almost nothing. The magnetic north of our moral compass had been ripped from the heavens. We had been raised to cherish human life, and then taught to exterminate, based on a differentiation among Vietnamese that our senses could not comprehend, and that we too often felt we could not apply and still stay alive.
We did not find Hitler among the enemy; we did not see Roosevelt among those we had been sent to protect.
But, despite that confusing moral backdrop, we tried to make sense of our mission, to do the job we were sent to do.
We returned home to an America that was indifferent, even hostile. There were no parades, only nightmares. Veterans were spat upon, called baby-killers, our uniforms themselves targeted us for ridicule from those who could never understand our pain. The war stories we had did not uplift, but rather repelled. For many vets, it was simply impossible to explain, so silence became the only option.
Most deadening was our realization that the anguish we felt about the Vietnamese was not shared by any part of the American political spectrum; certainly not by the White House or Pentagon; and certainly not by extremists who saw the My Lai massacre as a political opportunity and the Tet Offensive as a debating point for the vindication of views.
We veterans found, when we returned, that America thought the war was all about America - when we had thought it was about Vietnam. This seemed a betrayal, but in reality it could not have been any different. For us, the war was personal; we had lost our friends and many had watched brothers lose arms and legs; we had seen Vietnamese fight and curse, weep and die. Most Americans had not lived our experience, and could not fully understand - and we thought them lucky for that kind of ignorance.
The fissures created by Vietnam have long been stubbornly resistant to closure. Each step was its own drama as activists battled government secrecy and the willful amnesia of a society that did not want to remember.
Led by veterans and family members, advocates fought the forgetting and pushed our nation to confront the war's surplus of sad legacies - Agent Orange, Amer-Asian orphans, abandoned allies, exiled and imprisoned draft dodgers, doubts about whether all our POWs had come home, and honor at last for those who returned from Vietnam and those who did not.
Slowly, the truth was understood. The faults in Vietnam were those of the war, not the warriors.
Year by year, our nation has moved to heal what was healable, but we have still not fully recognized the wounds that only God can mend. |
Originally appeared:
The Boston Globe April 29, 2001, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: FOCUS; Pg. D1
HEADLINE: POLITICS & HISTORY US Senator John F. Kerry served in the Navy during the Vietnam War.;
THE WAR THAT WILL NOT GO AWAY BOB KERREY'S ACCOUNT OF MURDERED CIVILIANS
UNDERSCORES HOW LITTLE WE UNDERSTAND THE VIETNAM EXPERIENCE - IF WE UNDERSTAND WAR AT ALL
BYLINE: By John F. Kerry
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| Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 12:02 am Post subject: |
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more DEBUNKING vet's treatment, referenced by Bob Kerrey
Just One Minute
| Quote: | May 06, 2005
Who Spat On Whom?
Is it really an "urban myth" that Vietnam-era soldiers and veterans were spat upon by protesters? This topic is being recycled with the recent news coverage of Jane Fonda being spat upon at a book signing.
The author of the "urban myth" view is Holy Cross professor and Vietnam Veteran Against The War alumni Jerry Lembcke, whose book, "Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam", was published in 1998. He reprised his effort in a recent guest piece in the Boston Globe:
For a book I wrote in 1998 I looked back to the time when the spit was supposedly flying, the late 1960s and early 1970s. I found nothing. No news reports or even claims that someone was being spat on.
What I did find is that around 1980, scores of Vietnam-generation men were saying they were greeted by spitters when they came home from Vietnam. There is an element of urban legend in the stories in that their point of origin in time and place is obscure, and, yet, they have very similar details. The story told by the man who spat on Jane Fonda at a book signing in Kansas City recently is typical. Michael Smith said he came back through Los Angeles airport where ''people were lined up to spit on us."
The "urban myth" notion has been kicked around for years. Jack Shafer (who has been a towering genius on the Valerie Plame case) wrote in support of Lembcke in 2000 and again in 2004. Ahh, but did he apprise himself of Lembke's political views, and, if he knew then what we know now about the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, would he be so supportive?
You guessed it - Lembcke's thesis is a rehabilitation effort of the Vietnam anti-war movement, of which VVAW were a significant part. And his political motivation? Back in 1991, he thought that the rallying cry of "support the troops" was being used to stifle dissent prior to Gulf War I, and a research project was born. Fortunately, he had determined the conclusion at the outset, as he describes in the linked article excerpted after the break. One can only imagine what he thinks today.
The pithiest rebuttal is available in the comments at Hit and Run:
Jerry Lembcke, a Marxist historian, was unable to find any story that convinced him veterans had ever been spit on. Lembcke has also been unable to find convincing evidence that Marxism isn't a workable economic theory; I am not surprised at his inability to find proof of something less well-documented.
<snip>
And the other end of the spectrum would seem to be "Homecoming - When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam", as described here.
OK, that is a start. Bob Greene collected testimonials from folks claiming to remember abusive treatment. Another possible source of contemporaneous evidence would be travel orders or travel advisories from the early 1970's - did the military have any written advice about soldiers traveling in civilian clothes to avoid trouble?
Other suggestions as to contemporaneous evidence would be welcome - letters to the editor of a small-town paper describing/deploring/(applauding?) abusive treatment, or letters home from a soldier might also be convincing.
Otherwise, reasonable folks like Jack Shafer will be unconvinced.
UPDATE: Let's present an excerpt from p. 232 of Bob Kerrey's new book, "When I Was A Young Man". The future Senator is describing an incident in 1969; he is in Philadelphia undergoing rehab with his prosthetic leg and the incident occurs at the Martin Luther King track meet at Villanova:
"After the race I was taunted by a group of long-haired men who blocked the exit and knocked me to the ground as I pushed past them to leave."
Now, Kerrey does not say he was spat upon. However, this does not sound precisely like the Veterans outreach described by Lembcke. Of course, lacking a police report or a contemporaneous news account, Lembcke might just reassure us that this is just an invented memory. (And doesn't he get knocked down in New Hampshire in 1992, or some other Presidential run, by unsympathetic protestors? Hmm...) |
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kate
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| Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 12:07 am Post subject: |
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more DEBUNKING, John Kerry historian even references spitting
Slate
| Quote: | Campaign Spit Takes
Culled from the New York Times and Tour of Duty.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Monday, March 15, 2004, at 3:08 PM PT
Jodi Wilgoren writes in today's New York Times (March 15, 2004) that Cedric Brown, a citizen who asked a question of Sen. John Kerry at a campaign forum, claimed that when he was a West Point cadet during the Vietnam era, "he was spat on, he said, by antiwar protesters."
In Tour of Duty, his new book about Kerry, historian Douglas Brinkley writes that "While in the Mekong Delta or along the DMZ GIs always dream of ending their tour, of coming home to a national embrace. But when they got home nobody was there to greet them. They were shunned as if they harbored a contagious disease." He goes on to cite historian Marilyn B. Young's The Vietnam Wars: 1945-1990 to support his thesis. Young writes, "Later, many veterans would tell stories of having been spat upon by antiwar protesters, or having heard of veterans who were spat on. … It doesn't matter how often this happened at all. Veterans felt spat upon, stigmatized, contaminated." [Emphasis, I assume, in the original.]
I don't know about Ms. Young, but as one who has actually been spat upon, I can tell you there is a big difference between feeling you've been spat upon and sensing the slithering saliva as it traverses your face.
But did any Vietnam vet get gobbed on by an antiwar protestor? Holy Cross professor Jerry Lembcke (a Vietnam vet) investigated hundreds of news accounts of antiwar activists spitting on vets for his book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. But whenever he pushed sources for more evidence or corroboration from a witness, the story always collapsed. Many times, the person who had been spat on turned out to be a friend of a friend or somebody's relative. Lembcke writes that nobody ever convinced him that any spitting incident between protester and vet took place. It may have happened, but Lembcke is still waiting for a contemporaneous police report or other documentary evidence that would prove it. (For an earlier "Press Box" piece on the Vietnam vet spit myth, click here.)
I won't criticize Wilgoren for not giving Cedric Brown the fifth degree about an incident from his past. Had he claimed that he'd once milked a cow or played bass in a garage rock band, I wouldn't expect Wilgoren or anybody in the press corps to confirm the assertions by deadline. But Brinkley doesn't have the deadline excuse for writing so naively, and if he accurately portrays Young on the subject, neither does she. Journalists and scholars everywhere should be skeptical about the spit story and shouldn't be shy about asking for proof. The spit story is an urban (and rural) myth until proved otherwise, and that's the way it should be treated.
******
Don't argue with me. Argue with Jerry Lembcke.
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kate
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| Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 12:13 am Post subject: |
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on the DEBUNKING side from Muller of all people
Link
| Quote: | American Radio Works
An Online Chat with Bobby Muller
On April 28th, Robert O. (Bobby) Muller, President of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, joined us live online to talk about the Vietnam War and its legacy, and his own experiences as a wounded veteran.
<snip>
Audience Question: How were you treated when you came back to the United States?
Bobby Muller: The veterans were totally ignored in this country for years following the end of the war. We were the symbol of the war and we were its legacy. Both were very negative. It wasn't until 1981 that the American public started to pay attention to the Vietnam veteran. I believe this was because of the returning hostages from Iran receiving a welcome that was so contrasted from the one that we received as Vietnam veterans that people something had to be done. The other factor was the hostage situation made clear that we had a role within the world community and to try to figure out that role meant talking about Vietnam
Audience Question: Someone mentioned earlier about being spit on. I was one of those spit upon in Chicago and San Francisco airports - how can I understand that (as a native American)?
Bobby Muller: The example of veterans being spit upon is often raised. It really did happen. A lot of people in this country did not separate the war from those who were called upon to fight it. This is outrageous, especially when you remember the average age of a combat soldier in Vietnam was 19. People now no longer put the burden of moral responsibility for Vietnam on the backs of those who were drafted to fight it. I think it's fair to say that while the veterans were ignored for years, the public finally did come around and gave them a fair measure of respect and public support.
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kate
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| Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 12:42 am Post subject: |
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and from the DEBUNKING corner
The MYTH people say this urban legend started in the 1980s?
Hmm this article, from the Reno Evening Gazette was published June 9, 1971
Courtesy of SBD who originally posted it on this thread 
if link broken...thumbnail added, please click to view...
transcribed...para 1,2
| Quote: |
“How’s it feel to be a murderer?” asked the faculty advisor of Al Zellar who was mustering out after a year’s infantry service in Vietnam. Jim Minarik, another infantry veteran of that war walked out of doors in his uniform and was twice spat upon, was denied restaurant service, and called a "war criminal” all before he had time to buy a civilian suit. Jim Kerns pulled down a Vietcong flag here and spent nine hours in jail before Judge Halleck dismissed his case. Veterans are advised, one of them said, not to mention Vietnam service when making applications.
But it wasn’t these indignities, these evidences of an American world turned upside down that caused some 5000 proud-of their-country former servicemen to organize as Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. It was the sight and sound of John Kerry, the most publicized sinner since Judas Iscariot, spilling his guts with sickening frequency for the TV cameras.
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last sentence
| Quote: | But the Americans we also need to hear from are those who don’t revile and spit on our
fighting men, and who in their hearts are ashamed of those who do. |
hmm wonder if Lexis seaches could turn up more articles like this? anyone?
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kate
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| Posted: Sun Apr 23, 2006 2:05 am Post subject: |
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Debunker
The Anti-War Movement in the United States
Mark Barringer
link
Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
<snip>
| Quote: |
Protest music, typified by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, contributed to the gulf between young and old. Cultural and political protest had become inextricably intertwined within the movement's vanguard. The new leaders became increasingly strident, greeting returning soldiers with jeers and taunts, spitting on troops in airports and on public streets. A unique situation arose in which most Americans supported the cause but opposed the leaders, methods, and culture of protest. |
from Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History. Ed. Spencer C. Tucker. Oxford, UK: ABC-CLIO, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Spencer C. Tucker. [NOTE: This three-volume set is the most comprehensive reference work on the Vietnam War. A concise one-volume edition is now available for the general reader.]
not before the '1980' date, still a good source
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kate
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| Posted: Sun Apr 23, 2006 2:33 am Post subject: |
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Debunker !
The Agony of the U.S. Army
By L. JAMES BINDER.
New York Times . New York, N.Y.:
Nov 30, 1971. pg. 45, 1 pgs
Document types: article
Dateline: WASHINGTON
ISSN/ISBN: 03624331
Text Word Count 885
Abstract (Document Summary)
| Quote: | WASHINGTON -- To many of our people the Army is a controversial issue. It is not easy to think of that apolitical, proud old body of citizen soldiers in that way. Wars can be controversial and so can generals and weapons, but not the Army.
<snip>
The fact is, however, that the service and many of the things it stands for are taking a bad beating these days. The uniform of its soldiers is spat upon in the streets and its wearers are denounced in public places as "war criminals".
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Take that Mr Jerry Lembcke ...
your so-called Urban Myth started around 1980??
hat tip > justoneminute
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Last edited by kate on Sat Apr 29, 2006 1:37 am; edited 6 times in total |
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kate
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Posts: 1891
Location: Upstate, New York
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| Posted: Sun Apr 23, 2006 2:43 am Post subject: |
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Debunking --
A whole lot of spitting going on...even if not at Vets in these articles. Certainly shows these protestors were of the spitting variety
Bayh Is Heckled and Spat On at Florida Airport
New York Times New York, N.Y.:
Jul 23, 1971. pg. 13, 1 pgs
Document types: article
Dateline: ORLANDO, Fla., July 22
ISSN/ISBN: 03624331
Text Word Count 305
Abstract (Document Summary)
| Quote: | | ORLANDO, Fla., July 22 (UPI) -- Shouting demonstrators heckled Senator Birch Bayh and one of them spat in his face today when the Indiana Democrat arrived here to test Florida support for a possible 1972 Presidential bid. |
150 Protest at Coast Ball Honoring Agnew and Hope
New York Times . New York, N.Y.:
Jun 13, 1971. pg. BQ111, 1 pgs
Document types: article
Dateline: BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., June 12
ISSN/ISBN: 03624331
Text Word Count 134
Abstract (Document Summary)
| Quote: | | BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., June 12 (AP) -- Peace demonstrators cursed, spit and kicked at automobiles carrying guests to an Army Ball tonight honoring vice President Agnew and Bob Hope. |
Robert Kennedy, 17, Fined for Loitering; Pleads No Contest
New York Times . New York, N.Y.:
Aug 24, 1971. pg. 25, 1 pgs
Document types: article
Dateline: HYANNIS, Mass., Aug. 23
ISSN/ISBN: 03624331
Text Word Count 336
Abstract (Document Summary)
| Quote: | | HYANNIS, Mass., Aug. 23 (UPI) -- Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 17-year-old son of the late New York Senator, was ordered to pay $50 in court costs on a loitering charge today after he allegedly spat ice cream into a policeman's face. |
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Last edited by kate on Sun Apr 23, 2006 3:00 am; edited 1 time in total |
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kate
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| Posted: Sun Apr 23, 2006 2:49 am Post subject: |
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More Debunking from ole skerry and the left would of course consider him a reliable source
West Wing
John Kerry’s chances for the White House
BostonPhoenix.com
| Quote: |
With the 30th anniversary of his testimony before Congress approaching, the Phoenix asked him to talk about his wartime experiences and how he feels about them now. He agreed.
KERRY RETURNED from Vietnam opposed to the war, and he wanted to do something about it. But first he had to finish out his military service, which he did by working for an admiral in New York City. It was in New York that he confronted the animosity of the left for the first time. Kerry remembers dirty looks and harsh language from others opposed to the war. “There were hippie protesters here and there who objected to people in uniform,” he says. “On a couple of occasions I heard people say ‘baby killer.’” Friends of his, Kerry says, were even spat on by antiwar types.
Despite the scorn he encountered, when the Navy mustered Kerry out of active service he planned to run for Congress from Massachusetts as a protest candidate against Representative Phil Philbin, a pro-war hawk. But state Democrats thought Boston College Law School dean Robert Drinan, a liberal Jesuit priest, was a better choice, so Kerry backed Drinan and joined up with the nascent VVAW. Their first action was the Winter Soldier Hearings in Detroit, which publicized American atrocities.
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kate
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| Posted: Sun Apr 23, 2006 2:58 am Post subject: |
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Debunking
Veterans for a Just Peace' Formed to Offset Kerry Unit
The Washington Post, Times Herald
Washington, D.C.
Author: By Ken W. Clawson
Date: Jun 2, 1971
Start Page: A3 Section: General Document Types: article Text Word Count: 903
Abstract (Document Summary)
| Quote: | | An hour after Jim Minarik was discharged from the army, two persons spat on his olive drab uniform as he walked alone a street in Oakland, Calif. |
Area Student Protests Range From Solemnity to Violence
The Washington Post, Times Herald
Washington, D.C. Author:
By Carl Bernstein
Date: May 7, 1970
Start Page: A3 Section: General Document Types: article Text Word Count: 781
Abstract (Document Summary)
| Quote: | | As police arrested a group of students for blocking traffic in Ward Circle, an American University coed spit at a policeman, then called him a "... pig" and "filthy swine." |
tho she spit at the cop, venue was at a protest
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kate
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| Posted: Sun Jun 25, 2006 6:44 am Post subject: |
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More Debunking, from the left, no less
this from Fonda's lovely site Sir! No. Sir!
On that site they have a disclaimer, affirming the Myth of the spitting image. However, they have a data base in their library of more than 650 articles published in the GI press between 1967 and 1973
Quick scan came up with these two references, time stamped in the era
The Underground GI Press
Duck Power, vol. 1, no. 4
...from The Bond for April 15, 1969
| Quote: | | You walk down the street and the people give you the finger and spit at you. It really makes you feel the cause is worth dying for. |
Dare To Struggle
Dare To Struggle, no. 1
date? ed: bizzyblog picked this up & dates it at 1970
| Quote: | | What was it? It was a group of these GI’s who were tired of all the **** they were getting, tired of all the killing and seeing their friends dying, tired of getting hassled every day, tired of getting spit on in the streets of America. So they met and drew up twelve demands, and set out to gain those demands. They dared to struggle, they dared to win control of their own destiny. |
links purposefully omitted
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Last edited by kate on Tue Apr 10, 2007 4:36 am; edited 1 time in total |
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