"Diversity is not our strength": Cincy's own Ramaswamy 2024!

[Dill]

(08-10-2023, 12:00 AM)GMDino Wrote: Yeah I was just saying it might have depended on where you were and when you came back.  I think Dill cited some stuff to consider that it wasn't ALL soldiers being spot in and maybe not even most.  But those kinds of stories are awful and carry much more weight in the public consciousness.

That doesn't take away for anyone's own experiences.  It just says there is more than a black and white view of it.

No one can determine for certain that no vet was EVER spat upon on returning home--over 2 million returned--but one can determine whether it was a "common experience" as SSF puts it. Just as one can determine whether pro-war demonstrators more commonly attacked anti-war demonstrators--which often included vets.

So Dill cited some polling and historical research which pretty much settles the question of how "common" spitting was, without disputing that some vets have claimed it. I.e., not very. The overwhelming number polled in 1979 remember their homecoming as positive. And when they remember protests, they seem to recall them as directed at the government, not the vets whose support they welcomed.

One of the books referred to in Sirota's Times article (linked in my previous post), Vietnam Vet Jerry Lembke's The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, includes accounts of veterans who claim to be spat upon. But could not confirm any of them (e.g., by interviewing other vets who returned with the a guy who claimed he was spit upon and don't remember spitting). 

Spitting gets termed a "myth" in this book, as in others, not because the author claimed it never happened, but because of how, through the machinations of politicians and Hollywood, it comes to be taken as something that regularly occurred. Representative.

Lembke thinks the myth really took off in 1990, as George H.W. Bush referred to VV spitters in a speech to drum up support for the Gulf War. And the use of the spitting image in revisionist history is what keeps people talking about it now. Like missing POWs. It would be interesting to survey still living vets to see if spitting stories break down along party lines.

(Another strange phenomena about the VN War--the number of people who claimed to have served there but did not. Millions according to David Hack's US Wings website: https://www.uswings.com/about-us-wings/vietnam-war-facts/ It would be interesting to know if and how many of those wannabes remember being spit upon. That would confirm the "myth" status.)