There is a persistent myth or misconception that many Vietnam War veterans were spat on and vilified by antiwar protesters during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These stories, which overwhelmingly surfaced many years after the war, usually involve an antiwar female spitting on a veteran, often yelling "baby killer". Most occur in U.S. civilian airports, usually San Francisco International, as GIs returned from the war zone in their uniforms.

No unambiguous documented incident of this behavior has ever surfaced, despite repeated and concerted efforts to uncover them. The few dubious examples brought forward have been the object of much debate and controversy. Only 1 percent of Vietnam veterans themselves, according to a Veterans Administration-commissioned Harris Poll conducted in 1971, described their reception from friends and family as "not at all friendly", and only 3 percent described their reception from people their own age as "unfriendly". More, there is ample and well documented evidence of a mutually supportive, empathetic relationship between GIs, veterans and antiwar forces during the Vietnam War. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to this in his April 1967 speech, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence", when he chastised "those who are seeking to make it appear that anyone who opposes the war in Vietnam is a fool or a traitor or an enemy of our soldiers".

Origins

The origins of the spitting myth have been the topic of much scholarly investigation and public debate over the years. There are three general categories of these investigations and exchanges which often interpenetrate but generally fall into: 1) scholarly studies published in academic journals and one book, 2) finding and evaluating old press reports, and 3) Vietnam veteran anecdotal stories.

Studies

There have been numerous studies of returning Vietnam veterans, a number of which have attempted to pinpoint the origins of the perception that the anti-Vietnam War movement was anti-troop or spat on veterans. Notably in this context, the earliest studies and polls related to Vietnam veterans don't even have this issue on their radar. The 1971 Harris Poll mentioned above, which found that only 1 percent of veterans perceived an unfriendly reception from friends and family, also interviewed a cross section of households and employers and summarized their findings saying, "The public and prospective employers clearly feel that veterans are deserving of the same respect and the warm reception accorded to returning veterans of previous wars." In 1974 the Committee on Veterans Affairs of the U.S. Senate gathered together almost 1,000 pages of "Source Material on the Vietnam Era Veteran." Not one source in this large volume mentions antiwar forces spitting on veterans. A 1975 academic study of Vietnam veteran "Adjustment Patterns and Attitudes" asked no questions about treatment by antiwar forces or being spat on. What this study did reveal, however, was that participation in the war significantly changed the men's attitudeswhereas 67% of them were for the war prior to entering the military, 75% came back against it. So, not only has no evidence been uncovered by scholars of "I was spit on" stories, during the war period, or shortly after, but "there is no evidence that anyone at the time thought they were occurring", or felt it needed to be investigated.

Academic papers

It wasn't until over a decade after the war that spat-upon veteran stories began to appear in movies, the media and anecdotally from veterans, and even longer before it surfaced as an academic question to be studied. A 1995 study by three prominent sociologists (Thomas D. Beamish, Harvey Molotch and Richard Flacks), who carefully examined "press accounts of protests between 1965-1971", concluded that media reports showing the antiwar movement "directly or purposely" targeting troops "are virtually nonexistent." They did, however, find frequent instances of government officials and military leaders falsely labeling the antiwar movement as anti-troop, which they present as one source of the later developing myth. A 2004 study situated the myth's origins in the early efforts by President Johnson's administration to portray antiwar demonstrations as anti-troop, including the staging of a counter demonstration to 'Support Our Boys in Vietnam' parade in New York City" on May 13, 1967. By the end of 1969, according to this study, government officials and politicians were becoming "more shrill", with the New York City mayoral candidate accusing the then Mayor, John Lindsay, who was an opponent of the war, of having "planted a dagger in the back of American servicemen in Vietnam." Then California Governor Ronald Reagan took it even further by saying that the November 1969 antiwar Moratorium would cause some Americans to "die tonight because of the activity in our streets."

Jerry Lembcke

The most extensive and comprehensive study of this phenomenon, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, written by sociology professor and Vietnam veteran Jerry Lembcke, situates the origins in "Nixon's haranguing of war protesters for their disloyalty to the troops." Lembcke shows how the Bush administration and American media used support for the soldiers as a primary motivator to rally the country to support the Gulf War in 1990–91. A prominent part of this was the yellow ribbon campaigns and the image of the "spat-upon Vietnam veteran", with newspapers like The New York Times quoting a soldier saying "if I go back home like the Vietnam vets did and somebody spits on me, I swear to God I'll kill them." According to Lembcke, "it was the image of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran that figured most prominently in the rhetoric of those supporting the Gulf War.

He also points out that during the Vietnam War years there were several newspaper accounts of pro-war demonstrators spitting on anti-war demonstrators, and suggests that these oral accounts could easily have been reinterpreted and inverted and made into stories about activists spitting on veterans. Perhaps one of the most well known of these spitting incidents was directed at anti-war activist and ex-Marine, Ron Kovic, who was wounded and paralyzed in the Vietnam War. At the 1972 Republican National Convention he and two other wounded vets shouted "Stop the bombing!" as Nixon accepted the nomination for president, and were promptly spat on by a man wearing a Four More Years button.

Lembcke also traces the myth's development through film and the media over the years. He identified and viewed "approximately 120 films portraying relations between Vietnam veterans and the anti-war movement", and reveals that from the "late 1970s on, Hollywood produce[d] more and more films portraying anti-war movement hostility toward soldiers and veterans." The movie Tracks, in 1977, "contains the first clear inference that anti-war activists spat on Vietnam veterans."

Perhaps Lembcke's most important contribution to this debate, however, has been to situate the "spitting image" within its historical context. Acknowledging that it's difficult to prove innocence, to show that something did not happen, he examines the era and shows "that the anti-war movement was supportive of Vietnam veterans and that, in turn, many veterans joined the opposition to the war." Given that, he argues, "it is highly unlikely that that same movement could have simultaneously been acting in a hostile fashion toward Vietnam veterans." He has also extensively investigated media from the war period, as well as several hundred anecdotal veteran stories of being spit on (more on this below). He may also be the only scholar to dig into police reports and court records in search of arrest or trial accounts, pointing out that anyone today spitting on political or religious groups would certainly be arrested. He found "not a hint of hostility between anti-war activists and military personal or veterans" in these records.

Lembcke acknowledges that he cannot prove the negative—that no Vietnam veteran was ever spat on—saying it is hard to imagine there not being expressions of hostility between veterans and activists:

Other

In 1992, the Director of the Connelly Library and curator of the Vietnam War Collection at LaSalle University listed the spitting myth as one of six "legends" from the Vietnam era, and observed it "derives from the mythopoeic belief that returning GIs were routinely spat upon at some time during their repatriation to the USA. This particular round of tales has become so commonplace as to be treated reverently even among otherwise wisely observant veterans." In 1994, scholar Paul Rogat Loeb wrote, "to consider spitting on soldiers as even remotely representative of the activist response is to validate a lie", and noted that myths like that of antiwar activists spitting on soldiers have rewritten or "erased history".Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus; Paul Rogat Loeb; Rutgers University Press; 1995; pgs. 77-80 Clarence Page, the well known journalist, Vietnam veteran and member of the Chicago Tribune editorial board interviewed Lembcke and Bob Greene, who published a book of veterans' anecdotal stories (see below), and observed, "the stories have become so widely believed, despite a remarkable lack of witnesses or evidence, that ironically the burden of proof now falls on the accused, the protesters; not their accusers, the veterans. Antiwar protesters must prove the episodes didn't happen, instead of the veterans having to prove they did."

All of the academic sources who have studied the origins of the spitting myth agree that it was the pro-Vietnam War and then pro-Gulf War forces which promoted and sustained a false narrative.

Press reports

Several academic studies and some individuals have searched extensively for media stories of spitting incidents reported during the war or around that time period. All the academic studies have come away essentially empty handed, with no verifiable contemporaneous story matching the basic theme of an antiwar protester spitting on a Vietnam veteran. In 2007, Northwestern Law School professor and libertarian blogger James Lindgren claimed to have uncovered "[m]any 1967-72" spitting incidents in the press, and was critical of Lembcke's and others' research. Others, however, critiqued Lindgren's methods and pointed out that he had included a number of unrelated spitting incidents into his list of "many", seriously undermining his claim. For example, he cited as a prominent example press coverage of two sailors who were spit on and attacked with a knife by a group of men who were not identified as antiwar or even political. He also included reports of World War II and First World War veterans being spit on, plus reports of spitting on police and flags. Lembcke wrote an 18-point response to Lindgren's list of reported incidents which was linked in an article in the online magazine Slate. He felt two or three of the incidents were of interest and worth looking into, but maintained his larger thesis that a few possible incidents don't make the overall myth true. Especially since there is ample historical evidence and documentation of friendly relations between antiwar forces and veterans. Jack Shafer, writing for Slate, examined these back and forth exchanges and concluded that "Lindgren has failed so far to produce a contemporaneous news accountor other corroborative evidenceof a protester ambushing a returning veteran with a gob of spit, which I take as the main point of Lembcke's book".