spat upon vietnam soldiers returning home spit on

This would make it a variation of the “ Stab in the Back legend.” A Modern Stab in the Back Legend?īut Lembcke takes it one step further. Lembcke speculates that the reason for the persisting image is that pro-war Hawks wished to blame the loss of the Vietnam War on the anti-war protestors. Far from spitting on veterans, the antiwar movement welcomed them into its ranks and thousands of veterans joined the opposition to the war.” Lack of Proof: “A 1971 Harris poll conducted for the Veterans Administration found over 90 percent of Vietnam veterans reporting a friendly homecoming.Lack of Means: “GIs landed at military airbases, not civilian airports, and protesters could not have gotten onto the bases and anywhere near deplaning troops.”.He examined these claims and found them largely lacking in credibility for two reasons. However, he did find a substantial increase in claims during the 1980s. He failed to find a single story about protestors spitting on veterans. To make a long story short, Lembcke researched news reports from the late 1960s and early 1970s. He followed that up in 2005 with a widely-read opinion piece in the Boston Globe. In it, he made the rather extraordinary claim that the shabby treatment of Vietnam veterans as they deboarded their planes was nothing more than a “stab in the back legend,” concocted to discredit the anti-war movement. Kindle * Nook * Kobo * iBooks * Smashwords * Paperback Did Protestors Spit on Vietnam Veterans?īack in 1998, Lembcke wrote The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam.

Spat upon vietnam soldiers returning home spit on