> A rightwinger then angrily claimed to have been a
> vet and proceeded to recount his own tale of being
> 'spat on'. I picked apart his bogus story and Cooper
> went ballistic, insisting that if the guy said he was
> spat on, then by golly he was spat on!
Jerry Lembcke, himself a vet, has written a whole book on this urban myth ("The Spitting Image"). He points out that there are several contemporaneous accounts of Vietnam veterans being spat upon . . . usually by veterans of other wars, and always when the Vietnam vets were participating in anti-war protests. The contemporaneous image of a Vietnam vet was of the disheveled kind, sympathetic to the VVAW and reviled as a "crybaby" by many veterans of other wars. The Rambo archetype of the Vietnam vet looking for revenge on the gooks came much later. There is no account from that period of any Vietnam vet being spat upon by the antiwar movement, and had there been one, you can bet that Nixon (who created John Kerry's perennial nemesis, John O'Neill) and his ilk would have played the story to the hilt in those days of the appeal to the "Silent Majority." Of course it's impossible to prove a negative, but it's very unlikely that it ever happened, particularly since the antiwar movement was trying mightily to attract antiwar vets to tell their stories.
If I recall correctly, the earliest that Lembcke could find a version of this story popping up was the late '70s. He goes into some depth in showing the stories' parallels with common urban myths, with particular emphasis on the gender anxieties that the story usually lays bare, since the spitter is almost always a woman. It's no wonder that Jane Fonda has drawn the unparalleled ire of those vets who bought the "stab-in-the-back" fairy-tale narrative.
What an asshole Marc Cooper is.
- - - - - John Lacny http://www.johnlacny.com
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!