>From Australia,
Mike B)
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The New York Times business section of November 2, 1998, carried the story, "A Bicycle Path From Wall Street to Vietnam," written by Laura A. Holson. The story was about Peter D. Kiernan, III, who organized a bicycle tour of Vietnam. Kiernan is a banker at Goldman, Sachs & Company. In her report, Holson wrote that Kiernan had been moved to organize the trip when he heard a Vietnam veteran talk about his coming-home experience. The veteran, identified in Holson's story as "a top executive," reportedly told Kiernan that he had returned from Vietnam on a stretcher with a bullet in his leg. He said, "college kids rushed up and poured rotten vegetables on him. They spat on him. He was so ashamed."
On the day Holson's story appeared, I faxed a letter to the Times letters' editor saying that, "in research for my book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, I found no evidence that such incidents ever took place. It would have been impossible for protesters with rotten vegetables to get close to a wounded soldier returning from Vietnam." I pointed out that, "stories of spat-upon veterans are apocryphal. They discredit the Americans who opposed the war and help construct an alibi for why we lost, namely, that we were betrayed on the home front by disloyal fifth columnists." My letter was never printed.
...
Though the Times had not acknowledged my criticism, I nevertheless thought the presence of my position may have been felt and that maybe we had seen the last reference to spittled veterans in the pages of that paper. My optimism grew when Lars-Erik Nelson reviewed Robert Timberg's book, John McCain: An American Odyssey for the New York Review of Books, October 21, 1999. In his book, Timberg accused the anti-war movement of hostility to Vietnam veterans and said protesters had spat on men returning from the war. Reviewing the book, Nelson called Timberg's accusation a "slur that should be dealt with once and for all" and then went on at some length to do just that, citing my book as his source.
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The spat-upon veteran stories have been likened to urban legends in that they are manifestations of something in the nation's collective subconscious, perhaps lingering unsettledness about the war. But unlike urban legends, which believers seem willing to relinquish their hold on once the mythical side of the stories is exposed, the accounts of defiled veterans seem to be proliferating and their tellers are surprisingly defensive about the veracity of the tales. Shafer's thoughtful Slate.com editorial received nearly 300 postings, one of the largest ever for that site. Many of them defended the spitting stories and several respondents, claiming to be veterans, offered new versions of having been welcomed home by spit, human feces, and worse. One veteran claimed a "hippy chick" spat dog semen on him after giving her puppy a blow job. Some of the postings contained expressions of hostility against Shafer and me that writers debunking, say, the "hookman legend" would never receive. The volume and vehemence of the defense of the spat-upon veteran stories, in other words, suggest that there are some deeply cultural elements at work in their telling.
The image of spat-upon veterans is an icon through which the country constructs its memory of what the war was about and the fictive nature of that icon suggests that America has never come to grips with the war itself. Screened out by the accounts of forgotten warriors and spat-upon veterans are the politics that got us into the war and the history that thousands of GIs joined the effort to end the war; buried beneath the images of protester's animus for veterans is the history of the real war in which 3,000,000 Vietnamese died fighting for national independence.
The historical amnesia left by our own mythologizing of the war means that the vast majority of Americans do not know how we got to the peace that we've just celebrated. Reclaiming our memory entails a struggle against some very powerful forces that toy with our imaginings of the war for reasons of monetary, political, or personal gain. Remembered as a war that was lost because of betrayal at home, Vietnam becomes a modern-day Alamo that must be avenged, a pretext for more war and generations of more veterans. Remembered as a way in which soldiers and pacifists joined hands to fight for peace, Vietnam symbolizes popular resistance to political authority and the dominant images of what it means to be a good American. Journalists are major players in the construction of those memories and we need to hold them accountable for their work.
full: http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/3600
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