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The controversy over whether anyone spat on returning soldiers is the main them of a book which claims it never happened: The Spitting Image
So I'm moving this article there.
A persistent criticism levelled against those who protested the
United States's involvement in the
Vietnam War is the complaint that protesters spat upon and otherwis derided returning soldiers, calling them "baby-killers", etc. The notion of soldiers being spat upon was featured in a number of American movies, including the
Rambo series.
The American public was greatly divided during the war, with widespread acts of civil disobedience, flag burning and the like among the protesters, and government crackdowns such as those associated with COINTELPRO. Well-known figures such as Jane Fonda and groups like Vietnam Veterans Against The War were regularly in the public spotlight. In this environment, allegations began to surface, and have persisted to this day of spitting on returning soldiers as being a common occurence at the time.
Of course, there have been well recorded incidents of mistreatment of veterans in the US - such as the Bonus march of 1932, when World War I veterans rallied in Washington DC for more effective veterans benefits during the height of the Depression, which was broken up when the US army sent tanks and soldiers with bayonet-affixed rifles into the veteran camps to clear the veterans out and burn the camp down, killing some in the process like William Hushka, and injuring many more. Mark Richards 19:08, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Ok, I started work on Attitudes and reactions to returning soldiers - please help and edit, comment and add material, but let's remember how emotionally charged this issue is on both sides, and try to document reactions that we can substantiate with independant sources. Thanks! Mark Richards 19:21, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Does this count as evidence?
It's from a book review of a book I haven't read... -- Uncle Ed 19:51, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)
There's a good book called Nam, I don't recall the author, which is just stories and comment from Vets, it's worth hunting out. Mark Richards 21:25, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC) Here you go - Mark Baker [2]
---
Coming home, in civies changing planes in the St Louis airport, in September of 1969, a stranger approached me and asked me if I was in the Army. "No, sir", I replied, "the Marines!" "Babykiller", he hissed, and spat at my shoes. I looked down, and then up, to tell him that he'd missed, and to invite him to try again, but he was already thirty feet away, waddling as fast as he could. Coward. No, I didn't call the local newspaper, or television station, or the cops. Just a jerk being stupid, not news, not actionable. Maybe today it would be. Really happened to me. As such, it's original research, and not useful here, other than as a war story. htom 21:57, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
---
All these claims of spitting and no accounts of resulting brawls? To be frank, I can't imagine it. Surely someone took the matter into their own hands.
I was a schoolboy cadet in Australia in the 1970s and recall Remembrance Day and ANZAC Day parades I marched in, when boiler-suited feminists threw red paint at veterans in protest over women who had been raped in wars. There were pictures of this. It made the 6:00 PM news. People were arrested in the bushes outside the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. Can someone tell me why this didn't happen when these claimed spitting incidents occurred? The women in the incident I described were charged with minor public order offences (I think). See page 119 of this .pdf:
http://www.dva.gov.au/commems_oawg/commemorations/education/Documents/Gallipoli_Anzacs_Unit7.pdf
Spitting on someone is a form of assault - a more serious offence. Why are there no documented cases of this happening? Even Robert Kiyosaki claims to have been "tired of being spit (sic) on" in his book "Rich Dad's Guide to Investing", inferring it happened to him regularly.
There is an underlying inference that there was a culture of spitting on Vietnam veterans, the usual bogeymen being cited as "hippies" But the lack of substantiated evidence means I find it almost impossible to believe that this was anything more than a few isolated incidents. I'm not saying it didn't happen at all; I'm saying it was nowhere near as common as claimed. Where are the court papers and charge sheets? Was anyone ever convicted? I'm simply not prepared to believe that a bunch of battle-hardened Marines wouldn't take a would-be spitter behind the nearest bush and beat seven colours of cr@p out of him. Flanker235 ( talk) 10:08, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
I've made significant edits primarily to convert this Wikipedia article from one about Greene's book (with half the citations being to Greene's book) to one about Lembcke's book, so as to conform to the article name. Greene's book is mentioned in just 2 locations in The Spitting Image book, a proportion more closely reflected reflected in this article. I'm not sure why Greene's book didn't have its own article when this one was written. I also...
Xenophrenic ( talk) 20:35, 16 October 2016 (UTC)
In Episode 8 of Ken Burns's docu on Vietnam, Nancy Biberman, a anti-war activist who knew Tom Hayden and participated in student occupation of buildings at Columbia University admits to calling returning Veterans "baby killers". Should we add to this article? Rja13ww33 ( talk) 00:44, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
That is what Colonel (ret.) W. Patrick Lang said happened to him. https://turcopolier.com/httpswwwnytimescom20171013opinionmyth-spitting-vietnam-protesterhtmlrrefcollection2fsection/ How can his first-person account be denied? For all of what he wrote, see below.
I WAS SPAT UPON in March, 1968 while transiting San Francisco International Airport en route to Travis AFB to board the trans-Pacific airlift en route to Vietnam. I was in uniform and waiting for the bus when a woman got out of her car and walked across the parking lot. She chose to spit on my chest rather than on a sergeant standing next to me so perhaps she had a thing for officers. I asked if the people at her house had a roster to schedule spitting on soldiers. She said they did. Perhaps they sent only women to do this.
I wrote to the NY Times yesterday to tell this story in comment on their article. They did not publish my comment. There are 217 comments on the article.
IMO the left is engaged in editing the narrative of that time so as to absolve itself of the ugliness of its own actions. KHarbaugh ( talk) 00:21, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
This page has archives. Sections older than 90 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 5 sections are present. |
The controversy over whether anyone spat on returning soldiers is the main them of a book which claims it never happened: The Spitting Image
So I'm moving this article there.
A persistent criticism levelled against those who protested the
United States's involvement in the
Vietnam War is the complaint that protesters spat upon and otherwis derided returning soldiers, calling them "baby-killers", etc. The notion of soldiers being spat upon was featured in a number of American movies, including the
Rambo series.
The American public was greatly divided during the war, with widespread acts of civil disobedience, flag burning and the like among the protesters, and government crackdowns such as those associated with COINTELPRO. Well-known figures such as Jane Fonda and groups like Vietnam Veterans Against The War were regularly in the public spotlight. In this environment, allegations began to surface, and have persisted to this day of spitting on returning soldiers as being a common occurence at the time.
Of course, there have been well recorded incidents of mistreatment of veterans in the US - such as the Bonus march of 1932, when World War I veterans rallied in Washington DC for more effective veterans benefits during the height of the Depression, which was broken up when the US army sent tanks and soldiers with bayonet-affixed rifles into the veteran camps to clear the veterans out and burn the camp down, killing some in the process like William Hushka, and injuring many more. Mark Richards 19:08, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Ok, I started work on Attitudes and reactions to returning soldiers - please help and edit, comment and add material, but let's remember how emotionally charged this issue is on both sides, and try to document reactions that we can substantiate with independant sources. Thanks! Mark Richards 19:21, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Does this count as evidence?
It's from a book review of a book I haven't read... -- Uncle Ed 19:51, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)
There's a good book called Nam, I don't recall the author, which is just stories and comment from Vets, it's worth hunting out. Mark Richards 21:25, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC) Here you go - Mark Baker [2]
---
Coming home, in civies changing planes in the St Louis airport, in September of 1969, a stranger approached me and asked me if I was in the Army. "No, sir", I replied, "the Marines!" "Babykiller", he hissed, and spat at my shoes. I looked down, and then up, to tell him that he'd missed, and to invite him to try again, but he was already thirty feet away, waddling as fast as he could. Coward. No, I didn't call the local newspaper, or television station, or the cops. Just a jerk being stupid, not news, not actionable. Maybe today it would be. Really happened to me. As such, it's original research, and not useful here, other than as a war story. htom 21:57, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
---
All these claims of spitting and no accounts of resulting brawls? To be frank, I can't imagine it. Surely someone took the matter into their own hands.
I was a schoolboy cadet in Australia in the 1970s and recall Remembrance Day and ANZAC Day parades I marched in, when boiler-suited feminists threw red paint at veterans in protest over women who had been raped in wars. There were pictures of this. It made the 6:00 PM news. People were arrested in the bushes outside the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. Can someone tell me why this didn't happen when these claimed spitting incidents occurred? The women in the incident I described were charged with minor public order offences (I think). See page 119 of this .pdf:
http://www.dva.gov.au/commems_oawg/commemorations/education/Documents/Gallipoli_Anzacs_Unit7.pdf
Spitting on someone is a form of assault - a more serious offence. Why are there no documented cases of this happening? Even Robert Kiyosaki claims to have been "tired of being spit (sic) on" in his book "Rich Dad's Guide to Investing", inferring it happened to him regularly.
There is an underlying inference that there was a culture of spitting on Vietnam veterans, the usual bogeymen being cited as "hippies" But the lack of substantiated evidence means I find it almost impossible to believe that this was anything more than a few isolated incidents. I'm not saying it didn't happen at all; I'm saying it was nowhere near as common as claimed. Where are the court papers and charge sheets? Was anyone ever convicted? I'm simply not prepared to believe that a bunch of battle-hardened Marines wouldn't take a would-be spitter behind the nearest bush and beat seven colours of cr@p out of him. Flanker235 ( talk) 10:08, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
I've made significant edits primarily to convert this Wikipedia article from one about Greene's book (with half the citations being to Greene's book) to one about Lembcke's book, so as to conform to the article name. Greene's book is mentioned in just 2 locations in The Spitting Image book, a proportion more closely reflected reflected in this article. I'm not sure why Greene's book didn't have its own article when this one was written. I also...
Xenophrenic ( talk) 20:35, 16 October 2016 (UTC)
In Episode 8 of Ken Burns's docu on Vietnam, Nancy Biberman, a anti-war activist who knew Tom Hayden and participated in student occupation of buildings at Columbia University admits to calling returning Veterans "baby killers". Should we add to this article? Rja13ww33 ( talk) 00:44, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
That is what Colonel (ret.) W. Patrick Lang said happened to him. https://turcopolier.com/httpswwwnytimescom20171013opinionmyth-spitting-vietnam-protesterhtmlrrefcollection2fsection/ How can his first-person account be denied? For all of what he wrote, see below.
I WAS SPAT UPON in March, 1968 while transiting San Francisco International Airport en route to Travis AFB to board the trans-Pacific airlift en route to Vietnam. I was in uniform and waiting for the bus when a woman got out of her car and walked across the parking lot. She chose to spit on my chest rather than on a sergeant standing next to me so perhaps she had a thing for officers. I asked if the people at her house had a roster to schedule spitting on soldiers. She said they did. Perhaps they sent only women to do this.
I wrote to the NY Times yesterday to tell this story in comment on their article. They did not publish my comment. There are 217 comments on the article.
IMO the left is engaged in editing the narrative of that time so as to absolve itself of the ugliness of its own actions. KHarbaugh ( talk) 00:21, 21 December 2023 (UTC)