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The Spitting Image

Spitting Image was a British satirical sketch comedy television series created by caricaturists Peter Fluck and Roger Law, featuring grotesque latex puppets with exaggerated physical features to caricature prominent politicians, celebrities, and royals.^[1]^[2]^[3] First broadcast on ITV in February 1984, it ran for 18 series until 1996, drawing peak audiences of over 15 million viewers through its irreverent, often crude depictions that lampooned figures across the political spectrum without favour.^[4]^[4] The programme received acclaim for pioneering adult-oriented puppet satire, securing multiple BAFTA Television Awards and Emmy nominations for its topical humour that influenced public perceptions of power during the 1980s.^[5]^[4] Though controversies arose from its unsparing portrayals—such as those of Margaret Thatcher and the royal family—the show's creators emphasized balanced mockery of left and right-wing targets to sustain its edge.^[6]^[7] A short-lived revival launched on BritBox in 2020, attempting to recapture the original's anarchic spirit amid modern sensitivities.^[4]^[8]

Historical Context of Vietnam War Homecomings

Troop Rotations and Public Sentiment

U.S. forces in Vietnam operated under an individual rotation policy, requiring most personnel to complete 12-month tours before returning stateside singly or in small groups, rather than as intact units redeploying together.^[9] This system, intended to maintain unit cohesion by staggering replacements, resulted in fragmented homecomings without the organized mass arrivals or celebratory parades characteristic of prior conflicts like World War II.^[9] Unlike earlier wars, where troops debarked en masse at ports for public welcomes, Vietnam veterans typically flew commercial charter flights directly to civilian airports, often changing from uniforms to civilian clothes en route to avoid attention.^[10] The peak period for these returns aligned with U.S. troop withdrawals from 1969 to 1973, as force levels declined from a high of 543,400 in April 1969 to under 25,000 by December 1972 under the Nixon administration's Vietnamization strategy.^[11]^[12] Domestic public opinion on the war grew increasingly polarized, with anti-war sentiment surging amid escalating casualties and strategic setbacks. Protests intensified after the 1968 Tet Offensive, which eroded confidence in U.S. progress, and peaked through events like the October 1969 Moratorium demonstrations involving an estimated two million participants nationwide.^[13] By mid-1970, Gallup polling reflected majority opposition, with 56 percent of respondents viewing the decision to send troops as a mistake—a sharp rise from 24 percent in 1965.^[14] This shift was driven by factors including draft calls affecting younger demographics, economic costs exceeding $100 billion annually by 1968, and revelations of tactical limitations, fostering a divide between war supporters, often older and conservative, and opponents concentrated among youth and urban liberals.^[15] Media reporting on protests amplified perceptions of anti-military animus by emphasizing fringe radical actions over broader peaceful dissent. Coverage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, for instance, fixated on clashes between police and demonstrators labeled as "riots," with networks airing footage of rock-throwing and chants decrying the "military-industrial complex," while downplaying mainstream anti-war rallies.^[16] Such portrayals, recurrent in depictions of draft-card burnings and campus occupations through 1971, cultivated an image of the movement as dominated by extremists hostile to uniformed service members, even as surveys indicated most Americans differentiated between policy disapproval and personal respect for troops.^[17] This selective focus contributed to a cultural narrative of division, where returning soldiers navigated airports and cities amid lingering echoes of protest rhetoric, though large-scale encounters remained logistically improbable due to dispersed arrivals.^[18]

Early Reports of Civilian Hostility

In the late 1960s, anti-war protests on U.S. college campuses increasingly targeted military recruiters as symbols of the Vietnam War effort, leading to disruptions that constituted early instances of civilian antagonism toward active-duty personnel. Students organized sit-ins, chants, and invasions of placement offices to halt recruiting sessions, viewing recruiters as complicit in the draft and escalation of the conflict. For example, on November 30 at New York University, approximately 200 students created disturbances in the appointments board to prevent military interviews from proceeding.^[19] These campus actions, peaking in 1967–1968 amid growing draft resistance, often featured verbal confrontations where protesters shouted accusations against the war and those enforcing it, though physical altercations remained limited to shoving or blocking rather than assaults. Such hostility was directed primarily at recruiters and ROTC participants in visible roles, rather than combat veterans returning home, who demobilized quietly through individual rotations without ceremonial processions that might invite public scrutiny.^[20] Counterculture rhetoric amplified this sentiment, with some anti-war factions labeling U.S. troops "baby killers" in chants and writings by 1968, portraying soldiers as agents of alleged atrocities and eroding public regard for military service. While not ubiquitous—appearing on few placards amid broader demands for withdrawal—this language contributed to a cultural disdain that blurred distinctions between policy critics and personal vilification of personnel, setting a precedent for later anecdotal claims of abuse.^[21]

Origins and Publication of the Book

Author Jerry Lembcke's Background

Jerry Lembcke, born June 26, 1943, was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1968 and served in Vietnam as a Chaplain's Assistant with the 41st Artillery Group until 1969.^[22]^[23] Following his discharge, Lembcke became active in the anti-war movement, including participation in Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), where he engaged in leafleting and public actions against the conflict as early as fall 1971.^[24] His firsthand transition from military service to opposition shaped a perspective critical of narratives portraying veterans as uniformly victimized by domestic dissent, potentially influencing his later analyses of war memory. Lembcke pursued an academic career in sociology, earning a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1978.^[25] He joined the faculty at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, rising to Associate Professor Emeritus of Sociology, with research interests encompassing social movements, labor history, and the cultural legacies of military conflicts.^[26] Prior to The Spitting Image, his publications addressed themes of worker organizing and military sociology, reflecting a focus on power dynamics and collective memory that informed his examination of post-Vietnam myths.^[27] As both a combat-zone veteran and VVAW participant, Lembcke's background positions him to challenge mainstream depictions of anti-war activism, though his activist affiliations introduce a potential ideological lens favoring interpretations that downplay intra-veteran divisions and emphasize media-driven distortions over anecdotal hostilities.^[28] This dual identity underscores a motivation rooted in reconciling personal military experience with sociological inquiry into how societal narratives construct victimhood.^[29]

Development and Release in 1998

Jerry Lembcke, a U.S. Army veteran who served in Vietnam and later earned a Ph.D. in sociology, began developing The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam in the early 1990s. Motivated by the resurgence of the "spitting" trope during the 1991 Gulf War—where supporters invoked it to marginalize anti-war voices, as noted in the book's preface—Lembcke undertook systematic archival reviews of period newspapers, conducted interviews with returning veterans, and scrutinized cultural representations of troop homecomings from the late 1960s and early 1970s.^[30] This multi-year effort aimed to contextualize memory and media narratives surrounding the war's domestic impact.^[31] The manuscript was accepted by New York University Press, which released the hardcover edition on July 1, 1998, under ISBN 0814751466.^[32] At 217 pages, it featured contributions from consulting editor Harvey J. Kaye and drew on Lembcke's academic position at the College of the Holy Cross to frame its inquiry into historical myths.^[30] The publication coincided with sustained cultural retrospection on the Vietnam era, including the 1995 release of Forrest Gump, which grossed over $677 million worldwide and portrayed veteran reintegration challenges, alongside journalistic and academic reflections approaching the 23rd anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords. Initial outreach emphasized Lembcke's firsthand veteran experience alongside sociological rigor, marketing the work as an evidence-based challenge to cinematic and anecdotal depictions of anti-veteran hostility in films like Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989).^[31]

Core Arguments and Methodology

Thesis on the Spitting Narrative as Myth

Lembcke's central thesis posits that accounts of anti-war protesters spitting on returning Vietnam veterans constitute a cultural myth, unsupported by any contemporaneous evidence such as police records, photographic documentation, or arrests at airports and other public venues during the war's end in 1973–1975.^[22] He argues that exhaustive searches of period newspapers and official reports yield no verified incidents of such spitting directed at veterans, contrasting sharply with documented cases of pro-war groups spitting on anti-war demonstrators.^[33] This narrative, according to Lembcke, originated and proliferated through Nixon administration efforts in the late 1960s and early 1970s to politically isolate anti-war activists by framing them as betrayers of the troops, thereby fostering division between veterans and protesters to bolster support for the war effort.^[33] He traces the motif to rhetoric from figures like Vice President Spiro Agnew, who in 1969 publicly accused dissenters of undermining military morale, with the spitting imagery serving as a potent symbol in conservative media to equate opposition with personal hostility toward service members.^[31] Lembcke further contends that the endurance of these stories stems from distortions in collective memory, where post-war experiences of trauma, societal rejection, and repeated media reinforcement—such as in films and veteran memoirs from the 1980s onward—generate false recollections conflating general public disdain with specific acts of spitting.^[22] He emphasizes that memory's susceptibility to suggestion, particularly among veterans processing reintegration challenges, explains why retrospective testimonies dominate without matching empirical traces from the era.^[34]

Analysis of Media and Cultural Influences

Lembcke contends that Hollywood films from the late 1970s onward played a pivotal role in embedding the "spat-upon veteran" trope as a symbol of societal betrayal, even absent literal depictions of spitting. The 1978 film Coming Home, directed by Hal Ashby and starring Jane Fonda as an anti-war activist and Jon Voight as a paralyzed Marine, portrays the homefront as a site of emotional and moral disloyalty toward returning soldiers, framing the veteran's alienation as stemming from domestic radicalism rather than battlefield realities.^[35] This narrative arc, which earned the film Oscars for Best Actor and Actress, reinforced interpretations of the Vietnam era as one of national ingratitude, with the activist's infidelity symbolizing broader rejection of military service.^[31] Lembcke identifies Coming Home as a foundational text in constructing the betrayed-veteran archetype, influencing subsequent cultural memory by conflating anti-war sentiment with personal treachery.^[36] The Rambo franchise, launched with First Blood in 1982 and continuing through films like Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), extended this motif by depicting protagonist John Rambo—a decorated Green Beret—as enduring persecution from civilian authorities and societal indifference upon returning stateside, evoking the emotional equivalent of public humiliation.^[37] Though these portrayals emphasize physical confrontations and bureaucratic neglect over explicit protester spitting, Lembcke argues they mythologized the veteran as a victim of homefront sabotage, aligning with 1980s cultural shifts toward rehabilitating military honor amid Reagan-era patriotism.^[31] The series' box-office success—First Blood grossed over $47 million domestically—amplified the imagery of isolated heroism against ungrateful civilians, embedding the betrayal narrative in popular consciousness without reliance on verified historical incidents.^[38] In print media, Lembcke traces the narrative's endurance to 1980s–1990s news features and veteran memoirs that recirculated anecdotal claims of airport confrontations, often in retrospectives timed to anniversaries or policy debates like the 1991 Gulf War buildup. Outlets including Newsweek and regional papers published pieces aggregating unverified stories of veterans being jeered or spat upon, framing these as emblematic of anti-war excess despite scant contemporaneous police or press records from the 1960s–1970s.^[38] Memoirs such as B.G. Burkett's Stolen Valor (1998), released contemporaneously with Lembcke's work, cataloged similar uncorroborated episodes, prioritizing emotional testimony over empirical validation to underscore perceived cultural amnesia.^[39] Lembcke posits that this media selectivity functioned to reframe Vietnam's defeat not as a strategic or political failure but as a consequence of eroded homefront cohesion, thereby advancing agendas that absolved wartime leadership while vilifying dissent as the causal agent of division.^[33] By prioritizing resonant symbols of humiliation—rooted in biblical and historical precedents of spitting as ritual degradation—over documented troop rotations via commercial airports with minimal public fanfare, these influences cultivated a retrospective consensus narrative that obscured mutual veteran-activist solidarity evident in era-specific records.^[31] This causal dynamic, Lembcke maintains, aligned with conservative cultural reclamation efforts, as seen in the 1985 National Salute to Vietnam Veterans parade, which juxtaposed martial pageantry against evoked memories of civilian scorn.^[38]

Empirical Evidence Examined

Contemporary News Reports and Absence Thereof

A comprehensive review of major U.S. newspapers and media archives from 1965 to 1975, the period encompassing peak troop returns from Vietnam, reveals no verifiable contemporary reports of anti-war protesters spitting on returning veterans at airports or other public venues.^[33] Scholarly searches of databases such as LexisNexis, covering terms like "spit," "veteran," and "Vietnam" in conjunction with "airport" or "protester," produced zero matching incidents during this timeframe, despite extensive coverage of anti-war demonstrations and veteran homecomings.^[22] This absence persists even in outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post, which documented numerous protests but omitted any such targeted hostility toward individual service members.^[33] In contrast, media from the era recorded instances of spitting in reversed contexts, where pro-war supporters or bystanders directed aggression toward anti-war activists. For example, during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, eyewitness accounts and news dispatches described pro-Nixon demonstrators and police allies spitting on peace marchers amid clashes outside the convention hall.^[40] Such reports, appearing in real-time in publications like Chicago Tribune, highlight a pattern of hostility flowing toward protesters rather than from them toward veterans, though these events involved crowds rather than isolated returnees.^[29] The logistical structure of veteran returns further undermines the plausibility of widespread spitting incidents. U.S. troops were rotated home individually or in small groups via military flights to West Coast bases like Travis Air Force Base, after which they received vouchers for commercial flights to dispersed destinations across the country, arriving at varied civilian airports without fanfare or mass assemblies.^[41] Military policy encouraged or required changing into civilian attire upon stateside arrival—often in base or airport facilities—to blend into public spaces and minimize visibility, reducing opportunities for coordinated protester encounters.^[42] This decentralized process, handling over 500,000 returns annually by 1972 without centralized welcoming events, made systematic targeting improbable amid the era's fragmented travel networks.^[43]

Veteran Testimonies and Recollections

Numerous Vietnam veterans have recounted personal experiences of physical and verbal harassment upon returning home, including incidents of spitting, primarily documented through retrospective memoirs, letters, and oral histories collected in the late 1980s and 1990s. In syndicated columnist Bob Greene's 1989 compilation Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned from Vietnam, over 80 letters from veterans explicitly described being spat upon at airports or in public spaces shortly after demobilization, often by individuals perceived as anti-war activists who also hurled epithets like "baby killer."^[44] These accounts typically involved isolated encounters during layovers or travel, with veterans reporting saliva directed at their uniforms or faces amid crowds.^[43] Contemporary surveys conducted closer to the war's end, however, indicate lower rates of reported hostility. A 1971 Harris Poll commissioned by the Veterans Administration found that only 1% of Vietnam veterans described their reception by the American public as unfriendly, with 99% reporting favorable treatment from family and friends; spitting was not singled out but encompassed within broader perceptions of public response.^[33] Later polls and veteran gatherings in the 1990s and 2000s elicited higher recollections of witnessed or personal incidents, with some informal surveys among veteran groups suggesting 10-20% of respondents claiming direct experience or observation of spitting, though these lacked the rigor of the earlier Harris inquiry and often relied on memory decades after events.^[45] Participants in events like the 1971 Winter Soldier Investigation, organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, occasionally referenced homecoming verbal abuse in their testimonies, including being called derogatory names, but physical acts like spitting were less emphasized amid focus on wartime experiences.^[46] Memoirs such as those from individual veterans, including accounts in Deseret News interviews from 1989, detail similar patterns: sudden, unprovoked spitting by civilians in transit hubs like airports, contributing to a sense of societal rejection.^[39] Verification of these testimonies remains challenging due to their anecdotal nature and the passage of time, with potential for memory conflation arising from documented general civilian disdain—such as workplace discrimination or social ostracism—intensified by post-traumatic stress or reinforced by media portrayals of veteran mistreatment. Empirical reliance on self-reports as data points underscores a pattern of perceived betrayal, even as causal factors like isolated agitators or exaggerated recall from trauma complicate attribution to organized anti-war efforts.^[45]

Criticisms and Debates

Challenges to Lembcke's Claims

Critics of Lembcke's work have highlighted its heavy dependence on the absence of contemporaneous media reports as disproof of widespread spitting incidents, arguing that this approach treats lack of documentation as conclusive evidence of non-occurrence. During the Vietnam era, a period of intense media alignment with anti-war perspectives, individual altercations at airports or bus stations—often involving isolated veterans reluctant to seek attention amid broader public antagonism—likely evaded journalistic coverage or were deemed insufficiently newsworthy for national outlets sympathetic to protesters.^[47] Lembcke's methodology has also drawn scrutiny for marginalizing oral histories and firsthand veteran accounts, which form a body of consistent, if anecdotal, testimonies from non-academic collections. Detailed recollections, such as those from veterans Mike Borah and Tom Huis in the Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project, describe specific spitting encounters upon return, challenging the portrayal of these as fabricated or PTSD-induced false memories. By prioritizing archival silences over such corroborative narratives without rigorous case-by-case validation, Lembcke's analysis risks underweighting experiential data that aligns across disparate sources like memoirs and support networks.^[47]^[48] Concerns over confirmation bias stem from Lembcke's activist background, including his affiliation with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which may have inclined his research toward narratives absolving the anti-war movement of intra-left tensions with service members. Detractors contend that this alignment influenced source selection, favoring interpretations that downplay veteran-protester frictions in favor of a unified opposition to the war, potentially overlooking evidence of selective reporting or minimized conflicts within progressive circles.^[49]^[50]

Broader Interpretations of Anti-War Activism

The anti-war movement exerted significant public pressure that contributed to the U.S. decision to withdraw combat troops from Vietnam by 1973, as declining domestic support amid mounting casualties and protests constrained presidential options and facilitated negotiations leading to the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973.^[12] Historians note that this shift in opinion, amplified by media coverage of demonstrations and events like the 1968 Tet Offensive, helped avert further escalation and is credited with saving American lives by hastening de-escalation, though the movement's influence was one factor among strategic failures and diplomatic imperatives.^[51] Such activism focused on critiquing policy failures rather than individual soldiers, aligning with first-hand veteran testimonies that distinguished between opposition to the war and personal animosity toward troops.^[52] However, radical factions within the movement, such as the Weather Underground, employed inflammatory rhetoric portraying U.S. troops as complicit in imperialist aggression, which some analysts argue contributed to a dehumanizing narrative that blurred lines between policy critique and hostility toward service members.^[53] The group's manifestos and actions, including bombings targeting military-related symbols, framed soldiers as extensions of an oppressive system, potentially inciting confrontational encounters at bases where protesters clashed with personnel, as documented in contemporaneous reports of disruptions at facilities like Fort Bragg.^[54] This fringe element's emphasis on revolutionary violence alienated moderates and fueled perceptions of the broader movement as endorsing domestic antagonism, though mainstream organizers distanced themselves from such extremism. Vietnam veterans exhibited divided attitudes toward anti-war activism, with empirical surveys revealing no unified stance: a 2025 poll found 46% of veterans viewed the war as unjustified, reflecting sympathy for protesters' policy critiques, while others reported feelings of betrayal from perceived domestic rejection.^[55] Organizations like Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), founded in 1967, drew thousands of participants who testified against the war's conduct, as in the 1971 Winter Soldier Investigation, yet countervailing sentiments persisted among those who associated activism with eroded public support for troops returning home.^[56] This schism underscores causal tensions in protester-veteran interactions, where constructive dialogue coexisted with instances of alienation driven by radical overtones and media portrayals.^[57]

Reception and Impact

Academic and Scholarly Reviews

Scholars in history and sociology have generally commended Jerry Lembcke's The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998) for its rigorous archival investigation into the cultural construction of Vietnam War memory, particularly the narrative of anti-war protesters spitting on returning veterans. Marita Sturken, in her review for the American Historical Review, highlighted the book's contribution to understanding how media portrayals and cinematic tropes, such as those in films like Coming Home (1978), perpetuated symbolic rather than literal accounts of veteran mistreatment, emphasizing Lembcke's analysis of memory as a socially constructed process.^[58] Similarly, the H-Net review praised Lembcke's methodological innovation in tracing the spitting motif's emergence through newspapers, veterans' memoirs, and popular culture from the late 1970s onward, arguing it effectively demonstrates the absence of contemporaneous evidence for widespread incidents.^[59] Critiques from military historians have focused on Lembcke's interpretive framework, contending that it may underemphasize documented instances of verbal harassment and social ostracism experienced by veterans, even if physical spitting remains unverified in primary sources. Mark D. Van Ells, reviewing for the Journal of Military History, noted that while Lembcke's debunking of the spitting image as a post-war myth is compelling, the work selectively prioritizes cultural analysis over oral histories and personal testimonies that convey real alienation, potentially minimizing the causal role of anti-war rhetoric in veteran trauma. Thomas D. Beamish, in Contemporary Sociology, acknowledged the archival depth but critiqued the thesis for implying a near-total fabrication without fully accounting for fragmented, anecdotal reports in veteran accounts that align with broader patterns of public disdain. The book's influence extends to fields like cultural history and memory studies, where it has shaped discussions on how national traumas are mythologized; by the 2020s, it had been cited in over 200 scholarly works examining war remembrance and media distortion, including analyses of collective forgetting in U.S. foreign policy narratives. Despite debates over its absolutism—Lembcke himself concedes isolated incidents cannot be ruled out—the monograph remains a foundational text for privileging empirical voids in media records over retrospective claims.^[34]

Public Discourse and Media Coverage

Upon its 1998 publication, The Spitting Image received attention in mainstream media outlets, where it was often framed as a corrective to exaggerated depictions of anti-war activism, such as those popularized in films like Rambo that portrayed returning veterans as victims of widespread public scorn. Lembcke's analysis, emphasizing the absence of verifiable newspaper accounts or police reports of spitting incidents between 1965 and 1975, was presented as evidence that the narrative served to deflect blame from military policy failures onto domestic protesters.^[33] This coverage, including Lembcke's subsequent opinion pieces in newspapers like The New York Times and Boston Globe, positioned the book as contributing to a nuanced understanding of Vietnam-era divisions, highlighting how cultural myths reinforced a victimized veteran archetype.^[22] The work provoked backlash among segments of the veteran community, who viewed its dismissal of the spitting stories as an invalidation of real emotional traumas and a form of revisionism that downplayed hostility from anti-war elements. Personal recollections from veterans, documented in memoirs and interviews, persisted in public narratives, with critics arguing that the lack of contemporaneous records did not negate individual experiences amid broader societal rejection, including job discrimination and media portrayals associating soldiers with atrocities.^[60] While anti-war veteran organizations like Vietnam Veterans Against the War endorsed Lembcke's thesis as debunking folklore, traditional groups and commentators expressed concern that it risked whitewashing the anti-war movement's role in stigmatizing service members, fueling ongoing debates in outlets like CounterPunch and historical analyses.^[61] Overall, the book stimulated public discourse on the reliability of collective memory in wartime legacies, raising awareness of how unverified anecdotes can shape national narratives without providing empirical resolution to evidential disputes. Media discussions acknowledged its role in questioning "spitting image" tropes in popular culture, yet controversies endured, as the persistence of veteran testimonies underscored unresolved tensions between documented history and subjective recall.^[59]

Influence on Vietnam War Memory

Lembcke's analysis in The Spitting Image has reinforced a historiographical narrative portraying anti-war protesters as non-violent and supportive of returning veterans, thereby challenging accounts of widespread public hostility and emphasizing instead media-driven distortions of memory.^[31] This perspective gained renewed visibility in mainstream outlets, such as a 2017 New York Times op-ed by Lembcke himself, which reiterated the absence of verified spitting incidents and framed such stories as postwar fabrications rather than empirical events.^[33] By privileging archival gaps in contemporary reports over later personal testimonies, this view has informed segments of public discourse that seek to rehabilitate the 1960s counterculture, positioning protesters as victims of conservative myth-making rather than agents of division.^[62] Despite these efforts, recollections of spitting and verbal abuse endure prominently within Vietnam veteran communities, sustaining a parallel memory of societal rejection that underpins critiques of left-wing activism during the era. Surveys and oral histories collected decades later, including those shared in veteran forums and publications, frequently reference such encounters as emblematic of broader ingratitude, with incidents described in airports and urban centers from 1969 onward.^[50] This persistence has fueled right-leaning interpretations of the war's legacy, where the alleged myth serves as evidence of cultural amnesia or deliberate revisionism by academic and media elites, maintaining divisions in how the conflict's domestic fallout is remembered.^[63] The dichotomy in Vietnam memory has manifested in contrasts with post-9/11 conflicts, where anti-war protests against Iraq and Afghanistan operations—peaking around 2003–2007—did not yield comparable widespread claims of physical spitting on returnees, despite similar scales of opposition.^[28] This absence, amid documented verbal confrontations and media scrutiny, underscores the Vietnam-specific resilience of the spitting motif as a cultural artifact, potentially amplified by the era's unique polarization and lack of immediate hero's welcomes, rather than a universal pattern of activist behavior. Ongoing debates thus highlight how Lembcke's framework influences selective emphases in war remembrance, privileging systemic explanations over individualized veteran experiences in shaping collective perceptions.^[64]

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The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam
About the Author. Jerry Lembcke grew up in Northwest Iowa. He was drafted in 1968 and served as a Chaplain's Assistant in Vietnam. He is the author of eight ...Missing: background | Show results with:background
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The Myth of the Spitting Antiwar Protester - The New York Times
Oct 13, 2017 · Jerry Lembcke, an associate professor emeritus at College of the Holy Cross, is the author of “The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy ...Missing: background | Show results with:background
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The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam
Aug 6, 2025 · Tracing a range of conflicts in the twentieth century, the book illustrates how regimes engaged in unpopular conflicts often vilify their ...
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[PDF] Jerry Lembcke. The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy ...
The basic theme underlying this modern myth is that the Vietnam veterans were poorly treated by an unappreciative nation, specifically by anti-war groups. But ...<|control11|><|separator|>
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Interview with Dr. Jerry Lembcke - Digital Collections
Mar 14, 2017 · Biographical Text. Dr. Jerry Lembcke is an associate professor emeritus of Sociology at Holy Cross University. He has a Ph.D. in Sociology from ...
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The spitting image : myth, memory, and the legacy of Vietnam
Sep 14, 2011 · The spitting image : myth, memory, and the legacy of Vietnam. by: Lembcke, Jerry, 1943-. Publication date: 1998. Topics: Vietnam War, 1961-1975 ...Missing: process development
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The Image of a Veteran - Newsweek
Feb 1, 2008 · Lembcke's book "The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam," looked in part at how the news media and pop-culture ...
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VIETNAM VETS RECALL THEIR HOMECOMINGS - Deseret News
Feb 4, 1989 · For years I had been hearing stories that when American troops returned home from Vietnam, they were spat upon by anti-war protesters.
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Myth 27: That in reality the stories of returning soldiers being spat at ...
At least one former anti-war protestor has admitted to spitting on soldiers during his protesting days. Spitting on National Guardsmen at the 1968 ...<|control11|><|separator|>
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Vietnam veterans faced scorn and rejection when returning home to RI
Feb 21, 2023 · Returning vets flew into West Coast Air Force bases. They received a good meal, vouchers for civilian flights home, and a bus ride to Seattle, Oakland or San ...Missing: logistics | Show results with:logistics
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[PDF] Vietnam – Returning Home - South Dakota State Historical Society
I remember landing in the airport and going in the men's room and getting out of my uniform and putting on civilian clothes. I decided I didn't want to be ...
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The Homecoming for Vietnam Veterans | CherriesWriter
Nov 26, 2013 · In the 1970's, Vietnam Veterans were discriminated against for jobs, publishing books of their war experiences and were referred to as the social delinquents ...Missing: logistics | Show results with:logistics
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HOMECOMING When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam <i> by ...
Mar 18, 1990 · In these brief letters, former servicemen share their bitter memories of being hit, kicked, spat upon and called “baby killers” and worse. To ...
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[PDF] Were They Spat On? Understanding The Homecoming Experience ...
Sep 3, 2019 · York: Holt, Reinholt and Winston, 1971), xiv. 3. Vlieg: Vietnam Veteran Homecoming Experiences. Published by ScholarWorks@GVSU, 2019. Page ...Missing: mass | Show results with:mass
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The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam ...
often a woman — spitting on the.
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https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/gvjh/vol7/iss1/3
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https://www.gvsu.edu/vethistory
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THE MOST IMPORTANT LEGACY OF THE VIETNAM CONFLICT
Oct 28, 2019 · Some Vietnam veterans, notably Jerry Lembcke, a sociology professor ... biased perspective concerning Vietnam. Not supportive of what ...
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Disrespect for Vietnam vets is fact, not fiction - Star Tribune
Jun 26, 2012 · Lembcke is an avowed socialist and has tried to use incomplete or dishonest research to lend credence to his government-as-pro-war conspiracy ...Missing: background | Show results with:background<|separator|>
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The Antiwar Movement and Vietnam Policy - OSU
This paper presents some disconnected speculations about the effect of the Vietnam antiwar movement on public opinion, political elections, American Vietnam ...
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[PDF] How the American Peace Movement Impacted Foreign Policy ...
The peace movement restricted Nixon's foreign policy extremes, but he continued the war to protect his 1972 election, leading to more bloodshed.
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Sources of Vietnam Veteran Pro- and Antiwar Political Attitudes
Aug 6, 2025 · Roughly 55% of Vietnam-era veterans thought the media had a great effect on attitudes toward veterans, while 33% of the general public felt ...
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The True Legacy of the Vietnam War - VA News
Dec 21, 2011 · The impact of the anti-War protests across the nation in the late 1960s and early 1970s fostered an anti-Vietnam Veteran atmosphere here at ...Missing: division | Show results with:division
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50 Years Later, Majority of Vietnam Veterans and U.S. Adults Think ...
Apr 28, 2025 · Vietnam veterans do not agree with the statement: 58% disagree that Vietnam made the U.S. government more cautious, compared to 29% who agree.
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[PDF] An Exploration of the Motivations of Vietnam War Veterans Who ...
In addition to 40,000 official members, an unknown number of Vietnam veterans participated in anti-war protests or held anti-war beliefs without ever officially ...
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[PDF] Sources of Vietnam veteran pro- and antiwar political attitudes
Vietnam veterans who participate in political activism upon returning home are particularly engaging because they emerge as “moral entrepreneurs”. (Shils 1966) ...
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Jerry Lembcke. The Spitting Image: Myth ... - Oxford Academic
Jerry Lembcke. The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. Assisted by Harvey J. Kaye. New York: New York University Press. 1998. Pp. xi, 217.
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H-Net Reviews
Review of Lembcke, Jerry, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. H-Pol, H-Net Reviews. December, 1998. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/ ...
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Why Were Vietnam War Vets Treated Poorly When They Returned?
Nov 8, 2018 · American soldiers returning home from Vietnam often faced scorn as the war they had fought in became increasingly unp...Missing: homecoming individual credible sources
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Nobody Spat on American GIs! - CounterPunch.org
Jul 3, 2015 · My 1998 book, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, delved into the origins of the stories and inquired into their ...
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False memory - International Socialist Review
Jerry Lembcke's The Spitting Image exposed as a big lie one of the most horrid of myths that middle class antiwar protestors spit repeatedly on returning ...
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Were Vietnam veterans spat on? - Skeptics Stack Exchange
Feb 17, 2020 · In his book The Spitting Image Jerry Lembcke claims that it's a myth and never happened, or at least not in any confirmed incident.<|control11|><|separator|>
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The Legend of the Spat-Upon Veteran - In These Times
Jun 1, 2012 · It's a disproven myth, but politicians, keen on dispelling opposition and maintaining militarism, continue to feed the fable.Missing: absence | Show results with:absence<|control11|><|separator|>