"Many tellers of the spitting tales identify the culprits as girls, a curious quality to the stories that gives away their gendered subtext." Stories about arriving back from Vietnam into San Francisco and Los Angeles "are implausible," and one of the storytellers lacks "credulity." According to Lembcke, " no returning soldiers landed at San Francisco Airport," and "GIs landed at military airbases, not civilian airports, and protesters could not have gotten onto the bases and anywhere near deplaning troops." The stories started appearing about 1980. No news reports or even claims that someone was being spat on." "For a book I wrote in 1998 I looked back to the time when the spit was supposedly flying, the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In this post I'll take up just a few of Lembcke's arguments (I'll have much more on spitting over the next week): In a 1998 NYU Press book, The Spitting Image a 1999 scholarly conference paper of the same name and two op- eds, Lembcke spins an elaborate tale to support his view. Yet several journalists and at least one scholar, sociologist Jerry Lembcke of Holy Cross, think that such things never happened, that they are an "urban legend." Lembcke claims: "Stories of spat-upon Vietnam veterans are bogus." Hundreds of Vietnam-era veterans have publicly claimed in recent decades that they were spat on by citizens or anti-war protesters because of their military status, either before they went to Vietnam, when they were on leave, or after their returned from overseas.
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