The Myth of the Spat-Upon Soldier

June 8th, 2014

Growing up in the late twentieth-century United States I, like many others, was taught that protestors against the Vietnam war spat on American soldiers when they returned home from the war. When I got older and studied history more thoroughly I discovered that I had been taught a myth. That spitting did not happen. There were no news reports or other accounts of it happening - not one, not even from the most ardent supporters of the war - during the war. There were newspaper reports of pro-war counter-demonstrators occasionally spitting on anti-war protesters, but that's the closest you'll get. All allegations of protestors spitting on returning soldiers were made after the war was over. The myth originated in movies a few years after the end of the war, and reached the height of its popularity in the early 1990s when politicians used it to justify the first Iraq war.

Soldiers & veterans were actually major parts of the anti-war movement. Vietnam Veterans against the war was one of the largest & most influential anti-war organizations in the country and, in the later phases of the war, soldiers started killing their own officers with fragmentation grenades. Some of the most severe military unrest in US history happened during the war. One officer reported to the Armed Forces Journal Journal in 1971:

The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.

By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous. …

All the foregoing facts – and mean more dire indicators of the worse kind of military trouble – point to widespread conditions among American forces in Vietnam that have only been exceeded in this century by the French Army’s Nivelle mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917. …

At best count, there appear to be some 144 underground newspapers published on or aimed at U.S. military bases in this country and overseas. Since 1970 the number of such sheets has increased 40% (up from 103 last fall). These journals are not mere gripe-sheets that poke soldier fun in the "Beetle Bailey" tradition, at the brass and the sergeants. "In Vietnam," writes the Ft Lewis-McChord Free Press, "the Lifers, the Brass, are the true Enemy, not the enemy." Another West Coast sheet advises readers: "Don’t desert. Go to Vietnam and kill your commanding officer."

At least 14 GI dissent organizations (including two made up exclusively of officers) now operate more or less openly. Ancillary to these are at least six antiwar veterans’ groups which strive to influence GIs.

All allegations of anti-war demonstrators spitting on soldiers after returning from Vietnam occurred after the war was over. They were first popularized by several movies, especially the Rambo series. About ten years after the war ended a handful of Vietnam veterans began insisting that soldiers had been spit upon, although a large number also insisted those stories were nonsense. Most of the time, when you press those veterans on the matter they will admit that they themselves weren’t spat upon, and they didn’t personally witness any spitting, but will insist that it happened to the friend of a friend’s cousin’s boyfriend, etc. None of them have any evidence to corroborate their claims. In some cases the available documentation directly contradicts their claims (for example, in some cases military records show they weren’t even in the military). If spitting on returning soldiers had been at all common there would have been evidence of it produced at the time - such as newspaper reports, photographs, video, letters, etc.

The stories all tend to repeat the same improbable formula: a stereotypical hippie spat upon a returning solider after he got off a plane returning from Vietnam, usually in San Francisco. The story is improbable because most soldiers did not return by plane, they returned by boat, and those who did return by plane usually did not fly through a civilian airport, let alone through San Francisco. Additionally, we generally think of stereotypical hippies as lovey-dovey types who avoid confrontation - not the type of person who’d spit on a burly soldier immediately after getting off an airplane returning from a warzone.

The popularity of the myth reached its height in the early 1990s, during and after the first Iraq war. Supporters of the war, including the first President Bush and most of American media, promoted the myth in order to silence opposition to the war. They portrayed anyone who opposed the war as dishonorable people who spat on soldiers and insisted everyone “support the troops” (by which they meant support the war). The myth gets occasionally bumped by policy-makers again whenever they want to denigrate anti-war activists or burnish support for the latest war.

There were several reasons why Americans were susceptible to this particular kind of war propaganda at this point in history. Its not unusual for a society to conclude it was "stabbed in the back" after losing a war. For example, many Germans (falsely) concluded that they had lost world war one because German Jews stabbed their country in the back. The same thing happened to the US after Vietnam. The Nixon administration did not claim that anti-war protestors spat upon soldiers returning from Vietnam, but it did unsuccessfully attempted to drive a wedge between the civilian and military wings of the peace movement during the war, and this left some with the mistaken impression that the anti-war movement was hostile towards rank & file soldiers (in reality anti-war veterans & soldiers were the stars of the show). Additionally, as noted previously, there were cases of spitting at peace demonstrations but it was typically cases of hawks spitting on doves. All these factors made the spitting myth seem plausible to many Americans, so when the media and the government started promoting it most fell for it.

For a more detailed look at this myth see The Spitting Image by Vietnam veteran and sociologist Jerry Lembcke. The excellent documentary Sir! No Sir! also discusses the spitting myth, and gives a more detailed history of the anti-war movement among soldiers and veterans.