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By Jerry Lembcke, Associate
Professor of Sociology
 In
February 1991, I was asked to speak at a teach-in on the
Persian Gulf War in the Hogan Campus Center Ballroom. My
presentation focused on the image then being popularized
in the press of Vietnam-era anti-war activists treating Vietnam
veterans abusively. After sending troops to the Gulf
region in August, the Bush administration argued that opposition
to the war was tantamount to disregard for the well-being
of the troops and that such disregard was reminiscent of
the treatment given to Vietnam veterans upon their return
home. By invoking the image of anti-war activists spitting
on veterans, the administration was able to discredit such
activism and galvanize support for the war. Drawing
on my own experience as a Vietnam veteran who came home from
the war and joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW),
I called the image of spat-upon
Vietnam veterans a myth.
After seven years of research and writing,
my book, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam was
published in August 1998, by New York University Press. The book has received
widespread press in the print and electronic media. Many veterans have
responded to my book with gratitude that I have set
the story straight. Others have challenged my thesis, claiming to have
been treated badly when they returned from the war. Few of the latter stories,
however, lend validity to the myth that it was anti-war activists who were hostile
to vets. Upon questioning, vets will often concede that the hostility came
from older veterans, the Veteran's Administration hospital, or simply a drunk
in a bar. The historical fact is that the peace movement saw veterans as
potential allies and reached out to
them.
If the image of the spat-upon veteran is mythical, how then does it come to be
so widely accepted? Myths help people come to terms with difficult periods
of their past. They provide
explanations for why things happened. The myth of the spat-upon veteran
functions in this way by providing an alibi for why the most powerful and righteous
nation on earth (as the United States perceives itself to be) lost the war to
an underdeveloped Asian nation. The myth says, in effect, that we were
not beaten by the Vietnamese but were defeated on the home front by fifth columnists:
the anti-war movement.
Explanations offered by myths can also help
reconcile disparities between a group's self-image and the historical record. On
a societal level, we have largely forgotten that much of the energy and inspiration
for the anti-war movement came from veterans of not only Vietnam but World War
II as well. We "forget" because the image of anti-war warriors does not
fit comfortably with the militarism that dominates
our culture. But political amnesia can be dangerous. For the military,
the failure to remember GI and veteran opposition to the war could lead to overly
optimistic assessments of what to expect from soldiers
in a future conflict. Written in the Catholic Radical, Australian
peace activist Ciaron O'Reilly recently reported that more serious resistance
to the Gulf War came from within the military than from the peace movement. Plagued
by myth, young people today have erroneously come to equate being anti-war with
being anti-soldier, a connection the Bush administration
helped to promote. The myth sullies the reputation of those individuals
and organizations that dared to dissent and strips Vietnam veterans of their
true place in history as gallant fighters against the war. The identity
crisis supposedly suffered by Vietnam veterans because they were denied the military
victory of their youth might be better laid at the feet of a culture that confers
manhood on warriors, but not on peacemakers,
and especially not warriors-turned-peacemakers.
We are what we remember, but how do we remember? We remember through the
representations of our experiences, through the
symbols that stand for the events. While the events themselves are frozen
in time, their representations are not. Our memories of what happened can
be changed by altering the images of events. The power to control memory
is thus bound up with the power to control the representations of history which,
in our society, are heavily mediated by the institutions of popular culture and
mass communications. As we approach the 21st century, the twisted imagery
of Vietnam veterans in films like Rambo continues to infect our culture and cloud
our political discourse. To look
at a film like Forest Gump is, according to film scholar William
Adams, to watch an historical image in the making, a public memory in
the course
of construction.
Reclaiming our memory of the Vietnam era entails a struggle against very powerful
institutional forces that toy with our imaginings of the war for reasons of monetary,
political, or professional
gain. It is a struggle for our individual and collective identities that
calls us to reappropriate the making of our own memories. It is a struggle
of epic importance. Studies of the 20th century will shape our national
identity for decades to come. Remembered as the war that was lost because
of betrayal at home, Vietnam becomes a modern-day
Alamo that must be avenged. Remembered as a war 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. By challenging myths like that of the spat-upon
Vietnam veteran, we reclaim our role in the writing of our own history, the construction
of our own memory, and the making of our own identity.
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