Support Our Troops!

In a class I'm currently teaching, we've been having a good discussion about whether America was more "united" (whatever that means) during World War II than it is today. In the course of the conversation, more than one student has raised the bete noire of Americans failing to support troops during and after Vietnam, and someone just invoked that hoary old story of troops being spat upon when they debarked from their planes. It's now more a "let's not do that to our troops in Iraq" caution than a way of staking out a position in the Sixties culture wars, but either way, it's probably not true, according to sociologist Jerry Lembcke:

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. I found nothing. No news reports or even claims that someone was being spat on. What I did find is that around 1980, scores of Vietnam-generation men were saying they were greeted by spitters when they came home from Vietnam. There is an element of urban legend in the stories in that their point of origin in time and place is obscure, and, yet, they have very similar details... GIs landed at military airbases, not civilian airports, and protesters could not have gotten onto the bases and anywhere near deplaning troops. There may have been exceptions, of course, but in those cases how would protesters have known in advance that a plane was being diverted to a civilian site? ... A 1971 Harris poll conducted for the Veterans Administration found over 90 percent of Vietnam veterans reporting a friendly homecoming. Far from spitting on veterans, the antiwar movement welcomed them into its ranks and thousands of veterans joined the opposition to the war.

I savor this finding. It's good to keep in mind today, and as the 2006 elections - which will, I think, feature "supporting our troops" as a major and ut