![]() But one of the points that Lembcke comes back to again and again in his book is that anti-war activists were engaged in recruiting Vietnam veterans into their ranks why would anti-war activists treat potential colleagues in a manner that might alienate them? It should be noted that Lembcke has some experience in this relationship when he returned from Vietnam he became a member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The basic theme underlying this modern myth is that the Vietnam veterans were poorly treated by an unappreciative nation, specifically by anti-war groups. And, in between those two periods, the myth was perpetuated by motion pictures, which seized upon this myth as a dramatic device. His thesis is that such spitting incidents are part of a modern myth, used initially by the Nixon Administration as means to separate "good" veterans from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and later by the Bush Administration to discredit opposition during the Gulf War. Lembcke, a sociologist and a Vietnam veteran himself, has written a very serious book challenging the widely-held belief that Vietnam veterans were spit upon by anti-war activists when the veterans returned to the United States. There is one problem with those memories, according to Lembcke: Such treatment never happened. One recalls those returning veterans as being reviled, called names, even spit upon. Reviewed by David Eyman (History Department, Skidmore College)Įtched into the memories of most Americans of an age to remember the 1960s is the poor treatment accorded returning Vietnam veterans. New York: New York University Press, 1998. The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam.
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