Roasted On A Vietnam Spit: 'Urban Myth' Prof's Urban Miss

CINCINNATI (TDB) -- Slate's Jack Shafer this week distanced himself from the contention soldiers in military uniforms were never spat upon by U.S. civilians during the years Americans were deeply divided over the Vietnam War. Shafer found a vet and believes his story from 1971.

The Slate columnist has long based his skepticism about spitting incidents on the research of Jerry Lembcke, a College of the Holy Cross professor who likens spitting stories to urban legends. Lembcke is a Vietnam vet who became active in the anti-war movement after coming home. He contends the myth took hold in popular culture several years after Saigon fell.

Shafer made contact with Delmar Pickett Jr. , a Vietnam vet from Kansas who was interviewed by CBS TV newsman Morton Dean. Pickett told CBS he was spat upon at the Seattle airport while in uniform -- a story he repeated for Shafer last week. The CBS broadcast aired on Dec. 27, 1971, before the war ended, and long before the professor published his research casting doubt on accounts of spitting.

"Pickett's personal history challenges the work of Jerry Lembcke, the author of the 1998 book Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, who holds the spat-upon-vet story is an 'urban myth' that took root in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It also challenges the half-dozen columns I've written in support of Lembcke's thesis."

That's Shafer, who added the spitting stories had "greater currency in those early years than Lembcke allows." He was respectful of Pickett, who recalled some of the details, but not all, because the passage of time had influenced his memory a bit. Said Shafer:

"I have no reason to believe Pickett is lying, even if his two recountings of that day in 1971 don't match up perfectly. I'm no human lie detector, but his telephone manner seemed remarkably relaxed and candid for somebody getting a call from the press out of the blue. What argues in favor of Pickett's claim over say, Minarik's (another vet from the era), is that a document shows that he made it in the year in happened. And unlike Minarik, he's not making any political hay with it. It's just one soldier's story."

Anyhow, Pickett put it best about rooting around memory banks and recapturing what it was like to live through a time when the nation was more sharply split than today over the prosecution of an unpopular war.

"Memory tends to blur. Things you think happened didn't. Things you think didn't, did. Time softens everything."

H/T BizzyBloglog and the proprietor, Tom Blumer, for passing along Shafer's follow up in Slate.

Spitting At Vets: Here's Why It Never Happened?

CINCINNATI (TDB) -- Here's how one professor (and miltary vet) explains why our culture is awash in mythical spitting tales. The author is cited by many -- including some bloggers in Cincinnati -- as the chief debunker:

"The element of spit in the coming-home stories of veterans who feel betrayed reveals a binary, man-nature dichotomy that lies at the heart of our understandings of human existence. When and how did mankind separate from nature? The answers are provided by creation myths that entail stories about the emergence of mankind from the sea. The prominence of water in creation stories correlates with the scientific understanding that human life emerged from aquatic life, but its psychological origin may have derived from the experience of biological birthing in which life emerges out of the amniotic fluid of the mother. Subconsciously, the individual feels a primal connection with the warmth and dampness of that in utero existence, and perhaps even desires to return to it, while consciously recognizing that life itself depends upon successful separation from the safety and comfort of that watery world.

"Whatever its origin, the belief that human existence begins with its separation from water is accompanied by fears of an involuntary return to it. We find these fears reflected in stories of a great deluge that sometimes appear in conjunction with creation stories. The idiom of wetness in myth is also gendered in ways that help us understand why the stories of spat-upon veterans frequently tell of women or girls doing the spitting. From the age of Enlightenment, Western culture has emphasized a link between women and nature. Rationality, the sine qua non of humanity, was understood by Enlightenment philosophers to be an attribute of the male, emotionality, of the female. The control of women became representative of the control of nature, and with their equation to nature, women became the object of oppression. The "naturizing" of women was followed by their sexualizing. Seventeenth-century writers valued women for their erotic physiognomy, especially their breasts and vaginas. But the ambiguity inherent in humankind's post-aquatic existence was paralleled by the male's ambivalence toward women: revered for her life-giving powers, the female simultaneously beckoned the male to return to its folds and threatened to reengulf the life that had emerged from it. As Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in the introduction to Theweleit's Male Fantasies:

"'The dread arises in the pre-Oedipal struggle of the fledgling self, before there is even an ego to sort out the objects of desire and the odds of getting them: It is a dread, ultimately of dissolution—of being swallowed, engulfed, annihilated. Women's bodies are the holes, swamps, pits of muck that can engulf.'

"It is this misogynous equation of women—nature, sexuality, wetness, engulfment, deeply etched in our culture, that is the basis for the myth of women spitting on defeated soldiers."

The entire paper that challenges spitting stories is
HERE. It is well worth reading.

1970 At Ft. Polk Louisiana: Those Were The Days

Ft. Polk Photo From The Internet

CINCINNATI (TDB) -- Read on for a glimpse of what it was like to be in basic training in 1970 -- not long after the Kent State University shootings -- when life could be dazed and confused. I was at a place the Army called "Tigerland," in Louisiana, the anti-war movement was gaining force, and things were tense. They had just spun out of control that May in Ohio, where National Guard rifle-fire killed four students.

Here are some pictures of what Fort Polk's Tigerland looked like as young soldiers were trained for war. Hollywood made a movie in 2000 that was called Tigerland about Fort Polk's role in the Vietnam-era. The reviewer, who trained there, captured the place pretty well, including the fact that Leesville -- the town outside the gates -- was isolated and hardly a hotbed of anti-war sentiment.

At Fort Polk, the Army cancelled its Armed Forces Day celebration in 1970, and there were several posts that apparently did the same. Some peaceful protests and demonstrations took place at other military installations.

An old drill sergeant remembers how some people went AWOL rather than complete basic, and describes the "trainees" difficulty slipping out of Leesville by Greyhound.

A Wikimapia of Fort Polk today is HERE.

Now, there's a good bit of debate under way on the Internet about whether vets were or weren't spit at during the Vietnam years, a lot of it stirred up by the post immediately beneath this one. These stories have been challenged as urban myths.

An article in the online magazine Slate from a few years back is HERE, and it directly and sincerely raises questions about the amount of expectoration aimed at troops. On the other hand, there are comments from Vietnam era vets who rebut the assertion there was no spitting.

My take: Only the spittees and spittors know the answer. But the debate will last for years -- like the contretemps over who was at fault in Kent on May 4, 1970, troops or students, students or troops. The side you take depends on what you want to believe.

[UPDATE: 10/30/10 12:30 pm -- When I went through Army Basic Training at Fort Polk in 1970 my unit was A-2-1.  Every time we sat down or did something as a group, the entire company would chant, "Rat shit, cat shit, bucket full of bat shit.  Chicken pluckin', mother f---kin, A-2-1"   A bonding rite I reckon.  The wet bulb -- whatever the hell that is -- was always on because the summertime climate was hot, humid and oppressive.  The wet bulb meant we could roll up our the shirtsleeves of our olive drab fatigues and unblouse the pantlegs atop our black leather combat boots.  It was a way to loosen up the uniform in the heat.  A-2-1 was assigned barracks at South Fort -- two story wooden buildings with open bays crammed with metal bunkbed racks -- and we were told the barracks were built to house troops trained for duty in World War II.  Three wars later, they were still being used.  My platoon's drill sergeant was named Smith; I no longer remember his first name.  He was from Tennessee, somewhere around Memphis.  The company's head drill sergeant was Sgt. Simmons, or at least that I what I recall today.  Memories have faded from 40 years ago.  At a formation after the company finished basic, Sgt. Simmons told us he had been hard on us because he wanted us to come home if, and when, we were shipped off to war.  It was quite moving to hear him speak.  Until that moment, we all thought he was gruff and unreasonable.  Suddenly, we knew immediately that he was a good soldier and honorable man with our interests, our lives, at heart.  Looking back, I now see that he had the toughest job on Earth -- preparing young men for war, hoping they would survive, wondering if he gave them the tools and skills to make it back.  Basic was not easy in those days.  To get into the chow hall, we had to go back and forth across a set of handbars.   And walking was not allowed in the company area -- soldiers ran.  On marches, if somebody fell out, the troops would have to carry him and his equipment.  The barracks had to be spotless when the platoon left for training missions.  At Fort Polk, I learned how to use a floor buffer.  We didn't love Fort Polk -- the GIs in my company called it Fort Puke Lousyanna.  I wonder if that phrase is still around?

Somebody sent me an e-mail last week from a film company that wants to make a documentary about Fort Polk in the Vietnam era.  Unfortunately, it came into my spam account and I accidentally deleted the e-mail rather than saving it as I should have.  I would have posted the e-mail here so all Fort Polk vets interested in the documentary could contact the film's producers, perhaps to pass along a memory, yarn or tall tale.  After basic, I was assigned to AIT at North Fort.  I can't remember the unit designation.  It was a pretty bleak place, and I seem to recall that the barracks were in worse shape than at South Fort.]

[UPDATE 2: 8:44 am, 11/05/2010 --  The production company that has been hired to make the documentary about Fort Polk is called Cloverland, and you can see their website by clicking here.  They are looking for Vietnam-era veterans who went through basic at Tigerland.  I spoke with Cloverland owner John Cork, who told me that vets in Louisiana or Southern California would be best because his film crews are in those areas.  Interested?  You can learn more at JCork@madeincloverland.com.  Here's a portion of the e-mail I received from Los Angeles producer Lisa van Eyssen with details about the project:

"The company I work for, Cloverland, has been contracted by 20th Century Fox to produce a short documentary called, The Real Tigerland, which will be included on a Blu-ray release of the 2000 film, Tigerland, starring Colin Farrell.  Our goal with this documentary is to tell the story of the real life Vietnam veterans who spent their time at Tigerland, and include their remarkable training and the spectrum of emotions they experienced during this period.  We hope to sit down with several veterans who can share their personal history and the real experience of Tigerland."]