Vietnam, Doug Mastriano, and an Urban Legend

A few days or so ago, PA State Senator Doug Mastriano posted this on his Facebook Page:

He's introducing legislation to establish a Vietnam War Veterans day in Pennsylvania.

Before we get any further, let me state unequivocally that I agree with Doug Mastriano when he said, during the above speech, that:

[Vietnam veterans] deserve our country's admiration, respect and appreciation as well as gratitude.

However it's what Sen Mastriano (and PhD in, uh, History??) said just before that that's the problem.

Here it is:

Thank you Mr President. This morning as chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs and Emergency Preparedness Committee, we held a service in honor of our Vietnam Veterans Day in Pennsylvania.

I have a lot to say about our Vietnam veterans and what they have been through. They faced circumstances abroad and at home that few veterans had to face.

My message today can be summed up simply with “I'm sorry and thank you.” That's it.

As to the “I'm sorry” part, it's about how our heroes during the Vietnam era were treated when they came back home, when they came back to the United States from country - especially those landing in airports such as San Francisco when they were greeted by being spat upon and called names.

I can't imagine after serving a year or more in theatre losing friends, slugging it through the Mekong Delta or the mountains with the Hmong warriors around the border area of Laos and Cambodia that they be treated in such a way after such intense combat.

They were yelled at often when they came home, heckled and often spat upon.

Compelling story. It's also an urban legend.

Here's sociologist Jerry Lembcke, writing in 2005:

Stories about spat-upon Vietnam veterans are like mercury: Smash one and six more appear. It's hard to say where they come from. 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.

And:

Like many stories of the spat-upon veteran genre, Smith's lacks credulity. 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? And even then, returnees would have been immediately bused to nearby military installations and processed for reassignment or discharge.

Wouldn't Mastriano, the historian, have known this?  Better yet, shouldn't he have? 

Earlier, in 2004, Lembcke explained his fact-finding methodology for his 1998 book, The Spitting Image:

My strategy on the evidentiary question was two-fold. First, I assumed the position of the prosecution and asked myself what it was that someone trying prove that the alleged acts did happen would have to find as evidence and where would they find it. If these things happened as frequently as is now believed, I reasoned that it would be possible to find a record that someone at the time (the late 1960s and early 1970s) at least claimed that such acts were occurring. In newspapers of a city like San Francisco, where many of the spitting incidents supposedly took place, one would expect to find reports and perhaps even photographs that would constitute proof that the alleged incidents occurred. Other places to look included police reports and written histories about the anti-war movement.

My search for evidence turned up a couple of claims which, if interpreted generously, could have been construed to suggest that veterans or servicemen in uniform may have been spat on. But I also found research done by other scholars that showed quite convincingly that acts of hostility against veterans by protesters were almost nonexistent. No researchers cited reports that veterans were spat on (Beamish, Molotch, and Flacks, 1995).

I also found historical evidence for what I came to call "grist" for the myth. There are newspaper reports, for example, of pro-war demonstrators spitting on anti-war activists. In their retelling over the years, the oral accounts of these incidents could easily get reinterpreted and inverted and made into stories about activists spitting on veterans. There is also a record of military authorities warning GIs that they might experience hostility from opponents of the war. Most interesting in this regard were the warnings issued to Vietnam-bound troops that their families might receive harassment phone calls from communist sympathizers saying the soldier had been wounded or killed. 

Huh. If you listened to the rest of Mastriano's speech, you'll understand why I included that last paragraph.

That second paragraph references this paper, published in 1995.  And the authors did a study of the San Francisco Chronicle (remember, Doug says that veterans were spat upon in San Francisco):

As a further effort to avoid missing portrayals of anti-troop behavior, we carried out a focused search of the San Francisco Chronicle to discover stories the other papers might have missed. We used this paper for three reasons: 1) Although located in a liberal city, it had a conservative pro-war editorial stance; 2) many protest events, including those organized at UC Berkeley were at its "doorstep," sometimes literally; and 3) the newspaper was located close to the Oakland Army terminal, a major GI disembarkation point and thus a likely target for anti-troop sentiment to be expressed and observed. This logistical and ideological combination was unique in the United States; if movements were perceived as engaging in troop blaming, this newspaper could well have played a role in creating such an image. We confined the Chronicle search to coverage associated with large scale troop withdrawals as sequentially outlined in Olson (1988) and Summers (1985) over the 1969-1973 period. We scanned the front six pages of those days' papers immediately following dates of major troop arrivals in the Bay area, looking for protester-troop confrontations of any sort

And this is what they found:

Here is a simple finding from our Chronicle side study: There was no instance in the San Francisco paper of returning soldiers or troops in general meeting negative demonstrations of any kind or even of an individual showing disapproval. Beyond the Chronicle, there were no reports of behavior as crude as spitting on troops or directly taunting them in any of our media.

Huh.  And if that's not enough, in 1971 The Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs issued a report titled:

A Study of the Problems Facing Vietnam Era Veterans on Their Readjustment to Civilian Life.

 And from the opening:

This Committee Print contains the full report of a survey conducted for the Veterans Administration by Louis Harris & Associates, Inc. entitled "A Study of the Problems Facing Vietnam Era Veterans: Their Readjustment to Civilian Life." It is the first professional research survey by the Veterans Administration conducted among veterans of the Vietnam War. The survey also measures attitudes of the general public and employers towards veterans. Conducted between August 15 and August 30 of 1971 the Harris Associates interviewed 2,003 veterans recently separated from the service, 1,498 households representing a cross - section of the American public and 786 employers.

And contrary to what Sen Mastriano said about the reception those veterans received upon their return, the survey found that in 1971 95% of those surveyed agreed (80% "strongly" and 15% "somewhat") with the statement "Veterans deserve respect for having served their country in the armed forces."

Not only that but 84% agreed (81% "strongly and 13% "somewhat") with the statement "Veterans of the armed forces today deserve the same warm reception given to returning servicemen of earlier wars."

Doug is simply wrong on his facts.

But let's keep going.  They asked returning veterans in 1971 about what they thought about returning. And 79% agreed (47% "strongly" and 32% "somewhat) with the statement, "Most people at home respect you in the armed forces."

And finally, 69% agreed (31% "strongly" and 38% "somewhat") with the statement, "People at home made you feel proud to have served your country in the armed forces."

Doug, you're just plain wrong about the spitting and you're just plain wrong about how the American people felt about the returning Vietnam Veterans.

Yes, they deserve all the respect and gratitude in the world for serving in Vietnam but lying about it in the Pennsylvania Senate Chamber is not the way to do it.