by David Jones

Over the years I have often thought about this nasty story of the “spat-upon veteran” and wished someone would confront it. It’s good that Lembcke’s book has done this.

I have from time to time heard people I know state that it happened to them, or to somebody else, which I have never be lieved, even from their lips. The story is always identical—in an airport, etc., etc.

It reminds me of something that happened many years ago on the railroad and was related to me by an African American co-worker. One day an engineer whom he was working with told him an essentially racist, but allegedly factual story about how some other Black worker had been unable to stay awake, etc., etc., consistent with all the generations-old horror stories circulated when Black workers were being driven out of the railroad operating crafts in the early part of this century, and since. Old issues of the Trainmen’s magazine from the 1890s are full of letters describing this alleged tendency.

Anyway, this co-worker of mine, an astute individual, told me that the engineer had related the identical story to someone else, only this time it concerned my friend, not the original target —a vivid example of how these myths are propagated.

I was involved in the antiwar movement for years. I spent a considerable amount of time working full-time for the movement against the Vietnam war, came in contact with countless individuals, including many returned GI’s, and I never heard anybody mention any such events at all. I don’t recall ever meeting any participant in the antiwar movement who remotely would have seemed capable of doing such a thing, or ever expressed any personal hostility to individual rank-and-file members of the U.S. armed forces. If this ever happened somewhere in some form, it was prob ably committed by some borderline psychotic individual who was only remotely connected with the antiwar movement, if at all.

The story dovetails neatly with the lumpen paranoia that fuels the obsession about American POW-MIA’s being held in secret camps throughout Asia and the Soviet Union, being tormented for eternity by Asian fiends for no apparent reason other than their inherent iniquity, perversity, and hatred of the white race. Anybody who has ever seen the comic strips “Steve Canyon” and “Terry and the Pirates” or all the movies with evil and sadistic Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese villains from World War II to the present Rambo-type ex-post-facto steroid war adventures in Indochina could hardly wonder that such suggestions fall on fertile ground. An effective book demolishing this related legend is MIA, or Myth-making in America by H. Bruce Franklin, Rutgers University Press, 1993.

For another point of view on these issues, readers might want to also check out the website of the 30-year old Vietnam Veterans Against the War organization at http://www.prairienet.org.vvaw/.