![]() ![]() ![]() Perhaps the delusion of spitting is caused more than anything else by the phenomenon of several veterans who have achieved national audiences becoming some of the very ones who testify to having been spat upon.įor more, see item #2, three-quarters of the way down the page at the link above. The vast majority of this “spitting” testimony that a researcher will encounter is of the Friend-of-a-Friend variety, but evident to a troubling degree are those who themselves claim to actually have been spat upon. The compelling reality of Greene’s hundreds of responses is that returning GIs felt spat upon by virtue of being pointedly ignored and verbally abused by large segments of the population. Characteristically, that is not what a legend tends to do concerning an issue. ![]() In Bob Greene’s 1989 book entitled Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned from Vietnam it is possible to read the edited and selected results of what the syndicated journalist claims are one thousand letters written to him in response to his question “Were you spat upon when you returned from Vietnam?” What becomes very clear from these responses is that there seem to be about as many that deny the veracity of the spitting as confirm it. Persistent testimony to the revilement of returning GIs by spitting is the hardest of the legend-like tales to interrogate. There, he looked at the theme of spat-upon soldiers, Legend-researcher John Baky – himself a Vietnam vet – dissected a few prominent “folklorish” motifs of the Vietnam War in White Cong and Black Clap: The Ambient Truth of Vietnam War Legendry. ![]()
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