As an illustration of how the right wing has built elaborate stab-in-the-back fantasies about the Vietnam War, Hayden mentions one of the most famous postwar legends. Let's hear it from that man of the people, Chuckie, aka CHARLIE DANIELS, country singer and Regnery Press political hack (my emphasis):
When I think about brave men and women being spit on by dirty, stoned-out, jobless, pseudo-intellectual hippies whose only contribution to this nation had been to burn their draft cards, it makes my collar get about two sizes too small.
Hayden says of this spitting-on-the-veterans folklore:
The popular delusions about Fonda are a window into many other dangerous hallucinations that pass for historical memory in this country. Among the most difficult to contest are claims that antiwar activists persistently spit on returning Vietnam veterans. So universal is the consensus on "spitting" that I once gave up trying to refute it, although I had never heard of a single episode in a decade of antiwar experiences. Then came the startling historical research of a Vietnam veteran named Jerry Lembcke, who demonstrated in The Spitting Image (1998) that not a single case of such abuse had ever been convincingly documented. In fact, Lembcke's search of the local press throughout the Vietnam decade revealed no reports of spitting at all. It was a mythical projection by those who felt "spat-upon," Lembcke concluded, and meant politically to discredit future antiwar activism.
Also citing Lembcke's book, Bruce Franklin in Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (2000) talks about the spitting story:
The first allegations of such behavior did not appear until the late 1970s. The spat-upon veteran then became a mythic figure used to build support for military fervor ... [see Chuckie quote above]
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