My husband's friend at church thought it did. He experienced it and was bitter about it.
The false narrative published by Democrats who supported ending the Vietnamese war was that it never happened. That's pure hooey, imho.
Uh, the false narrative came up after the war. Kind of like Germany's "Stabbed in the Back" myth after WWI that brought the World one A. Hitler, right wingers propogated this myth to distract from any discussion of the really awful thing we did in Vietnam - namely murder millions of people because they wanted a form of government we didn't like.
The Spitting Image - Wikipedia
A persistent but unfounded criticism leveled against
those who protested the United States's involvement in the
Vietnam War is that protesters spat upon and otherwise derided returning soldiers, calling them "baby-killers", etc. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, years after the war in Vietnam ended, the proliferation of these spitting stories increased greatly. As both a Vietnam veteran and a member of the antiwar movement, Lembcke knew this criticism ran counter to what he personally experienced and witnessed. To the contrary, one of the hallmarks of the period's antiwar movement was its support for the troops in the field and the affiliation of many returning veterans with the movement. Lembcke was motivated to look further into the truth and origins of this spat-upon veteran myth, and the contradiction between historical fact and popular collective memory. Other observers had already noticed the proliferation of stories and questioned whether the spitting stories even made sense. In 1987, columnist
Bob Greene noted:
Even during the most fervent days of anti-war protest, it seemed that it was not the soldiers whom protesters were maligning. It was the leaders of government, and the top generals—at least, that is how it seemed in memory. One of the most popular chants during the anti-war marches was, "Stop the war in Vietnam, bring the boys home." You heard that at every peace rally in America. "Bring the boys home." That was the message. Also, when one thought realistically about the image of what was supposed to have happened, it seemed questionable. So-called "hippies," no matter what else one may have felt about them, were not the most macho people in the world. Picture a burly member of the Green Berets, in full uniform, walking through an airport. Now think of a "hippie" crossing his path. Would the hippie have the nerve to spit on the soldier? And if the hippie did, would the soldier—fresh from facing enemy troops in the jungles of Vietnam—just stand there and take it?
By 1992, the Director of the Connelly Library and curator of the Vietnam War Collection at
LaSalle University listed the spitting myth as one of the "Top Six Myths" from the Vietnam era, and observed the myth "derives from the mythopoeic belief that returning GI's were routinely spat upon at some time during their repatriation to the USA. This particular round of tales has become so commonplace as to be treated reverently even among otherwise wisely observant veterans."
[2] In 1994, scholar Paul Rogat Loeb wrote, "to consider spitting on soldiers as even remotely representative of the activist response is to validate a lie", and noted that myths like that of antiwar activists spitting on soldiers have rewritten or "erased history".
[3] An academic study into the making and shaping of a collective memory found that evidence of antiwar activists targeting troops was virtually nonexistent. Instead, it found popular memory was manipulated by national security elites and a complicit news media by frequently labeling resistors to U.S. war efforts as "anti-troop".
[4] As observed by
Clarence Page after interviewing Lembcke and Greene, "the stories have become so widely believed, despite a remarkable lack of witnesses or evidence, that ironically the burden of proof now falls on the accused, the protesters; not their accusers, the veterans. Antiwar protesters must prove the episodes didn't happen, instead of the veterans having to prove they did."
[5]