In my column this week I mentioned a 1998 book by Jerry Lembcke, “The Spitting Image,” which asserts that there was no published evidence that returning Vietnam vets were ever called “baby killers” or spat upon by antiwar protesters. Joe Hotchkiss of the Augusta (GA) Chronicle wrote in response:
Your most recent column included this sentence (emphasis added):
By the way, as Jerry Lembcke found in his book “The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam” (1998), there’s no reason for antiwar types to feel guilty over the treatment of Vietnam vets–there’s no evidence of any kind that anyone ever spat on a Vietnam veteran or called one a “baby killer.”
Not according to nationally syndicated columnist John Chamberlain, who wrote in 1970 about Marine Corps Maj. Richard H. Esau, and the scorn heaped upon him by college-age protesters: “The major gets tired of being taunted with such questions as ‘How many babies have you killed?’ … His answer to the baby killer taunt is, ‘If I don’t kill you, I haven’t killed any.’” (May 26, 1970, The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle). What are the odds that Chamberlain managed to find the only member of the entire U.S. military who had been taunted as a baby killer? There obviously had to have been more.
Soldiers nationwide clearly were branded baby killers by Vietnam-era protesters and others, likely in the wake of the revelations that sprung from the My Lai massacre court-martial. Rock musician Frank Zappa wrote in his autobiography that, during one of his shows at New York’s old Garrick Theater around 1970, he called a young soldier onto the stage, and threw him a prop they used in the show, some sort of doll. Zappa then told the soldier to pretend it was a “gook baby,” upon which the soldier made a sick comical show of stomping on it. (The Real Frank Zappa Book, 1989) Not only were the baby-killer taunts happening back then, they were clearly part of the popular culture (or counterculture, if you want to look at it that way).
Also, in September 1983, Dr. Jack R. Ewalt said plainly, in a newspaper interview, that traumatized Vietnam War veterans were attacked stateside as “baby killers, women killers, the kids that lost the war.” (Chronicle, Sept. 7, 1983) Ewalt was the director of mental health and behavioral sciences in the Department of Medicine and Surgery at the U.S. Veterans Administration, and presumably not someone who just got through watching a screening of First Blood.
And Jerry Lembcke says there’s no evidence of soldiers being called baby killers?
Neither the Zappa anecdote nor Dr. Ewalt’s 1983 newspaper interview did much to change my conclusion that Lembcke was right. After all, Zappa’s memoirs were written in 1989, seven years after the release of the myth-making 1982 film “Rambo: First Blood.” He might have “misremembered.” And even if Zappa’s memory was flawless, the story he tells hardly is the same thing as a returning vet being screamed at or spat upon. And the 1983 Ewalt piece came a year after “First Blood”—while he may not have seen the movie (well, why not?) he certainly could have been affected by the Reagan-era historical revisionism then in full swing that sought to recast the Vietnam War as a noble endeavor that might have succeeded if the troops had been properly supported back at home.
The Chamberlain story, however, was a different matter, potentially disproving Lembcke’s thesis. So I asked him to dig it out of the Chronicle archives. Here it is, and thanks to Mr. Hotchkiss for sending it:
Unfortunately this clipping hardly dispatches Lembcke’s work to the trash heap of history. As I wrote to Mr. Hotchkiss upon reading it:
Dear Joe,
Thanks for sending the page with the Chamberlain column, which ‘ll reference on my blog. I don’t think being asked “How many babies did you kill?” is quite on par with being spat upon and having “baby killer!” yelled at you, though. Yes, there’s a linguistic similarity and the subject is the same–which is why it’s worth noting–but it’s really not the same thing as the post-Rambo myth. It’s like the right-wing hate mail I receive: If someone asks, “Why are you a traitor?” and awaits my response, that’s hardly the same thing as screaming “Traitor!” and spitting on me.
So that remains, well, unsettled. The rest of the editorial page on which Chamberlain’s piece ran back in the dark days of May 1970 includes more evidence that nothing really changes. First there’s the fact that “Dlibert” type humor is nothing news:
Then there’s David Lawrence’s call for expansion of presidential power, so that then-President Nixon would be free to launch new wars, such as the then “secret” invasion of Cambodia, without being required to obtain a declaration of war from Congress. Even back then there were neocons:
And the real humdinger: an editorial cartoon that insults “peace marchers” (at least there were some!) and argues for—yep—the “fly paper” strategy! Gotta beat ’em in ‘Nam before they come here to the United States!
Nothing really changes. By the way, the cartoon I did that will go online tomorrow, which mocks the flypaper argument, was drawn more than a week before I saw this.
Postscript: How offensive it must be to the Iraqis and the rest of the world to hear American politicians say that it’s OK to fight wars overseas but not here—as if the rest of the world was a sort of Fresh Kills to be crapped all over. I just wonder why they wouldn’t hate us.
