By Kathleen Kern

In a basic version of the story, soldiers returning from Vietnam were spit on at the San Francisco airport by young female antiwar protesters. Jerry Lembcke, a sociology professor and Vietnam veteran, always thought the story was suspect. Returning troops did not normally land at the San Francisco airport but at Travis Air Force Base northwest of San Francisco.

Lembcke began researching the origins of the spitting accounts and found that those who claimed spitting had occurred invariably had not experienced it themselves but “knew someone whose cousin was friends with someone who was spit on.”

Lembcke, whose research appears in The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, delved into media accounts of the time, including the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes, and found no accounts of soldiers claiming they were spat upon. What he did find were hundreds of stories about U.S. soldiers who publicly demonstrated against the Vietnam War, because they believed, based on their experiences that the U.S. intervention in Vietnam was profoundly immoral.

But which has a grip on the American psyche — U.S. soldiers getting spit upon or the thousands of U.S. soldiers who denounced and resisted the war?

I thought about this resistance when I read an angry lament written recently by Kevin Tillman about his brother Pat, who would have celebrated his 30th birthday on Nov. 6.

Pat Tillman, who played football for the Arizona Cardinals, became a celebrity of the post-9/11 U.S. war effort when he gave up his NFL career to enlist in the Army Rangers with Kevin. He then became a military martyr when he died in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004.

Only later did Tillman’s family learn that the Pentagon had covered up the fact that his fellow soldiers had accidentally killed him. The following year, they told the San Francisco Chronicle that Pat, who served in Iraq as well as Afghanistan, regarded the U.S. invasion of Iraq as illegal.

Kevin Tillman wrote: “It is Pat’s birthday on Nov. 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. . . .

“Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. . . .

“Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military. . . .

“In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity.”

Given how the myth of the spat-upon soldier has become embedded in our culture, I wonder if the grandkids to whom Tillman refers really will understand what happened in our country when we invaded Iraq.

For the full text of Kevin Tillman’s lament, see www.truthdig.com/report/item/200601019_after_pats_birthday/.