This column may upset some readers, including people I know and respect. The impetus for writing this comes from reading a New York Times interview with Marianne Hirsch, a professor at Columbia University, known for her research on how descendants of survivors think about the Holocaust.
Hirsch coined the term “postmemory” to label her counterintuitive finding that the traumatic memories of children of survivors of the Holocaust are “passed down so powerfully and so emotionally that they remember them stronger than their own memories.”
After reading that, I had to respond.
Her trauma scenario triggered a seismic jolt of recognition as I recalled an entirely different, but equally powerful postmemory I encountered as a psychotherapist, working for 20 years with Vietnam veterans.
In a similar manner to how children of Holocaust survivors inherited their parents’ traumatic memories in lieu of developing their own, many Vietnam veterans believe they were spat upon by anti-war protesters.
But the truth is, they weren’t.
I know it didn’t happen to me or any of my Vietnam veteran friends or acquaintances. It was hard for me to imagine that such a thing could happen to any vet: that is, until 1994 when I started counseling Vietnam vets at VA centers, treating PTSD and other combat adjustment issues.
I soon discovered that being spat upon was a regular occurrence among soldiers who returned from that unpopular war. The incident usually happened at Travis Air Force Base in California, the arrival point in the U.S. for many returning soldiers. My patients told me harrowing accounts of being accosted by anti-war protesters, often young women who spat on them and called them baby killers.
It didn’t make sense to me because I had been made to feel welcome when my plane landed at Travais, and again when I arrived back in New Hampshire. My suspicions were confirmed in a book that came out in 1998, written by Vietnam veteran and sociology professor Jerry Lembcke: “The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam.”
It has never gotten the credit it deserves.
Lembcke, like me, is a Vietnam veteran who returned from that war to join the anti-war movement. His extensive research found no credible evidence of protesters spitting on soldiers. However, he did uncover a large body of evidence “showing a mutually supportive, empathetic relationship between veterans and anti-war forces.”
Lembcke showed how popular memory had been manipulated by the Nixon administration to discredit the peace movement, a hatchet job that continued in the hands of filmmakers and the news media during the 1970s and 1980s.
Lembcke wasn’t alone when his book came out. Other critics had already chimed in, including the director of the Connelly Library and curator of the Vietnam War Collection at LaSalle University, who listed the spitting myth as one of the “Top Six Myths” from the Vietnam era.
It turns out that implanted memories do, in fact, exist.
Decades of research demonstrate that people can come to remember events that never happened. This is especially true in high-stakes, life-or-death situations, such as war or a concentration camp, where an emotionally resonant myth gets a head start over a boring historical fact.
In the case of Vietnam veterans, we fought in an exceedingly unpopular war in which we sometimes became the scapegoats and objects of scorn in films and on TV. Psychologically speaking, it’s not surprising that we might feel spat upon.
Sloughing through the jungle carrying heavy gear in a war he didn’t choose, sweat running down his face, while a privileged few college dudes partied the night away with pretty women — yeah, that can sure feel like being spit in the face.
That’s why many of the veterans I counseled will go to their graves believing, in heart and soul, that they had been spat upon, a startling confirmation of what Hirsch calls postmemory.
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.