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The Fiction Front

Articles about novels, movies, songs, cartoons, etc.

Featured article:

The Lie that Will Not Die – Protesters Spitting at Veterans

by Stanley Heller, 7/17/24

Kristan Hannah has written some 19 very popular novels. Her latest called, "The Women", was #1 on the New York Times best seller list the week it came out and may be the biggest seller of 2024.. The story is about a young woman from California who becomes an army nurse during the late '60, during the U.S. war against Vietnam. The subject of women in that bloodbath is one that surely needs telling, but there are real problems with this book.

Chapter 18 is total BS. It's supposedly about the protagonist, the nurse "Frankie" McGrath, being spit upon many times when she came home from Vietnam in 1969.

Here's a number of quotes:

“As she neared the baggage claim she saw a group of protesters. They carried signs ‘End the War before it Ends you’, ‘Drop Acid Not Bombs’…They saw her in her skirted army uniform and thrust their signs at her as if to convince her. Someone spat at her. ‘Nazi Bitch’, one of the protesters yelled. Frankie stumbled to a halt in shock. Frankie didn't understand. Why would someone spit at her? ‘Go back to Vietnam.’ someone yelled. ‘We don't wamt you baby killers here.’ Baby killers?”

“She looked at the people crowded around the carousel. Men in suits and women in dresses who said nothing to help her . Did they think it was OK to spit at an army nurse coming home from war? She expected it from hippies and protesters but from ordinary people?”

Two Marine veterans then escort her and one says that no one likes soldiers from a lost war.

She looks for a cab.

“At the curb she put out one arms to hail a cab. The nearest Yellow Taxi veered out of the middle lane, headed toward her and slowed. She stepped off the curb and the cabbie yelled something and flipped her the bird and sped away stopping for a man in a suit.”

Other taxis slower for her saw her and sped away. She decides to take a bus.

“Finally she gave up, bought a bus ticket and ignored the veiled looks thrown her way as she lugged her heavy bags on the bus..[She finally gets to her home town]. By then she had been spat on four times, flipped off more times than she could count …”

Kristin Hannah, born in 1960. She was all of 14 when all U.S. troops left Vietnam so presumably she learned about Vietnam from books. Wish she had read better ones.

What she wrote above was just rubbish. No “protesters” or “hippies” spit on soldiers in uniform coming home from Vietnam. In fact no one did. I can write those words with confidence because the facts concerning this slur have been thoroughly investigated by Jerry Lembcke who is a Vietnam veteran himself and emeritus professor of sociology at Holy Cross in Springfield. He wrote a whole book on the matter called “The Spitting Image”. He investigated all the claims and stories about spitting and didn’t find evidence for any of them.

Furthermore the claims are illogical. Protesters were trying to recruit GI’s and veterans and did so with considerable success. See the 2005 documentary film “Yes Sir, No Sir”. Yes anti-war activists sometime used the words “baby killers” but at rallies against President Lyndon Johnson and other politicians. Probably the most popular slogan was “Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today.” Protesters did not taunt rank and file soldiers. [And who in their right mind was going to mock a battle-hardened soldier to his face].

About the specifics of H’s book “Frankie” is returning home in March 1969. In the airports families were there to greet them. Frankie’s family didn’t, OK, but where were all the other families. Finally Vietnam wasn’t a “lost” war at the start of 1969. Nixon had just been elected and was in office a couple of months. He and Kissinger weren’t giving up. They escalated the war, eventually bringing it disastrously to Cambodia and Laos.

For more on the right-wing spitting myth read Jerry Lembcke’s piece in the New York Times in 2017. And take a look at the comments. By coincidence the first comment under the article in the “NYT Picks” came from a veteran who returned to the U.S. in uniform via Los Angeles International airport, had no trouble from protest, and met his family there including his brother who was wearing a black protest armband.

A few more points. The story that cabbies were refusing to pick up soldiers in uniform is almost certainly bunk. No one has studied it because it’s ridiculous on its face. Driving soldiers from an airport was a big part of a cabbies bread and butter. They weren’t about to give that up. And if a cabbie had Leftist principles the cabbie would be eager to speak to a rank and file soldier to hear the news and let him know about anti-war organizations.

Admission at this point. I only heard parts of the audio book of the novel and learned more by hearing about it from two people who had gone through the whole book. But I got a good sense of it. The parts about what it was like to be a nurse in frontline conditions sound quite real. No doubt it was hell.

But Frankie’s “politics” seem unreal. She sees all the blood and gore and realizes the U.S. government is lying. It’s completely downplaying the number of casualties and how awful things are for the injured. But Frankie never thinks about the justifications for the war itself. Why are troops over there in the first place? Was it a valiant cause? Did we have to fight against the Vietnamese national liberation struggle? Certainly, lots of soldiers thought about those questions and had hard talks about them. Frankie’s veteran nurse friend upon returning home joins “Vietnam Veterans Against the War”, who were against the war not because so many were dying but because the whole cause was rotten. Frankie never thinks about it.

Someone should write a better book about Vietnam and its nurses. It should be about not only those nurses in the U.S. military, but include those who helped soldiers in the ARVN, the semi-colonial Vietnamese soldiers on “our side”. It also should talk about the lives of the nurses of the “enemy” who no doubt worked under even more difficult circumstances than our own.

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