The Vietnam Anti-War Movement Legacy for Today’s Returning Veterans

The homecoming of the last large generation of American soldiers -at the end of the Vietnam War- has been deeply embedded in our popular culture. As the story goes, vets returned to face the contempt of hippie protesters who spat on them.

A classic description comes from the first Rambo movie, “First Blood”. The title character—after practically destroying a small Oregon town— screams at his old commanding officer, who’s been brought in to talk him down:

“Then I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport— Protesting me! Spitting! Calling me baby killer, and all kinds of vile crap! Who are they to protest me? Huh? Unless they’ve been me and been there, and know what they’re yelling about?”

“That’s clearly something of Hollywood making up,” according Jerry Lembke, real Vietnam vet and the author of “The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam”. He says Rambo is the one who doesn’t know what he’s yelling about. “Nothing, nothing like that ever happened that I’m aware of: protesters meeting soldiers coming home from the war at that gate side or at the gate of the of the airport.”

There probably were some ugly incidents, but Rambo’s version, repeated in unverified news accounts over the years, stuck. Until John Kerry got Swift-Boated, most Americans had pretty much forgotten the prominent role Vietnam vets played in the anti-war movement, which largely embraced them.

“One of the clues to that for me is that these same stories– spitting stories literally– appear in other lost war cultures after other after lost wars,” says Lembke.

Whether it’s Germany, after World War I, or France, after its defeat in Southeast Asia, the stories pop up—and for some reason it’s almost always a woman doing the spitting.

“Vietnam is the most mythologized war in American history because it was a lost war,” says Lembke, “and so the American people are constantly reworking the outcome of that war.”

The new mythology left the Anti-War movement with a serious image problem: the image that protesters didn’t just hate war—they hated soldiers. Jerry Lembke believes that image, reinforced by popular culture and the news media, served to stigmatize the movement, and push it out of the mainstream.

Matt Southworth was 19 when he deployed to Iraq in 2004. When he was in high school, he says “any time someone brought up anti-war protests, if it were ever a factor in any conversation a lot of my teachers explained that away as a byproduct of LSD usage in a crazy generation; it was never something that in my youth was given credence, it was never something that was given credibility. So to me I didn’t even realize there was an anti-war movement when I signed up.”

Southworth began to have doubts about Iraq during his deployment and became involved with the anti-war movement after his discharge.

Allejandro Villatorro was also unaware there were protests against the war when he served in invasion of Iraq in 2003. He started to have doubts when no WMDs were found and the war was re-branded.

“Once we started hearing within the media the term “Iraq liberation” or “Iraqi freedom,” for the most part we were all pretty upset,” he says. “We knew that that was not our mission, our mission was to disarm Iraq not liberate Iraq.”

Villatoro’s and Southworth’s conversion stories are clearly unusual—2.3 million Americans have served in Iraq and Afghanistan—and only the tiniest minority of them were turned into activists. One obvious factor in the reduced number is the post-Vietnam transformation to a self-selecting, all-volunteer force. Not many pacifists sign up to be soldiers.

Still, It’s quite a turnaround from the 60s and 70s when Vietnam Veterans Against the War was a high-profile part of a very robust anti-war movement. Today you can’t even find a website for “Afghanistan Veterans Against the War” — it exists only as a committee within Iraq Veterans Against the War, which carries on even as that war has ended.

“To say it’s been discouraging would-be the understatement of my life. It’s been tough,” says Frank Corcoran.

Corcoran served in the Marine Corps in Vietnam in 1968, and has been involved in anti-war and humanitarian activities ever since. Like Southworth and Villatorro, he was converted by his combat experience, but says he can understand why most other vets don’t make that leap.

“Large numbers of vets don’t come home from war and go to an antiwar movement— it’s too hard to do, it’s too big of a leap, I think it’s dangerous, dangerous ground emotionally; it’s saying, ‘what I just did was wrong.’“

Allejandro Villatorro knows that emotional ground well.

“It was a tough moment to accept the facts of what led to the war in Iraq, what led to the invasion; I felt betrayed, I grew into a depression because I was a part of an illegal war.”

Allejandro’s story reveals a complexity that defies stereotypes or Hollywood formulas. He worked through his depression by studying and reading extensively about politics and world history. He says he’s found a voice since becoming involved with Iraq Veterans against the War in 2007. Yet he continued to serve: Allejandro was promoted to Sergeant, putting in two more tours in Iraq, and a recent tour in Afghanistan. He’s still active in the reserves.