ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the stories of spat-upon veterans that form the most salient and persistent image in the American narrative of a defeat abroad that stemmed from alleged disloyalty and weakness at home. The images of victim-veterans are also an impediment to citizen opposition to more war, particularly on college campuses. Most interesting to researchers was the similarity of spat-on veteran stories like these to those told after other lost wars including Germany after First World War and France after its loss of Indochina in 1954. Additionally, the image of spat-on veterans displaced public memory of the war itself. The yellow ribbon campaign dovetailed neatly with two issues hanging-over from the Vietnam era about which the American people felt great emotion: the prisoner of war/missing in action issue and the issue of spat-upon veterans. The Gulf War brought scholars to a new level of appreciation for the audacity of governmental power at the turn of the twenty-first century.
