The spitting on Vietnam veterans myth

In the Sunday Chronicle's Datebook section, a story perpetuates the myth of Vietnam veterans being spat on when they returned home:

It was the doomed war in Southeast Asia that made up the program for the Broadcast Legends’ spring luncheon. The war — and radio’s role. The ranks of the Legends, a group of radio and television veterans in all phases of those industries, obviously includes Vietnam War vets, and four of them recalled those times...The bad memories did not end with their return home. They were vilified by antiwar protesters. Landing in Hawaii, [Steve]Dini remembers, people at the airport “called us baby-killers...and they were spitting on me.”

Bullshit. Or, to be fair, it's almost surely bullshit. If Dini can document that, it would be unique among other such stories. Jerry Lembcke has written extensively about this myth (see The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam).

From Lembcke's op-ed in the NY Times last year:

Acknowledging that I could not prove the negative — that they were not true...there is no corroboration or documentary evidence, such as newspaper reports from the time, that they are true. 

Many of the stories have implausible details, like returning soldiers deplaning at San Francisco Airport, where they were met by groups of spitting hippies. In fact, return flights landed at military air bases like Travis, from which protesters would have been barred. 

Others include claims that military authorities told them on returning flights to change into civilian clothes upon arrival lest they be attacked by protesters. Trash cans at the Los Angeles airport were piled high with abandoned uniforms, according to one eyewitness, a sight that would surely have been documented by news photographers — if it had existed...