I think it's interesting that in Adam's post he points to what the spitting "stands for." What people don't bring up much is that "spitting on" people is both a real activity (expectorating saliva) and a metaphor. If you read this long thread, you'll see that many people, in arguing that VV were spit on, are speaking metaphorically.

It is impossible to tell when someone says "I came back to peace activists spitting on me" whether this is literal or metaphorical, and this is surely a factor in the accounts of this activity being so much more widespread than the documentation plausibly supports. The author of "The Spitting Image" also explains the spitting in terms of what it stands for, psychologically, mythologically, metaphorically. This is crucial to understanding the meaning of all these stories.

Stories about getting spit on, whether they are true or not, hold certain meanings for and to people in our society. The image of the spit-on VV is a myth, not in the sense of a misconception, but in the sense of story that cuts to the heart of our society and exposes some crucial meanings. It is also a "mythology" in Barthes's sense, that is, not a falsehood but something that comes to stand in a grand way for the ultimate in something: Einstein's Brain is a mythic representation of intelligence, just as the spitting anti-war protestor is a mythic representation of betrayal. Einstein really was smart, and some assholes really did spit, but why do these images mean more than, say, Tesla's brain or anti-war protestors embracing veterans? We don't say "who do I look like, Tesla?" when we can't figure something out, and we don't picture weeping people embracing uniformed soldiers when we think of anti-war activists, but both images would be appropriate, just as "true" are their mythic counterparts.

In the end, it doesn't necessarily matter "how true" a myth is, or even how often it really happened. If you, like troll, were one of the victims then you may be justifiably angry. But this is true of someone who got robbed by a black person, too, and it is still true that the mythic image of the thieving black person is unfair. No, what really matters is how we process it. Is resisting the government's attempt to make war REALLY tantamount to spitting on a veteran, or is that just what Nixon and/or Bush would want us to feel?

With respect to all who lived through that era, as I did not.