Claims of veterans treated badly by war protesters did not appear until about 1990, and B. G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley’s Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and History was one of the first attempts to work the stories into a narrative for the coming-home experience. H. Bruce Franklin touched on the mythical character of those claims in Vietnam and Other American Fantasies. In his book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, Jerry Lembcke made the stories of spat-on veterans a case study in myth creation and noted their similarity to stories told in Germany after World War I, when they became part of the Dolchstosslegende, or stab-in-the-back legend, which fed a home front betrayal narrative for Germany’s defeat. Claims that the spitters were often women or girls lends a sexual tenor to the interpretation of the war as a solipsistic affair “that Americans did to each other,” themes that are explored by Katherine Kinney in Friendly Fire: American Images of the Vietnam War.
Stolen valor: How the Vietnam generation was robbed of its heroes and its history by 
The Spitting image: Myth, memory, and the legacy of Vietnam by 
