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The Vietnam I choose to remember was fought by men like Rick Rescorla. He's pictured above helping people out of the WTC. Most of his coworkers survived. He went back in to save more -- and didn't come out in time. |
Posted on 08/10/2004 4:24:12 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
If John Kerry is elected president, he will define Vietnam.
The Vietnam he frames for history is one where atrocities were commonplace daily occurrences carried out with the knowledge and consent of the officer corps.
There's a lesson here for Iraq. The hundreds of thousands of men and women who serve there, in a war the left has despised from the start, may very well be identified by the abuses that occurred at Abu Ghraib.
Kerry's election as president of the United States would be the third humiliation of those who chose to serve in Vietnam.
The first was the betrayal of Vietnamese who trusted our word, as graphically symbolized in images of desperate loyalists clinging to the skids of departing helicopters as Saigon fell in 1975.
The second was the election of a president who deliberately evaded military service in time of war. It was, at the time, a shock requiring deep introspective analysis of previously unquestioned core beliefs. The irrefutable rules of life taught us as children -- duty, honor, country -- were suddenly negotiable. The nation conducted a referendum in 1992 and declared evasion acceptable.
The third humiliation would be to allow Kerry to frame the nation's Vietnam perspective.
No doubt atrocities occurred. They do in all wars. Even with disciplined armies. But they are not commonplace, nor are they sanctioned. They are rare breakdowns by out-of-control individuals and, as with My Lai, punished. More than 2.7 million men served in Vietnam. The few do not define them.
Robert Powell of Carrollton, a retired Army colonel with 27 years of service, was in a position to know. During three tours, he was constantly on the front lines with three stints as a rifle company commander.
"In my three years over there, we never committed an atrocity, and I never saw one," says Powell, who served tours in 1966, 1968 and 1971. Had even a single atrocity been committed in the brigades in which he served, Powell thinks he would have heard -- and no doubt he would. Soldiers talk.
During those three tours, Powell was wounded a total of seven times and received three Purple Hearts. While on night patrol during his first tour, he fell into a punji pit. On the second, his unit was pinned down and he was shot five times over an 11-hour period before relief could reach them. On the last tour, he suffered shrapnel wounds from a thrown grenade.
Kerry's charges so incensed Powell that he has written 7,000 op-eds in opposition to newspapers around the country. "The stamp cost is about to kill us," he says of himself and his wife, who assists him with the mailings.
The common theme of veterans opposed to Kerry is expressed by Larry Bailey, a retired Navy SEAL and president of Vietnam Vets for the Truth (Web site: kerrylied.com), one of the groups organizing a Sept. 12 rally in Washington. "More than any other person, John Kerry is responsible for the false image of Vietnam veterans as dysfunctional misfits and crazed killers, and we intend to change that image," Bailey has said.
The most effective of veterans' efforts to date is an ad produced by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (www.swiftvets.com) that is drawn from the testimony of those who served with Kerry. Kerry supporters have attempted to blame President Bush or his partisans for the effort.
This really isn't about Bush -- and the Bush campaign would be ill-advised to become involved in any way whatsoever.
It's about Kerry and, in a real sense, it's about the anti-war left that surfaces again in mobilizing opposition to the war in Iraq. Only 3 percent of the delegates who nominated Kerry agree that war in Iraq was worth the loss of life and cost to this country; 93 percent thought it was not.
Powell finds it ironic that the party that nominated Kerry is the party that grew out of the 1972 anti-war campaign of George McGovern. "Now the main thing they have going for them is Kerry's service in Vietnam," he says.
The main thing the terrorists have going for them is Powell in the State Dept.
Terrorists still invited by the State Dept into America in 2004
"I went to sleep for 32 years," said Hoffman, a Framingham resident and the younger brother of 1960s icon Abbie Hoffman.
If Jack Hoffman has been politically drowsy since he last participated in protests in the early 1970s, he could now be called something of a political insomniac: He is handing out leaflets, speaking to disciples of the left, participating in demonstrations -- anything to bash President Bush and what Hoffman describes as a wrong-headed war.
Hoffman is not the only aging Vietnam-era activist from the region agitating for Bush's ouster in November. For these veterans of political action, the consciousness of the late 1960s and early 1970s is seeing something of a revival: As they look to propel John Kerry to the White House, some say they haven't felt as driven since those heady days.***
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***The campaign source said that the book was not considered a "serious" problem for the campaign, because, "the media wouldn't have the nerve to come at us with this kind of stuff," says the source.***Source
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The Vietnam I choose to remember was fought by men like Rick Rescorla. He's pictured above helping people out of the WTC. Most of his coworkers survived. He went back in to save more -- and didn't come out in time. |
Bump!
I'll be thanking God when the last of those smelly stupid hippies takes their eternal reward and gets banished to Hell for their actions here on Earth. Back-stabbing boneheads.
Wow. Just out of curiosity, is this Jim Wooten the same Jim Wooten I used to see on ABC News a long time ago?
I'm not sure. I know he's been a part of the AJC editorial page for some time.
Bump.
Enough to make a real American puke.
Well, ABC still has their Jim Wooten on their bios, so I guess this must be a different one.
Wasnt just a false image but the one many so called Americans decided to push on Vets
and treat them as the false image were true..bringing about anger and bitterness
It took both a Kerry and a willing American public to pull the wool over their own eyes..
imo
Sounds like the basis for a new radio show for Keillor,
"Lake Blowhardspawn."Where atrocities were commonplace daily occurrences
and all boo-boos earned purple hearts
and a man could define himself any way he wanted
"As Kerry's biographer, the historian Douglas Brinkley, told me, "So much of his foreign policy worldview comes straight from Richard Kerry." ***"
I think he learned alot from hanging around the Kennedys. One can only imagine what bits of "INTEL" he came across.
LBJ set a great example for JFKerry to follow.
JFKerry just like the Clintons have never been required to account for their words and deeds.
This is the truth of the matter. When I was much younger I was introduced to Kerry by a couple of my friends in the Army who despised him over beers in the NCO club.
This Jim Wooten is a fine newspaper man surrounded by mostly leftist bozos in Atlanta.
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