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http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=9862

America, Are You Listening?
Written by Ray Calafell
Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Editor's note: This article was previously posted on ChronWatch, but we credited the wrong author. For that reason and because it is a powerful column, we are re-posting it with the proper credits. It originally appeared on Jennifer Martinez's site. Also,we thank Viper's Vietnam Veteran's page for bringing this to our attention.

One of the welcome side-benefits to Kerry's electioneering on a Vietnam platform is that it has allowed the veterans of that period to express the frustrations they have held inside for all these years. For example:

America, thirty years ago you abandoned us. You turned your back on us, forgot our sacrifices and classified us as losers, drug addicts, and social outcasts. Hollywood gladly persisted in portraying us to a younger generation and to the world as drug-addled sadists, loners, and borderline psychopaths.

You never welcomed us home with open arms or words of comfort for our wounds. Instead, we were greeted by sneering leftists, communists, and fifth columnists posing as students, professors, and members of the almighty press--all anxious to document the return of its wayward sons to a country all too quick and pleased to forget us.

Our own families, force-fed a diet of lies by their trusted television newsmen, doubted the nature of our sacrifices and quietly, shamefully, accepted our unadorned return.

Faced with such singular ignominy, we quietly resumed our lives, jobs, educations, and careers. The overwhelming majority of us succeeded in those interrupted lives and careers, becoming doctors, engineers, architects, lawyers, businessmen, accountants, and all other professions imaginable. We established businesses, bought homes, raised families, paid taxes, had grandchildren. By any measure, we achieved the American dream--not because it was handed to us in payment for our service, sacrifices, or victimization--but earned by us in spite of it.

For thirty years and more we quietly persevered in our march to heal the wound inflicted on our souls, not by the armed enemy we faced on the battlefield, but by our countrymen, some of whom had even worn the uniform themselves. Such a deep wound had been healing slowly and without any help from those who gleefully inflicted it.

And then, one of the men who wielded the original knife--the dagger sharpened by his ideological masters in Hanoi, Beijing, Moscow, and Havana--re-emerges from our past and begins to once-again twist that knife he so deeply thrust into our backs. He now emerges, wearing the mantle of a member of Congress, who rode his once-shameful Vietnam service into the halls of political power. He now seeks the highest office in the land, professing to be one of us--the abandoned ones, the forgotten ones, the ''murderers, rapists and sadists'' he so loudly and theatrically damned in front of a world in 1971. He now proudly proclaims shedding blood for a nation whose service he condemned in the seventies, whose medals he contemptuously threw on the Capitol grounds and which he now displays, unstained by the shame of his rejecting them when his nation needed solidarity. He now claims heroism as his badge of honor in an army of savages not seen since the ''hordes of Genghis Khan.''

And he does all of this without shame, guilt, or remorse in front of us, the forgotten ones, the abandoned ones. And what is most terrifying to us--the ones who were never ashamed of our service, who have quietly kept the faith of our fathers, who have faithfully remembered and honored our dead, who have never ''cashed in'' on our military service, and who had slowly and painfully learned to accept our anonymity--is the fact that this opportunist, this sunshine patriot, this back-stabbing traitor to his uniformed compatriots, this elitist, gold-digger, may possibly become our commander-in-chief.

And you, America--our dearly loved Nation--who abandoned us so many years ago, and to whom we have remained faithful nonetheless, are you going to shame us once again?

Ray Calafell

About the Writer: Ray is now a lawyer and served ss a Combat Infantryman in Vietnam.

Jeff - The phrase I use is "Quiet Pride".

He now seeks the highest office in the land, professing to be one of us--the abandoned ones, the forgotten ones, the ''murderers, rapists and sadists'' he so loudly and theatrically damned in front of a world in 1971. He now proudly proclaims shedding blood for a nation whose service he condemned in the seventies, whose medals he contemptuously threw on the Capitol grounds and which he now displays, unstained by the shame of his rejecting them when his nation needed solidarity. He now claims heroism as his badge of honor in an army of savages not seen since the ''hordes of Genghis Khan.'' And he does all of this without shame, guilt, or remorse in front of us, the forgotten ones, the abandoned ones. And what is most terrifying to us--the ones who were never ashamed of our service, who have quietly kept the faith of our fathers, who have faithfully remembered and honored our dead, who have never ''cashed in'' on our military service, and who had slowly and painfully learned to accept our anonymity--is the fact that this opportunist, this sunshine patriot, this back-stabbing traitor to his uniformed compatriots, this elitist, gold-digger, may possibly become our commander-in-chief.

Powerful truth.