US Military reacts to WMD Joke

mc mark · Mar 30, 2004

Originally posted by KingCheetah
Sweet another useless thread - you know basso it's ok not always having the most threads on the front page...
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come on! be fair KC. rimrocker hasn't been around for a while.

Oski2005 · Mar 30, 2004

So the opinion of Soldiers who take the time to email the WSJ are the only ones we need to listen to? Can't we wait til we here from others? How do we know the WSJ isn't holding a bunch of letters of a different opinion? I was looking at the letters to the editor at Stars and Stripes and there have been no opinions about it. My guess is that it will take a while before most troops hear about this and respond.

Troy McClure · Mar 30, 2004

Originally posted by basso
truely amazing that not a single poster in this thread has addressed the actual content of the soldiers' emails. perhaps you're afraid your convictions can't stand against those of the men and women on the front lines?
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Considering that the DEMOCRATS have the candidate who has been on the front lines, and considering that most soldiers are apolitical , especially when they are at war, and considering that since they are there they havnt been following a great deal of what Bush has done domestically, I don't think anyone here is afraid . Every single male member of my family has been in the military, and they all intend to vote for John kerry. That doesnt mean all soldiers will, and for anyone to use the military in this fasion is disgusting.

http://kerry.senate.gov/high/i/about_accomplishments.jpg

As soon as Americans realize how Kerry has served his country, there wont be a thing Republicans will be able to do to stop him.

Politcal Depth V. Political shill
War hero v. cheerleader
public servant v. corporate servant

Ottomaton · Mar 30, 2004

First, I would like to say that to me this highlights one of the real genuine flaws in GW. People accuse him of all sorts of sinister motives and such, but genuinely I think that most of those can be attributed to Nixon Neophite & aid Donald Rumsfeld, as well as his assistant Cheney, and the tacit approval provided for them by John Ashcroft's willingness to look the other way...

But back to the point at hand, I think Bush generally wants to be a good guy, and I think that he made the joke he really didn't understand that it might offend some people. In otherwords, many of GW's mistakes stem from a fundamental inability to understand things from other's points of view.

adding to that:

Originally posted by bamaslammer
Ridiculous. They're already mad at us! Geez, they rammed airplanes into our buildings. That was not an act of love for sure. A "regime change" isn't going to make terrorist whackjobs any less so.
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In case you haven't quite thought it through, bamaslammer, there are quite a number of differnet cultures in Asia, Africa, and the middle east, and even among these different cultures not everybody is the same. With war in Iraq, for every colateral casualty, there is a mother, a father, brothers and sisters, and perhaps some children.

Many of these people don't particularly like the United States, while some of them love us. The ones that would attack us for no reason, however, are limited. Once we kill their family members, though, a significant number of these people will immediately have common cause with those who do want to kill us for no reason.

In any case, there are many, many different individuals among them and to treat "them" with the lazy stroke of the intelectual brush that your statement implies, only speeks to an intelectual apathy that the terrorists among the diverse peoples of the world use when they lump all Israelies and Americans together as the "infadels".

This is the second genuine flaw I see in Bush, though I think he's worked on this flaw over the past 4 years.

Ottomaton · Mar 30, 2004

Originally posted by basso

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The religious neo-con "conservativism" of Thomas Jefferson:

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty
gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
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--Thomas Jefferson, "Notes on Virginia"

In the letter to Benjamin Rush, Jefferson states that the Jews' "system was deism; that is, the belief in one only God."(3) He goes on to argue that Jesus "corrected the deism of the Jews" by giving "juster notions of [God's] attributes and government" and by providing a superior ethics. In his famous correspondence with Adams he refers favorably to the "deism taught us by Jesus of Nazareth."(4) Standing in stark contrast were the continental deists (plus Paine), who would have nothing to do with the Bible, Jesus, or his teachings.
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--Nicholas F. Gier, University of Idaho

From the American Heritage Dictionary -

Liberalism:

3. An economic theory in favor of laissez-faire, the free market, and the gold standard.

4. A political theory founded on the natural goodness of humans and the autonomy of the individual and favoring civil and political liberties, government by law with the consent of the governed, and protection from arbitrary authority.
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Given the fact that these people lived in a time when most countries were ruled by Kings, and peoples were purged, expelled, or murdered for attempting to worship differently, or for wanting to not pay exorbitant taxes to their rulers, I dare you to look me in the eye, and claim that even the most conservative among these peoples were anything but radical leftist liberals.

bamaslammer · Mar 30, 2004

Originally posted by Troy McClure
Considering that the DEMOCRATS have the candidate who has been on the front lines, and considering that most soldiers are apolitical , especially when they are at war, and considering that since they are there they havnt been following a great deal of what Bush has done domestically, I don't think anyone here is afraid . Every single male member of my family has been in the military, and they all intend to vote for John kerry. That doesnt mean all soldiers will, and for anyone to use the military in this fasion is disgusting.

http://kerry.senate.gov/high/i/about_accomplishments.jpg

As soon as Americans realize how Kerry has served his country, there wont be a thing Republicans will be able to do to stop him.

Politcal Depth V. Political shill
War hero v. cheerleader
public servant v. corporate servant
Click to expand...

As a former Marine, I think I need to address some of the erroneous points in your post.
While we are SUPPOSED to be apolitical (we are not allowed to participate in politics except to vote), most of our fighting men are, unfortunately for liberals, are conservative on most issues. Liberal politicians tend to cut our budgets and send us on wasteful "peacekeeping" boondoogles into the wretched wastes of the turd world. They also tend to force "social engineering" upon an institution that challenge the very core values of the military. There are some liberal folks in the military but they are thankfully a minority. Guess you know all of them.

As for Americans caring about military service in a candidate, did it matter for Bill Clinton. Apparently not, because the coward got re-elected.

Kerry was not a hero. He was barely over there before three minor wounds sent him home. The
As for Kerry being a hero, let me leave you with the wise words of another former Marine, who addresses the issue quite well.

Vetting the Vet Record
Is Kerry a proud war hero or angry antiwar protester?
by Mackubin Thomas Owens

John Kerry, we know, is running against John Kerry: his own voting record. But there is another record that John Kerry is running against, and this has to do with his very emergence as a Democratic politician: Kerry, the proud Vietnam veteran vs. Kerry, the antiwar activist who accused his fellow Vietnam veterans of the most heinous atrocities imaginable.

John Kerry not only served honorably in Vietnam, but also with distinction, earning a Silver Star (America's third-highest award for valor), a Bronze Star, and three awards of the Purple Heart for wounds received in combat as a swift-boat commander. Kerry did not return from Vietnam a radical antiwar activist. According to the indispensable Stolen Valor, by H. G. "Jug" Burkett and Genna Whitley, "Friends said that when Kerry first began talking about running for office, he was not visibly agitated about the Vietnam War. 'I thought of him as a rather normal vet,' a friend said to a reporter, 'glad to be out but not terribly uptight about the war.' Another acquaintance who talked to Kerry about his political ambitions called him a 'very charismatic fellow looking for a good issue.'" Apparently, this good issue would be Vietnam.

Kerry hooked up with an organization called Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Two events cooked up by this group went a long way toward cementing in the public mind the image of Vietnam as one big atrocity. The first of these was the January 31, 1971, "Winter Soldier Investigation," organized by "the usual suspects" among antiwar celebrities such as Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory, and Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theorist, Mark Lane. Here, individuals purporting to be Vietnam veterans told horrible stories of atrocities in Vietnam: using prisoners for target practice, throwing them out of helicopters, cutting off the ears of dead Viet Cong soldiers, burning villages, and gang-raping women as a matter of course.

The second event was "Dewey Canyon III," or what VVAW called a "limited incursion into the country of Congress" in April of 1971. It was during this VVAW "operation" that John Kerry first came to public attention. The group marched on Congress to deliver petitions to Congress and then to the White House. The highlight of this event occurred when veterans threw their medals and ribbons over a fence in front of the Capitol, symbolizing a rebuke to the government that they claimed had betrayed them. One of the veterans flinging medals back in the face of his government was John Kerry, although it turns out they were not his medals, but someone else's.

Several days later Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His speech, touted as a spontaneous rhetorical endeavor, was a tour de force, convincing many Americans that their country had indeed waged a merciless and immoral war in Vietnam. It was particularly powerful because Kerry did not fit the antiwar-protester mold — he was no scruffy, wide-eyed hippie. He was instead the best that America had to offer. He was, according to Burkett and Whitley, the "All-American boy, mentally twisted by being asked to do terrible things, then abandoned by his government."

Kerry began by referring to the Winter Soldiers Investigation in Detroit. Here, he claimed, "over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did, they relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.
They told their stories. At times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

This is quite a bill of particulars to lay at the feet of the U.S. military. He said in essence that his fellow veterans had committed unparalleled war crimes in Vietnam as a matter of course, indeed, that it was American policy to commit such atrocities.

In fact, the entire Winter Soldiers Investigation was a lie. It was inspired by Mark Lane's 1970 book entitled Conversations with Americans, which claimed to recount atrocity stories by Vietnam veterans. This book was panned by James Reston Jr. and Neil Sheehan, not exactly known as supporters of the Vietnam War. Sheehan in particular demonstrated that many of Lane's "eye witnesses" either had never served in Vietnam or had not done so in the capacity they claimed.

Nonetheless, Sen. Mark Hatfield inserted the transcript of the Winter Soldier testimonies into the Congressional Record and asked the Commandant of the Marine Corps to investigate the war crimes allegedly committed by Marines. When the Naval Investigative Service attempted to interview the so-called witnesses, most refused to cooperate, even after assurances that they would not be questioned about atrocities they may have committed personally. Those that did cooperate never provided details of actual crimes to investigators. The NIS also discovered that some of the most grisly testimony was given by fake witnesses who had appropriated the names of real Vietnam veterans. Guenter Lewy tells the entire study in his book, America in Vietnam.

Kerry's 1971 testimony includes every left-wing cliché about Vietnam and the men who served there. It is part of the reason that even today, people who are too young to remember Vietnam are predisposed to believe the worst about the Vietnam War and those who fought it. This predisposition was driven home by the fraudulent "Tailwind" episode some months ago.

The first cliché is that atrocities were widespread in Vietnam. But this is nonsense. Atrocities did occur in Vietnam, but they were far from widespread. Between 1965 and 1973, 201 soldiers and 77 Marines were convicted of serious crimes against the Vietnamese. Of course, the fact that many crimes, either in war or peace, go unreported, combined with the particular difficulties encountered by Americans fighting in Vietnam, suggest that more such acts were committed than reported or tried.

But even Daniel Ellsberg, a severe critic of U.S. policy in Vietnam, rejected the argument that the biggest U.S. atrocity in Vietnam, My Lai, was in any way a normal event: "My Lai was beyond the bounds of permissible behavior, and that is recognizable by virtually every soldier in Vietnam. They know it was wrong....The men who were at My Lai knew there were aspects out of the ordinary. That is why they tried to hide the event, talked about it to no one, discussed it very little even among themselves."

My Lai was an extreme case, but anyone who has been in combat understands the thin line between permissible acts and atrocity. The first and potentially most powerful emotion in combat is fear arising from the instinct of self-preservation. But in soldiers, fear is overcome by what the Greeks called thumos, spiritedness and righteous anger. In the Iliad, it is thumos, awakened by the death of his comrade Patroclus that causes Achilles to leave sulking in his tent and wade into the Trojans.

But unchecked, thumos can engender rage and frenzy. It is the role of leadership, which provides strategic context for killing and enforces discipline, to prevent this outcome. Such leadership was not in evidence at My Lai.

But My Lai also must be placed within a larger context. The NVA and VC frequently committed atrocities, not as a result of thumos run amok, but as a matter of policy. While left-wing anti-war critics of U.S. policy in Vietnam were always quick to invoke Auschwitz and the Nazis in discussing alleged American atrocities, they were silent about Hue City, where a month and a half before My Lai, the North Vietnamese and VC systematically murdered 3,000 people. They were also willing to excuse Pol Pot's mass murderer of upwards of a million Cambodians.

The second cliché is that is that Vietnam scarred an entire generation of young men. But for years, many of us who served in Vietnam tried to make the case that the popular image of the Vietnam vet as maladjusted loser, dehumanized killer, or ticking "time bomb" was at odds with reality. Indeed, it was our experience that those who had served in Vietnam generally did so with honor, decency, and restraint; that despite often being viewed with distrust or opprobrium at home, most had asked for nothing but to be left alone to make the transition back to civilian life; and that most had in fact made that transition if not always smoothly, at least successfully.

But the press could always find the stereotypical, traumatized vet who could be counted on to tell the most harrowing and gruesome stories of combat in Vietnam, often involving atrocities, the sort of stories that John Kerry gave credence to in his 1971 testimony. Many of the war stories recounted by these individuals were wildly implausible to any one who had been in Vietnam, but credulous journalists, most of whom had no military experience, uncritically passed their reports along to the public.

I had always agreed with the observation of the late Harry Summers, a well-known military commentator who served as an infantryman in Korean and Vietnam, that the story teller's distance from the battle zone was directly proportional to the gruesomeness of his atrocity story. But until the publication of the aforementioned Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and its History, neither Harry nor I any idea just how true his observation was.

In the course of trying to raise money for a Texas Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Burkett discovered that reporters were only interested in homeless veterans and drug abuse and that the corporate leaders he approached had bought into the popular image of Vietnam veterans. They were not honorable men who took pride in their service, but whining welfare cases, bellyaching about what an immoral government did to them.

Fed up, Burkett did something that any reporter worth his or her salt could have done: he used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to check the actual records of the "image makers" used by reporters to flesh out their stories on homelessness, Agent Orange, suicide, drug abuse, criminality, or alcoholism. What he found was astounding. More often than not, the showcase "veteran" who cried on camera about his dead buddies, about committing or witnessing atrocities, or about some heroic action in combat that led him to the current dead end in his life, was an impostor.

Indeed, Burkett discovered that over the last decade, some 1,700 individuals, including some of the most prominent examples of the Vietnam veteran as dysfunctional loser, had fabricated their war stories. Many had never even been in the service. Others, had been, but had never been in Vietnam.

Stolen Valor made it clear why John Kerry's testimony in 1971 slandered an entire generation of soldiers. Kerry gave credence to the claim that the war was fought primarily by reluctant draftees, predominantly composed of the poor, the young, or racial minorities.

The record shows something different, indicating that 86 percent of those who died during the war were white and 12.5 percent were black, from an age group in which blacks comprised 13.1 percent of the population. Two thirds of those who served in Vietnam were volunteers, and volunteers accounted for 77 percent of combat deaths.

Kerry portrayed the Vietnam veteran as ashamed of his service:

We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more, and so when in 30 years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.
But a comprehensive 1980 survey commissioned by Veterans' Administration (VA) reported that 91 percent of those who had seen combat in Vietnam were "glad they had served their country;" 80 percent disagreed with the statement that "the US took advantage of me;" and nearly two out of three would go to Vietnam again, even knowing how the war would end.

Today, Sen. Kerry appeals to veterans in his quest for the White House. He invokes his Vietnam service at every turn. But an honest, enterprising reporter should ask Sen. Kerry this: Were you lying in 1971 or are you lying now? We do know that his speech was not the spontaneous, emotional, from-the-heart offering that he suggested it was. Burkett and Whitley report that instead, "it had been carefully crafted by a speech writer for Robert Kennedy named Adam Walinsky, who also tutored him on how to present it."

But the issue goes far beyond theatrics. If he believes his 1971 indictment of his country and his fellow veterans was true, then he couldn't possibly be proud of his Vietnam service. Who can be proud of committing war crimes of the sort that Kerry recounted in his 1971 testimony? But if he is proud of his service today, perhaps it is because he always knew that his indictment in 1971 was a piece of political theater that he, an aspiring politician, exploited merely as a "good issue." If the latter is true, he should apologize to every veteran of that war for slandering them to advance his political fortunes.

— Mackubin Thomas Owens is an NRO contributing editor and a professor of strategy and force planning at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He led a Marine infantry platoon in Vietnam in 1968-1969.
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link
Read more from a former Cobra gunship pilot from the Vietnam War and tell me if Kerry is a "hero." He certainly wasn't when he returned from Vietnam- in fact- I'd say he betrayed those he served with by spreading lies in the name of political gain.

Many Vietnam Vets Will Object to Kerry
by Terry Garlock

Now that Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry is claiming the veteran vote based on his war record, both sides of that story should be told. To appreciate the dark side of Sen. Kerry's war record, you should know a few things about Vietnam veterans.

For example, having fought in an unpopular war 30 something years ago, and having been awarded medals, is noteworthy. But it doesn't give anyone a pass -- their record and their ideas should be examined on their own merit.

And reporters make a mistake when they divide us into decorated veterans like Sen. Kerry and then all the others. We like to think of ourselves as brothers, whether we fought the enemy directly in combat or served in vital support roles in protected areas that were often exposed to attack.

Even today, after all this time, when two Vietnam veterans meet one another for the first time they are likely to say "Welcome home brother!" because many were never welcomed home - they met the cold shoulder of an ungrateful nation on their return.

Those of us whose job was combat feel a very special brotherhood. We learned to trust our brothers on the ground, on the water and in the air to do the right things to protect one another, even under fire. We came to deeply value the same trust they placed in us, and that mutual trust would form a bond that cannot be fully explained in words.

We quietly feared dying in battle, but there was something we feared even more. We knew if we should panic under fire and fail to do our job, we might lose our brothers' trust or we might lose their lives, and this we feared more than anything.

Like Sen. Kerry, I have a few medals. But among combat veterans, who has what medal doesn't make a dime's worth of difference between us. What matters is that we are, for the rest of our life, brothers who kept faith with one another in a miserable war.

A young John Kerry, however, broke faith with his brothers when he returned to the US. With the financial aid of Jane Fonda he led highly visible protests against the war.
He wrote a book that many considered to be pro-Hanoi, titled The New Soldier. The cover photo of his book depicted veterans in patchwork military uniforms, holding the American flag upside down and mocking the legendary image of Marines raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi in the 1945 battle for Iwo Jima.

Sen. Kerry publicly supported Hanoi's position to use our POWs as a bargaining chip in negotiations for a peace agreement.

Sen. Kerry played a key role in "Winter Soldier," a Jane Fonda event where over 100 men, many of whom were later discredited, testified about atrocities committed in the Vietnam war by American soldiers.

In 1971 Sen. Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and said our soldiers in Vietnam were not America's best, as Vice President Agnew had claimed, but that they were committing widespread rape, torture and murder of Vietnamese civilians. We who were there know that to be untrue.

Later that same day Sen. Kerry threw what he said were his medals over a fence in front of the capitol building in protest, on camera of course, but was years later caught in his lie when his medals turned up displayed on his office wall.

Some say Sen. Kerry's anti-war stance arose from his political ambitions since the war was so unpopular, and I cannot say I know his motivations. But when he ran for congress in 1972 maybe he thought his book and it's cover would be an embarrassment since it remarkably disappeared from store and library shelves. I would guess Hercule Poirot himself could not find a copy today.

Many good and decent people other than Sen. Kerry opposed the Vietnam war.
Many of us who fought it hated it, too, I know I did. But like Jane Fonda's infamous visit to Hanoi in 1972, Sen. Kerry's public actions encouraged our enemy at a time they were killing America's sons.

Decades after the war was done, interviews with our former enemy's leaders confirmed that public protests in the US, like Sen. Kerry's, played a significant role in their strategy and worked against our chances of victory. Many of us wonder which of our brothers who died young would be alive today had people like Jane Fonda and Sen. Kerry objected to the war in a more suitable way.

Now that it serves his ambition to be President, Sen. Kerry reminds the public of his war record daily, but the story of the dark side of that record is not being told. Many Vietnam veterans have taken notice, and many of us will vigorously oppose Sen. Kerry's election to any office. I will be one of them.

Terry L. Garlock of Peachtree City, GA was a Cobra helicopter pilot in Vietnam.
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FranchiseBlade · Mar 30, 2004

Kerry was definitely a hero in one of the most dangerous jobs during Viet Nam. He saved the lives of people who served with him, took personal risk chasing down and killing a man in Viet Nam. He was rewarded for that bravery.

To deny his Viet Nam service is nothing but sour grapes from some folks.

nyrocket · Mar 31, 2004

Originally posted bs by bamaslammer
The first cliché is that atrocities were widespread in Vietnam. But this is nonsense.
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OK, but...

More posted bs by bamaslammer
My Lai was an extreme case, but anyone who has been in combat understands the thin line between permissible acts and atrocity.
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Well, I mean, someone on the boat said that there was fire from the bank and so we let them have it. But it turned out that it was a bunch of unarmed kids. It wasn't really an atrocity because, you know, it's a thin line, and we meant to get the bad guys, and plus, you know, it's hairy out here, and also, people are going back home and telling everyone that we're murdering innocent people and that maybe we ought not be here in the first place but it's OK, because they're traitors!

gifford1967 · Mar 31, 2004

Originally posted by FranchiseBlade
Kerry was definitely a hero in one of the most dangerous jobs during Viet Nam. He saved the lives of people who served with him, took personal risk chasing down and killing a man in Viet Nam. He was rewarded for that bravery.

To deny his Viet Nam service is nothing but sour grapes from some folks.
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The attacks on Kerry's military service from the right wing are particularly despicable and hypocritical. They pretend to honor military service, but it turns out bravery and duty only count if you're a Republican. How else can they rationalize sliming the real service of Kerry and branding Max Cleland as unpatriotic, while defending Bush's spotty (to say the least) military record.

They really have no sense of honor.

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