The "John Kerry's gratuitous references to Vietnam" thread

edwards is 51, so born in 52? 18 or 19 in 1971 then.

 

yes, it does, doesn't it:

http://www.sgtstryker.com/weblog/archives/004300.php

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Why I Wouldn't Vote For John Kerry
By: Sgt. Mom

I wasn't out of high school by the time Nixon ended American involvement in the Vietnam War, and everyone heaved a sigh of deep relief and crossed their fingers, hoping that North Vietnam would keep its' word… and that we wouldn't have to put too much into keeping South Vietnam fairly stable and fairly free. My home towns of Sunland and Tujunga, remote suburbs of Los Angeles, blended so seamlessly together I think only the post office bureaucrats could have said with certainty where the dividing line between them ran. In the 1960ies, before completion of the 210 Freeway, it was even more remote than now, a blue collar and redneck bastion of the white working class. The telephone book used to include the residents' professions: they ran to things like truck driver, salesman, police officer, mechanic, plumber, hospital orderly; their children who went for higher education gravitated to the community colleges and the state universities. (Which actually offered a pretty good education, without the cachet---or the expense of the "good colleges") In other words, it was the kind of town where it was much more likely for a young man to be drafted--- or volunteer--- for military service in the Vietnam War than it would for him to protest against it, for all the talk there was of some kind of ragged commune up in the canyon called the Hippie Hog Farm.

A website memorial page lists eleven names of young men from Sunland and Tujunga, killed in Vietnam in the late 1960ies, most in their twenties, all but two of them draftees. Only one was an officer, only one had a Hispanic name. Those who came home safely slipped back into their lives, many of them doing college on the GI Bill just as their fathers had done before them. Of what they had seen and done, they did not talk overmuch--- a young man named Charlie, who sat next to me in a fascinating junior division history class murmured to me one day that he was just out of the Marines, and was afraid he would forget himself and scorch the ears of the class with some standard Marine language. When the lecturing professor outlined the necessity of balancing the primary sources on any particular historic event, since witnesses always had a bias to keep in consideration, Charlie chimed in with a quite brutally graphic account of fudging body counts, by way of adding real-life evidence to that proposition, which pretty well finished off any farther discussion of the topic.

The war, after all, was over--- even the various investigations and courts martial resulting from the My Lai massacre had only been completed a year or so before. It and similar atrocities were old friends to the front pages, although curiously, things like the massacre of thousands in the city of Hue at the same time never seemed to excite the same sympathies and untiring inquiries. On the whole, the war had been a bad thing, and now it was over; we had done our not-very-successful best, as ham-fisted and criticized as it had been.

In a remarkably short time, the whole war went down the memory hole until one morning I was sitting at breakfast in the kitchen of the Hilltop house, reading the newspaper, with page after page of pictures of frantic people. People cramming around the iron fence of the American Embassy in Saigon, reaching desperately through the bars, people standing shoulder to shoulder in tiny boats, barely afloat as they waited to be rescued, people trampling others to get into a departing aircraft, a straggling line of people going up a ladder to a rooftop, where a man handed them into a helicopter. Pictures of desperate people with bundles, carrying their children, of babies strapped two and three into the seats of aircraft evacuating them to safety, of helicopters being thrown off the deck of an aircraft carrier, to make room for three more, hovering just overhead and crammed with people who had trusted us, depended on us.

"I can't stand to look at this," I finally said to Mom. "Isn't there anything we can do? With the church, or something?"<br />
"Talk to Pastor Earl, "Mom suggested. "He might have some ideas." Pastor Earl was a colonel in the Air Force Reserves, so we assumed he might be up on matters of great import and policy. It turned out there was some sort of meeting at another church in North Hollywood to discuss that very matter, to which I was sent by Pastor Earl, driving nervously across the Valley in the very old Plymouth station wagon. My junior-year finals were all over, and I had the time… and my time, all that summer was taken up with refugees. Our congregation was small, but willing; eventually, we clubbed together with some other congregations and the Lions and Rotary club, and sponsored number of Vietnamese refugees: three small families, and three single men. I worked with all sorts of people, taking on all sorts of jobs; unpaid social worker, writer of begging articles for the local newspaper, advocate, driver, teacher of English, an organizer of resources and people, feeling a very great responsibility for these people and laying awake at night worrying about Kiet and Nguyen, the Trans and their family, all of them. They were good people, who had deserved better from us.

Maybe, we could get it right on this try, but if we did (and I say we did) it wasn't with the help of people like Jane Fonda, and John Kerry. It wasn't enough to slime people like Charlie and other veterans with accusations of wall to wall atrocities, it wasn't enough to render further assistance to South Vietnam politically untouchable after 1972, when it came to taking responsibility for the people whom their actions drove into the refugee camps (or the re-education camps, or the killing fields), they were nowhere to be seen. They had moved on, leaving other people to sort out the wreckage and the misery. People, you can make bad decisions--- god knows, I've made a few--- but the people I respect take responsibility when the bad decision has bad consequences.

And that is why I despise Senator Kerry, and Jane Fonda, and Noam Chomsky, and Robert MacNamera, too. They walked away and left other people to clean up the mess.

Thanks, folks. Couldn't have done it without you

 

this came via email this morning. i'm sure it'll piss some of you off, but it's pretty funny i think.

 

it does make for a pretty compelling contrast with W though. would one rather have a president who has the courage of his convictions, or one who has the convictions of his contributors?

 

Macbeth,

You have a way of twisting a simple set of statements/facts around into a brand new arguement that the original poster never made, then you proceed to strike down this invented arguement point-by-point as if this proves something about the initial post/poster. Straw man will never prove anything to me.

I am on record many times over as saying JFK deserves our respect and praise for his actions in Vietnam. Whether his actions subsequently, both his anti-war actions and his record in the massachusettes state government or the US congress do as well is a subject for legitimate debate. to suggest, as you do and as he does, the the fact he served in vietnam somehow shields him from all subsequest criticism is ridiculous. it is this suggestion that i object too, and kerry makes it over and over. he also speaks constantly about his service, rather than letting his medals do the talking for him. moreover, he and the democratic party have made vietnam the issue it is in this race. rather than making the election a referendum on the war in iraq, they have attempted to make it a referendum on service in vietnam. I will say it once again, in all caps, JOHN KERRY DESERVES OUR RESPECT AND PRAISE FOR HIS HEROISM IN VIETNAM. but he will not deserve my vote until he comes up with a coherent policy of dealing with the threat from international islamic terrorism. Outsourcing US security to the UN is simply not an option I can support. I'm sorry if that sounds like parroting the GOP line, but there's a reason many americans are uneasy about JFK Part Deux.

 

the inconsistencies are not "purported," they are facts. is not inconsistency one hallmark of someone who does not have the courage of his convictions? kerry's campaign is based solely onthe concept that he's a war hero and W's not. Kerry's every position is a reaction to W. show me one original thoughtful statement kerry has made this entire campaign season, one that isn't a reaction to something W or Dean or JE said or did, and perhaps we can begin to discuss his convictions.

Examples of W's political courage:

-invaded iraq at enormous political cost. is staying the course and sheparding a fragile state to democracy, perhaps at the cost of his reelection.

-proposed controversial immigration policy, alienating much of the right wing of the repulican party, with no off-setting gains from the left.

-supports constitutional amendment to define marriage for heteros on a national level, while leaving the states to offer civil unions if they wish. pissed off at least half the country, while the remaining half is split between the dubious and the fanatic.

PLEASE, offer me a similar, post 1972 example of Mons. Kerry's political courage.