The War Against Vietnam Veterans

[MORTARDUDE]

http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/m...001a3c9975188b

John Kerry?s Vietnam service is dismissed, Max Cleland?s triple amputation is dissed -- Vietnam veterans are being assaulted by fanatics who never served and never bled.
By Stewart Nusbaumer

?They?re trying to make Kerry into some type of hero,? Joe says bitterly.
?Well, he was in Nam,? I reply, ?wounded three times, has several medals. That's the truth.?
?And now they?re trying to say George Bush didn?t perform his duty in the military,? the World War II veteran says, his mouth twisting.
?Did he?? I ask.

Many World War II veterans have a problem with Vietnam veterans, always have. It?s not surprising that when returning home from Vietnam few of us joined traditional veterans groups such as the VFW and American Legion. We just didn?t get along. Maybe the older veterans blamed us for not winning the Vietnam War, or maybe they blamed themselves (subconsciously) for sending their children to a war that was not winnable. Maybe Vietnam veterans were oversensitive to their victory and our, well, not victory. I don't really know, but I do know Joe?s voice carried that old animosity when dismissing John Kerry?s Vietnam War record and defending George Bush?s less than stellar military record. It resonated with a past war that I thought was finished. It?s not.

?He wasn?t any damn hero, I can tell you that!? Joe is really heating up.
?So George Bush was a hero for getting drunk every night?? I retort, my voice straining.
?That?s just liberal propaganda.?
?And its liberal propaganda that Kerry was wounded three times in Nam??

According to the New York Times, on Friday Republican John McCain, a fellow Vietnam veteran, and a POW for 5 years, came to the aid of John Kerry, criticizing the coordinated campaign to smear his reputation. It?s very unusual that during a presidential election year a Republican steps forward to defend the reputation of the leading Democratic nominee. But this is not a normal presidential election.

Max Cleland is a man who lost a lot in Vietnam. Disembarking from a helicopter, a grenade -- either his or another soldier?s -- exploded, ripping off most of his three limbs. That?s right, three: two legs, and one arm.

I lost one limb in Vietnam, a leg. I can tell you that for years the mental pain was excruciating. Forget the physical pain; mental pain is the real terror. I can?t image how a man can put himself back together after losing three limbs.

That did not stop Ann Coulter from publishing a vicious piece on Max Cleland that is being widely circulated and celebrated on the political Right. Entitled Dropping Political Grenades -- a reference to the dropped grenade that crippled Cleland, she writes, ?But he didn't ?give his limbs for his country,? or leave them ?on the battlefield.? There was no bravery involved in dropping a grenade on himself with no enemy troops in sight. That could have happened in the Texas National Guard -- which Cleland denigrates while demanding his own sanctification.?

First, it did happen on a battlefield, one called Vietnam. Hasn?t Ann Coulter heard of the Vietnam War? Second, Max Cleland did give his limbs for his country, everyone who loses limbs in a war does. And regardless of the war, popular or unpopular, right or wrong, because youth fight wars and lose body parts, if not their lives, it is others who create the wars and profit handsomely from them.

Let?s not forget, unlike liberal antiwar opponents of the Vietnam War who on principle refused to fight in Vietnam, such as Bill Clinton, which I find an honorable position, Ann Coulter's older Right-wing hawks approved of the Vietnam War yet very few of them went to Vietnam. The young George Bush was certainly a strong defender of fighting the war, as long as he didn?t have to do the fighting. That is not being brave, but giving in to one?s weaker impulses. Yet, when Max Cleland showed up in Vietnam, and stepped off that helicopter in the Southeast Asian jungle, that was being brave. Bravery, evidently, is something the Right has problems understanding.

As for Coulter?s statement, ?That could have happened in the Texas National Guard.? Again she is wrong. The Texas National Guard did not carry live grenades; it was removed from the violence by half the planet earth. This is why George Bush was in the Texas National Guard. It is also, maybe, why today George Bush has all his limbs, while Max Cleland and I as well as tens of thousands of other war veterans don?t.

There are certain simple facts here that need to be understood clearly in this intensifying political season. John Kerry fought in Vietnam, but George Bush chose not to fight. Yet, Joe the World War II veteran, like many in his generation who are loyal Republicans, dismisses the combat veteran and defends the combat evader. Max Cleland sacrificed three limbs in Vietnam, while George Bush only sacrificed part of his liver on whisky binges in Texas. Yet, the right-wing starlet and her army of Republican attack dogs ridicule his combat sacrifices and embrace the overindulgence of a spoiled, selfish rich kid.

The political Right wanted that war in Vietnam, but what it did not want was the truth about the war as told by the warriors who suffered in the war. And today this same Right will do anything to shut up these graying warriors who insist upon telling the truth.

But dismissing war heroes contradicts everything the Right supposedly stands for; hiding when the nation calls is exactly what the Republicans supposedly detest. This is why when the Left pointed out that Kerry served in war and Bush did not, and pointed out Cleland?s sacrifices and Bush?s escapism, the Republican Right went berserk. Nothing outrages liars more than truth.

For some people, winning in politics is more important than common decency, more important than genuine patriotism, more important than truth -- even more important than the words of their God. Liberals need to understand this and must realize that attacking the opposition?s policies is not enough, not today. They must go after the Republicans' hypocrisy and immorality. Attack the Right-wing ruthlessness that is now slashing our political culture as it denigrates the reputation of good Americans.

But none of this is new. Joseph Welch, the counsel during the Army-McCarthy hearings, said to Joseph McCarthy, ?Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?? We know that Joseph McCarthy didn?t.

What we have, then, is this: The past has become today, and tomorrow will probably be even worse. We are experiencing the nasty regurgitation of not only the 1950s, but more so, the 1960s -- a regurgitation that is turning the presidential election into a historical battle for the direction of America at this most critical time. This election is certainly about the past as much as the present, the past being a weapon to control the future.

Take a step back in time, back some 35 years, and you will hear right-wing Americans slamming combat veterans after their return home. I said right-wing, not the antiwar movement. You will hear the hateful Right discrediting the battlefield sacrifices of the crippled, dismissing the mentally devastated that became know as PTSD, because of what they no longer believed. What they no longer believed in was the Vietnam War.

Then return to today, listen to the voices claiming John Kerry is a buddy of Hanoi Jane (Fonda). And hear the silence that the Vietnam War was wrong, notice the indifference from the Right as Republicans attempt to slash the Veterans Administration's budget. In the last election, in George what they heard was Senator Max Cleland is not patriotic enough, did not support defense enough. Georgians heard little or nothing about his nightmares in the service of our nation. The past is irrelevant -- unless to discredit Vietnam combat veterans!

In the past, the ?you?re either with us or against us? extended shamefully to even those who fought a war in a far-off jungle called Vietnam. And today it extends shamefully to John Kerry and Max Cleland, two aging warriors of that war now on a campaign to redirect America. And the shameful attacks will visit any Vietnam veteran -- regardless of sacrifice on the battlefield and regardless of insight from fire -- who dares to challenge the Republican Right's demand that all veterans fall in line behind them.

Well, John Kerry and Max Cleland are challenging them, and so should we.


Stewart Nusbaumer is editor of Intervention Magazine. He served with the 3rd Marine Division in Vietnam. You can email Stewart at stewart@interventionmag.com

Or click "Post comment" below right and tell us what you think.

[Gimptster]

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for posting this excellent account of what is actually taking place today.

It's disgusting, revolting and a damn shame that Kerry and Cleland are being "trashed" by the right-wing the way they are!

[blues clues]

Larry & gimpy the reason the viet nan vet is never going to be put in the white house because we've got too many out there to busy stabbing the one's that could be there in the back.

razz

[BLUEHAWK]

1) It is irrelevant whose grenade took off Max Cleland's limbs or how it happened... a man was asked to carry arms into battle against an enemy of this nation, he did so and was terribly injured.
2) Ms. Coulter needs to keep her mouth closed on topics of which she has zero comprehension.
3) It was not just the Right that wanted that war... to assert anything of the kind is nonsense.
4) It is not Kerry's conduct in Vietnam that is at issue, so far as I am aware.
5) If the DoD had seen fit to call up Bush's unit, he would have flown sorties in Vietnam. He enlisted, don't fault a man for taking advantage of an available avenue of service. As many VN vets around PF say, "Why in the name of God would you WANT to!"

It's a dead horse, so, let us cease kicking it.

[Arrow]

1. My problem is not with John Kerry's service in Vietnam.The record states that he served honorably and it is not my placeto question his service or the service ofany honorably discharged Veteran of these United States.

2.I don't read Ann Coulter. I'm furious that anyone left or rightor center wouldeven thinksuch dispicable thoughts in regard to Max Cleland, his serviceand hisloss of limbs in service to this country. What kind of a human being is she? Not only to think these things but towrite and publishthem for all the world to see. Someone needs to fry her hard drive.I question that her statements are being highly celebrated or circulatednotby decent folks and not in the Vietnam Veteranscommunity.

3.Irefuse to forgetwhatJohn Kerry did to every Vietnam Veteran when he testified in regard to the Winter Soldiers Investigation.He cast doubt on the integrity of the service ofevery Vietnam Veteranthat servedbefore, during and after he served in Vietnamwith histestimony and lies in regard to atrocities being the norm in Vietnam.He gave strength to thelie of the anti-war movement that all Vietnam Veterans were baby killing psycho maniacs.

4.Irefuse toforget that President Bill Clinton and John Kerry and this present administration along with members from both sides of the islesold out our POW-MIA and their families by pushing for and maintaining normal trade relations with Vietnam thereby taking away the leverage for a complete accounting of those still held and missing.

No one on this board that wants to put JohnKerry in the White House has even attempted to explain the actions of John Kerry and my objecton to them. If you are going to defend him by killing the messenger (namely me) or by attacking the opposingparty and can't address the issues directly thenjust give it a pass. I just want to hear your personal reasonedview of his statements and his actions concerning these two issues.

Arrow>>>>>>>>

[Arrow]

Statement by John Kerry to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations April 23, 1971

I would like to talk on behalf of all those veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were 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 and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told stories that 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 Ghengis 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.

We call this investigation the Winter Soldier Investigation. The term Winter Soldier is a play on words of Thomas Paine's in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriots and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.

We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out....

In our opinion and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.

We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.

We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American.

We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search and destroy missions, as well as by Viet Cong terrorism - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.

We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.

We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.

We watched the United States falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings." We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater. We watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese. We watched pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point, and so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 81s and Fire Base 6s, and so many others.

Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.

Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?....We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country - the question of racism which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions such as the use of weapons; the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything.

An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation of Alcatraz put it to me very succinctly. He told me how as a boy on an Indian reservation he had watched television and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped in Vietnam and he said, "my God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people," and he stopped. And that is what we are trying to say, that we think this thing has to end.

We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country....

We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away 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 fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so when thirty 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 where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

[Arrow]

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..-Mackubin Thomas Owens, 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.-

[Arrow]

We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away 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 fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so when thirty 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 where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

I don't appreciate John Kerry's arrogance in pretending to speak for my family with that ridiculous sob story at the end of his little speech.We were never ashamed ofbeing part of the US Military. My husband carried himself with dignityin his living and his dying in or out of uniform.On the daywe put him in the groundGod gave me the grace tostand up like a womanand recieve with pridethe folded flag that he servedunder.There were no sob stories on that day about how the government did us wrong and what vicitms we were. Every member ofour family was proud of my husbands service to this country on that day.

I don't knowwho John Kerry and his motley crew of winter soldiers thought they were speaking for but I can tell you it wasn't us.

Arrow>>>>>>>>>

[MM38084]

John Kerry must start looking in the mirror if he feels he has any chance of winning the white house in 2004. Not because he can?t handle the job but what he did to get to this point is nothing less then disgraceful. The old saying goes ?You cannot hide from the truth? and the sooner Mr. Kerry understands this, the better off he will be.

He first must admit that he lied about the winter meetings in Detroit or stretched the truth in a feeble attempt to shorten the war in Vietnam. I understand the method of the madness, but disagree with his moral obligation to his brothers still in fields of Vietnam. The true code of the American fighting man is ?Duty before self? and ?Never leave a comrade behind? Mr. Kerry failed at both, and doing so wiped out any honor he might have gained on or off the battlefield.

The next thing he must do is apologize to every man or women who ever put on a uniform, for his part of portraying them as pot smoking baby killing freaks who were the lowest life America had to offer. Because this portrayal did not stop in 1973 or 1975 with the wars end but lingered for at least two decades or beyond.

Mr. Kerry needs to stop using his experience in Vietnam for his own personal gain. He himself said he was not proud to be there, and he was rather ashamed of it. So leave it alone and start running on issues that affect all Americans. He can start with repelling NAFTA and the WTO and work more towards a common sense fair trade policy.

At the present time just to get though the primary Mr. Kerry has peaked in his run for the white house, about six months to early. Soon the momentum will shift back to president Bush, and Mr. Kerry has to be ready for the truth. Because if he thinks he can just side step the truth he is in for a sad demise.

[BLUEHAWK]

Thank you Sis, if I may so name thee, and MM... thank you.