In the primary season and now with an eye on the White House,
John F. Kerry has said that his fellow Vietnam vets constitute a
fraternity of sorts, a “Band of Brothers.” He has used this
relationship quite effectively to brush away an awful lot of
criticism: of his patriotism, his dovishness, and his strange
affection for communist thugs.
One problem, however, is that his fellow vets may not be as
willing as the general public to let bygones go by. Based upon tens
of thousands of e-mails and entries on my website, which
poured in in response to three recent editorials I wrote about the
man, it seems that many Vietnam veterans despise John Kerry.
To wit, I appeared briefly on Fox News Live on March 30,
discussing Kerry’s candidacy, and several hundred e-mails greeted
me when I returned home a few hours later. Only two disagreed with
my position. Almost all of the calls were from Vietnam vets.
Why the outrage? Is he a phony war hero, undeserving of the
Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts? No, but then
the medals do not make the man, and he did not seem to think much
of them at the time.
In the view of many Vietnam vets, Kerry threw away his right to
be regarded as a war hero when he tossed a handful of medals over
the fence of the Capitol in 1971 in protest of the war. That action
demonstrated an utter contempt for those medals, and all that they
represented, including the boys still in the jungles of Vietnam.
That they later turned out to be other vets’ medals, which he only
pretended were his own, only accentuated the gesture.
LIKE OTHER VETERANS OF the Vietnam War, I was there to experience
the silence, spitting, and shaming for our involvement in that
conflict. I was a volunteer, but there were many around my age:
scared wide-eyed young draftees who went because their country
called, their draft numbers came up, or maybe because their dads
had served in World War II or Korea.
Now we are all older, wiser, a little thicker around the middle,
and thinner around the hairline, and many of us, sometimes have
that far-away look in our eyes. Many feel John Kerry helped put
that look there and helped to bring about the mob mentality that
animated many liberals in our country in the early '70s.
Why do we feel this way? The right or wrong of our country’s
involvement in the Vietnam War is inconsequential right now. Of
much greater import is Kerry’s eloquent Winter Soldier testimony
before Congress in 1971, which launched his political career. Kerry
based his testimony on the statements of about 150 supposedly
highly-decorated veterans at the Winter Soldier Rally in Detroit,
who made claims of committing horrible atrocities in Vietnam. He
told Congress that the U.S. “murdered over 200,000 Vietnamese per
year,” a statement which the present Kerry campaign has gone to
great lengths to distance itself from.
The Detroit claims were duly investigated and found wanting. It
turned out that most of the claimants were phonies who had never
been in the military. Some used stolen names of actual veterans;
others refused to comply with investigators. So Kerry tarred his
fellow vets as war criminals based on trumped up, unsubstantiated
charges, in order to thrust his name into the spotlight.
Vietnam veterans who so strongly opposed Kerry’s presidential
bid this year see the senator now, for political expedience,
reversing course. He proudly thumps his chest about being a
decorated veteran, his past smearing of veterans notwithstanding.
To see how transparently opportunistic this is, it’s worth asking
what he has done for his Band of Brothers in his 19 years in the
Senate.
Not a hell of a lot, it turns out. I looked up his record on
veterans issues since becoming a Senator on the Library of Congress
website, and
the results were predictable. In this presidential election year,
Kerry proposed one veterans-related bill and signed on to six
others. However, in the previous 18 years, he sponsored a total of
only four veteran-related bills, and one amendment (all of which
went nowhere) and he refused to co-sponsor any others.
I WATCHED KERRY WITH amazement a few months ago when he replied to
reporters’ questions about Bush’s Air National Guard service. Kerry
said he would not comment on anyone’s decision back then to “join
the Guard, go to Canada, be a conscientious objector, or go
AWOL.”
Nor was I the only veteran amazed at this performance. One
hundred and forty Medal of Honor recipients were in the National
Guard. Six thousand seventy-seven members of the National Guard or
Reserves died in Vietnam, and John Kerry simply disrespected them
all for political expedience. By this, he added to the tendency of
born again liberal hawks to refer to the president as a draft
dodger and deserter, in contravention of all available
evidence.
When we examine the charcoaled remains left by the all the fires
that Kerry has started or fanned — tossing medals over the White
House wall, accusing his fellow vets of genocide, comparing
Guardsmen to deserters — it is very easy to see why we have a very
angry Band of so-called Brothers determined that this man not be
our next commander-in-chief.
