SwiftVets.com

[d19thdoc]

To My Friends, the Swift Vets and POWs:

I find myself a bit at sea, as many of us probably are now that the mission is done. It is not unlike the morning of February 12, 1968, as I sat in a passenger lounge at Sea-Tac Airport, alone, in my uniform, two days from Quang Ngai Province, and suddenly more bereft than I had ever been at any funeral of family or friend. I was numb, and wanted to be where things made sense - on LZ Thunder by Highway QL-1 and the South China Sea, with my guys. In a little over a year, my world and my place in it had been totally altered for good. I had been totally unaware of that fact, until that moment in that airport, alone.

I had no idea that ""joining" the Swift Vets earlier this year would also change my life. And now that mission is ended. And I am bereft. What now? Where do I go. Where do I fit? Why can't I get home?

I am only now coming to see that the worst thing that happened in my life was not Howard and Thompson and Davis and Ernie May and the seven Vietnamese civilians, or Samuel Davis, who had been missing three days when I, the company medic, found him.

But no, the worst thing was trying to come home.

In the last ten months, I have relived my 1968 at home, and have perhaps put it in its place - at least partly. In early 1969, I tried to kill myself. But this time, this year, I have found a better outlet for my experience.

I have only just now realized that it is my country that I have not been able to forgive. John Kerry was only the Headless Horseman in my nightmare vision of my country. Like an abused child with a complicit, intimidated and silent parent, I have never been able to comprehend how my country had allowed me to be so defiled, without protest, protection or recourse - the Motherland I loved and thought had loved me, for whom I had offered my life itself in respect of that mutual bond.

And I never knew before now that I was suffering from this aftermath as well as from the horrors of the war itself. And that this home coming was worse . . . there is no doubt about it.

One of the worst things John Kerry and his cronies like Carter and Kennedy and Gore and Dean have done, they have done this year - not thirty years ago. They have set the table for a repeat of the same abuse - this abuse of our soldiers now in combat. And they set it up for the same reason this time as last time - by making this war a partisan, and fake, issue from which they could wrest some personal, political advantage.

It is a wretched, treasonous, despicable enterprise. The very worst kind of betrayal. And nearly half the population either cannot see it, or is complicit in it - manipulated and duped by the amoral and opportunistic.

It is my mission now to make the country see it, and them, for what they really are; to spare this generation of our protectors from the same fate that destroyed so many in my generation.

I thank you for opening up the path that revealed these lessons.

You paid attention to my plight, to our plight, and you actually understood. We stood together, and I am no longer alone.
_________________
For The Honor of the Fifty-Eight Thousand.
"He Can Lose, But He Can Not Hide"

[Wing Wiper]

That is one powerful message, brother. You're not alone, you're just able to realize the source of the pain and put it in words. Welcome home and thanks.

[DADESID]

Welcome home, Doc.

God Bless You.