SwiftVets.com

[sullitms]

This is an op-ed from another site I belong to:

Did I mention I Served in Vietnam?

T. Ferguson

The theme for the convention was unmistakable. “John Kerry served in Vietnam!!!!” I half expected a camera to be shoved in his face as the balloons and confetti were falling asking him ‘John Kerry, you’ve just won the Democrat nomination for President. What are you going to do?’ ‘I’M GOING TO VIETNAM!!!!!’ I imagined him saying.

I was hoodwinked. So wasn’t everyone else in this country that gave Senator John Kerry the admiration we thought he deserved for serving his country in Vietnam. While I disagree with him on just about everything, I always felt I could comfortably say “At least he went and fought in Vietnam.”. That is until now.

I didn’t criticize him when the story broke about how his Purple Hearts were earned. Again, “At least he was there,” I said, giving him the benefit of the doubt. He truly could have been killed at any moment in such a volatile atmosphere. But the evidence is now too much to say that he was doing it for love of country.

It has been revealed this week, as well as in a Boston Globe article back in 1996, that Senator Kerry, otherwise know as Lieutenant Kerry on the rivers of Vietnam, reenacted some of the home movies that were used in the Spielberg produced short film on his life just before his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention this past week in Boston. To me it shows why John Kerry went to Vietnam. For John Kerry. Not for country. Not for his brothers in arms. Not for his sense of duty. It was for himself and his own selfish ambitions.

He brought a camera into Vietnam. He reenacted battles. He went back when a fellow swift boat mate fell over board and plucked him from the river. Why would he risk doing such things during the war where this country lost so many great men unless he felt the need to serve his country?

I finally had to admit the undeniable answer to myself. He had his life scripted from the word go. He had his eye on the Senate, and possibly the White House, from the moment he joined the Navy. He needed the medals. He needed the stories. He needed the glory.
After hearing about the movie set he put together in the jungles of Vietnam, I honestly believe that he would not have even been there had it not been for his personal ambitions.

Fast forward to 2004. John Kerry, in his attempt to sound like a man hell bent on the defense of this country, undertook a courageous quest to steal the issue of national defense away from the party that has always been associated with that very task. He touted his Vietnam service yet seemed to come down with a convenient case of amnesia when it came to his twenty years in the Senate voting against the military and intelligence. I find it amusing and irritating at the same time that Kerry wants to reinvent himself into the very people that he and others like him, whether it be figuratively or literally, spat on when they came back from Vietnam.

I feel sorry for the veterans that stand by him all these years later. Maybe they are complicit in this mirage. Maybe they are not. No matter which way you look at it now, they are being used. If I was a veteran standing by Kerry I would be asking myself one question. If he is so loyal to his band of brothers why did he cut and run on them after only four months in Vietnam? Maybe that question is going to be answered in the sequel to the fictitious film that was shown before the country at the DNC this past week.

http://www.politicscafe.com/editorials/073104.php
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