Ogre
Lt.Jg.
Joined: 23 Aug 2004
Posts: 120
|
 Posted: Wed Aug 25, 2004 12:31 am Post subject: Michael Novak on the SwiftVets ... |
 |
|
Excellent article:
| Quote: | A Matter of Honor
Kerry made his war service an issue.
When John Kerry called the Swift Boat Vets for Truth "liars" on August 19, he ignored a point articulated afterwards by his spokeswoman, Stephanie Cutter: "When somebody's attacking your military record, you reach a boiling point, and he reached a boiling point last night," Cutter explained. "When you go and fight in a war, when you spill blood for your country, your instinct is to fight back and defend your record."
Cutter was looking at matters from Kerry's angle, but her point works even more powerfully from the point of view of the Swift Boat Vets. That's because even before Kerry got fully free of the Navy (he was in the Naval Reserves until 1978), he took away the honor of his Swift Boat brothers, who were then as young as he was, and mostly still in harm's way. He said they and others like them had killed, burned, raped, and acted like the barbarian armies of Genghis Khan. He broadcast this message all around the world, until it echoed in the jungles and the prison camps and down the rivers of Vietnam — and these young men in uniform had no way to defend themselves.
Their instinct has also been "to fight back and defend" their record.
The Swift Boat Vets, of course, have been realists. They knew that very few Americans — and virtually no one in the press — cared that they had been dishonored or would do anything about it. So they got on with their lives. Then, during the past year, two things electrified them and gave them a renewed sense of duty. The first was the publication of Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty, with its many direct quotes from Kerry's journals and its uncritical, full-tilt representation of Kerry's version of events. The second was the possibility that a man they had learned to distrust because of the lies he told about them might become president, and then lie about the veterans of the war in Iraq.
The title of their book is to be taken seriously: Unfit for Command. Kerry's revisionism about his own past and the meaning of the war in Vietnam cannot be allowed to go unchallenged. History hasn't been kind to Kerry's view that the Vietnamese did not care about the difference between democracy and Communism. More than a million and a half boat people gave the lie to that, as does the comparative misery of Vietnam today.
The Swift Boat Vets and hundreds of thousands of others came home from Vietnam and no one honored them; some insulted them, and even their children and families looked at them with questions in their eyes — questions induced by the public proclamations of John Kerry and others like him. Kerry's testimony before the Senate called them — and the whole structure of command, indeed the whole country — hypocritical, self-interested, even criminal.
As one vet said recently, John Kerry gave the enemy the words it was torturing soldiers to sign their names to — that they were war criminals.
To this day, John Kerry has not said publicly that his friends among the Swift Boat Vets were not war criminals. He has not apologized. In his debate with the young John O'Neill on the Dick Cavett show in 1971, Kerry could not cite a single case of a war crime committed by the Swift Boat veterans. Yet Kerry has never attempted to give his band of brothers their honor back. |
There's a lot more here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/novak/novak200408240921.asp[/b] |
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
