Why It Matters
I keep hearing that John Kerry has has brought the character assassination on himself by playing up Vietnam in his campaign. The assessment seems to be that if he hadn't made a big deal out of it the Swift boat Borgias wouldn't have felt the need to come forward. This is, of course, nonsense. If he hadn't brought up his service they would have said he was trying to hide it. This was always in the cards. The Swift Boat Borgias hate John Kerry because he said that Americans committed atrocities in Vietnam and they have never been able to forgive him for agitating against a war they felt proud to have fought.
This is an understandable human reaction. They have never been able to come to terms with that war and what it meant and as a result they have projected all of their emotional confusion about their own actions, their government's perfidy and their country's ambigious relationship to the troops into a single focus on the anti-war protestors as the symbol of all that hurt them. It's beyond my ken to try to convince a bunch of 60ish year old men that they are wrong on this. This issue will dog my generation to our graves.
However, the media isn't really talking about any of that when it says that John Kerry asked for it. It is saying that Vietnam is irrelevant and that by bringing it up he brought all this distraction upon himself. This could not be more wrong. Because of Bush's Big Adventure in Iraq, all of this has become much more than a point of symbolism. It has become crucial to our understanding of what is happening right now.
Although the details differ, essentially we are once again engaged in a misbegotten war in which the goal is amorphous and for which the public feels ambigious. It is the result of a foolish grand geopolitical strategy not self defense and it has American troops embroiled in a complicated foreign battlefield in which we are viewed by all sides with suspicion if not outright hatred. People are dying everyday and nobody quite understands why. The pressure is building.
That at the hands of the Vietnam generation itself, we have found ourselves in this situation again is mind-boggling. And it is a testament to the "suspended in amber" nature of the hawkish mindset that it has happened.
The baby boom generation is incapable of governing if we don't choose among them people who have grappled honestly with the crucible of their lives. And that crucible was Vietnam. George W. Bush and his cronies have never done this. Neither have the Swift Boaters. These people have not faced up to what our country did in that war and as a result we are looking at another war based upon similarly bad assumptions and we are in the process of repeating many of the same mistakes.
Here is a sad case in point. I think most of us have heard that Joseph Darby, the man who blew the whistle on the Abu Ghraib torture, is now in protective custody. Back in his hometown his family was shunned while they held parades for those who committed the torture. He received death threats.
But, I don't know how many people know that this is a sad sequel to the story of Hugh C. Thompson, a helicopter pilot in 1968 who rescued a group of civilians during the My lai massacre and was fired on by his own countrymen. Then as now, right wing politicians were "outraged at the outrage."
He was a 24-year-old pilot flying over the Vietnamese jungle on March 16, 1968. The crew's objective: draw Viet Cong fire from My Lai, so helicopter gunships could swoop in and take out the enemy gunners.
Thompson spotted gunfire but found no enemy fighters. He saw only American troops, who were forcing Vietnamese civilians into a ditch, then opening fire.
Thompson landed his helicopter to block the Americans, then instructed his gunner to open fire on the soldiers if they tried to harm any more villagers. Thompson and two other chopper pilots airlifted villagers to safety, and he reported the slaughter to superiors.
"We saw something going wrong, so we did the right thing and we reported it right then," Thompson said.
The Vietnamese government estimated that more than 500 were killed.
Army Lt. William Calley Jr. was convicted in a 1971 court-martial and received a life sentence for the My Lai massacre. President Nixon reduced the sentence, and Calley served three years of house arrest.
Thompson received the prestigious Soldier's Medal -- 30 years after the fact.
His acts are now considered heroic. But for years Thompson suffered snubs and worse from those in and out of the military who considered his actions unpatriotic.
Fellow servicemen refused to speak with him. He received death threats, and walked out his door to find animal carcasses on his porch. He recalled a congressman angrily saying that Thompson himself was the only serviceman who should be punished because of My Lai.
Today, West Point considers Thompson and his story essential to educating its cadets.
"Hugh Thompson is a great example of individual responsibility," said Col. Tom Kolditz, head of the Army academy's behavioral sciences and leadership department. "He took initiative, he took action, to establish institutional values in a situation where they were not operating."
36 years later we have what is being called another "breakdown in discipline" at Abu Ghraib. As with My Lai, the upper chain of command will not be held liable. Once again there is documentary evidence of war crimes. And, here in the USA, once again, you have the hawks defending the war criminals against those who stand up to it.
This is unfolding before our very eyes in Iraq. It isn't some abstract argument about war stories and faux heroism and who admitted to war crimes a generation ago. This is now.
If there was ever a time that a decorated Vietnam veteran who came home with the knowlege that the war was wrong and fought to end it, was called for to lead this country, it is now. This is not a distraction and it is not beside the point. It is the very essence of the debate in this election.
John Kerry may be the single most qualified man in the entire nation to be president at this moment in history.