Commentary: Exploiting The Pain of Vietnam Veterans
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Those who thought they were too good to go to Vietnam are now exploiting those who did go to Vietnam.
By Brad Kennedy
It’s been thirty-seven years since I was lucky and returned from serving in Vietnam. I volunteered for the draft and ultimately served as a forward observer for the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. I still feel the horror of that war. Vietnam was like a bad dream where a monster was in control, reaching in and ripping out hearts and heads or pulling off arms and legs--American and Vietnamese. We never knew who was next. To escape its grasp was just the luck of the draw.
The longer we were in that dream, the clearer we saw there were actually four monsters--North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, Viet Cong, and American. We came to see ourselves as tiny parts of the American monster. Some made up the legs, others the arms and the brain. We forward observers were the eyes. Together, we were perpetrating outrages as surely as the other monsters were. These acts were against our will, for certain. We were a monster run amok.
In our fear and our horror, we had only one thing going for us--each other. No matter where or what unit an American was from, he was our brother. Creed or color or mother country were of no account. Our bonds of brotherhood seemed like they would last forever. Forged of love, they were our best hope for salvation. It was like we all had the same DNA, though that of a monster.
Maybe because I have spent so much time thinking and writing about the war, I’ve become addicted to its pain. I see Vietnamese smiling in a hootch one moment, shrieking and flailing amid flaming havoc the next. I hear my friends laughing one second, then see them frozen in timelessness forever. But now, only now after all these years, I sense a new pain, a different one but one every bit as mournful. It is the pain of our veterans’ bonds of brotherhood being torn apart. Where is the love and hope we prayed would save us from being cast to the wind? The monster stirs in the night when we savor our hard-earned sleep, contriving movements to tear us asunder. All over the country others feel it, too. This is no dream.
Who causes this pain? Some of us say John Kerry is to blame. They say he accepted medals he did not deserve and call him a liar. They tarred him for two weeks with these charges but couldn’t make the feathers stick. By now overwhelming new evidence has appeared in support of the official records and against their allegations. The accusers neither apologize nor recant, seemingly because it never was about the award of his medals. Several of them freely admit their actions and allegations have far more to do with what Kerry did with his medals afterwards. Principally, they object to his throwing them over the Capitol building’s fence in protest of the war, his public appearance(s) with Jane Fonda, and his raising the subject of war crimes in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. The war crimes statement seems to be the flash-point issue.
These matters are filled with high-octane emotional charge, especially for Vietnam veterans. But righteous indignation is justified only when it’s right. Sincere folks have two reasons to be wary:
First, the people attacking Kerry already have shown they will make false charges against him by their distortions about how he got his medals.
Second, their charges are made in the context of a national election for the purpose of influencing votes.
The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad takes excerpts from Kerry’s testimony before the Fulbright Committee out of context in such a way that they easily can be misunderstood. The voiceover for the ad says he accused all Viet vets of war crimes. In truth, Kerry made clear that he was reporting what decorated vets had said about themselves in sworn testimony and that he was not accusing others. He bore testimony to the failures of the policymakers in Washington.
It is also true that supporters of President Bush have advised, assisted, and bankrolled the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. It is they, not John Kerry, who thirty years after the fact have brought up these distortions about war crimes in Vietnam and repeated them over and over and over again. It is these wizards behind the curtain, who were too good to serve in Vietnam, who now manipulate for partisan purpose the pain and grief this issue causes those of us who did. They have no shame and they envy our honor. Fellow veterans, stand your watch.
Why did John Kerry protest the war when he returned home? I can only speak for myself, since I did the same. I became convinced that Vietnam was not necessary to our national security, that we were doing more harm than good there, and that it was only a matter of time before the American people turned on a policy that claimed as many as five hundred American lives every week. Given that view, which history has sustained, it would have been a breach of the bonds of brotherhood I felt for the American troops still in Vietnam for me not to do all I could within our democratic system to correct an errant policy and bring them home alive. I protested out of love for my brothers-in-arms.
When I visualize a sailor turning his boat back into gunfire to save a soldier from the water, I know that brotherly love steered that ship. One night John Kerry pulled one soldier from dangerous waters, the next he tried to pull hundreds of thousands more back to the safety of our own shores.
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Brad Kennedy lives in New Jersey and served in the US Army in Vietnam from August 1966 to July 1967. He is the author of the forthcoming novel Blood and Country: A Soldier’s Call.
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