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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (21941)	7/12/2003 11:34:55 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Damn, Scotty, this one hurts, and it hits real close to home. Coincidentally, I had a long talk with my cousin last night. He was an AF Special Forces medic stationed in Thailand.(Ironically, I think the only country in the entire region he didn't "visit" was S Vietnam. That includes China (didn't know we were in China, did you?); he told me he was there for 3 days. His story is remarkably similar to Cava's, but then there are probably 100K more out there. Anyway, one fine day, medic Perry decided he wanted to be on the waist gun of his chopper. They got hit by a rocket, and exploded. He got blown out, fell maybe a few hundred feet, and was the sole survivor. Comatose maybe a month, and is pretty physically screwed up; some neuromuscular thing, maybe due to a non-functioning pituitary which stopped working when it fell 200 feet and was landed upon by it's body.. He JUST, this week, got his first SSI payment, and is STILL trying to his 100% service connected disability payments ("Sorry, sir, we don't seem to have any records of your service"). (Also goes to a VA shrink, just one more crazy fucked-up VietNam Vet, and I say that with the utmost respect for all of them; I knew a lot, worked with a lot at the VA; they will pay the price forever, just like the WWII guys, and now Iraq, liable to be even more screwed up than the Nam guys). But, I digress. Perry's son flew off the Kitty Hawk the first month or so of the war. (His dad was at the Battle of the Bulge; he would never talk about it, and neither did Perry, until very recently). P and his kid had lots of talks B4 the war, and so did P and I. He was against this war, and knew all the BS they were trying to feed us. Most of the vets working for me in Palo Alto felt the same way about Nam; they hit there just trying to make it home in one piece, and they were refusing to do certain missions the way HQ wanted them done. Nam taught a lot of us, military and hippie, that the government couldn't be trusted. Obviously, we all learned a lot, because there was a large number of vets marching and speaking out B4 the war. Too bad it was falling on deaf ears; or maybe chicken hawks don't have ears. JLA and Coulter to the contrary, it tears me up that so many of us were right about this thing from the beginning. Just tears me up. I'd rather I had been wrong; ...and this thing is only just beginning... Rat