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Politics : The TRUTH About John Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (73)	2/26/2004 11:58:42 PM
From: American Spirit	Respond to of 1483

Reagan's daughter Patti wants Bush to fess up about 1972: By Patti Davis Newsweek Updated: 6:29 p.m. ET Feb. 26, 2004Feb. 26 - There is a boy I remember—17 when he lied and joined the Marines, believing that fighting a war for his country would stop the wars he fought inside himself. By the time he landed in Vietnam he was 18, still at war within himself and no longer quite as certain that being choppered into that embattled jungle was the best idea. It was 1968. He and I were classmates in high school before he made the abrupt decision to leave. Someone suggested writing to him when he started training, so I did. That first exchange of letters began a correspondence that lasted for years. It’s the closest I would get to the war that defined my generation. I learned about Daisy Cutters and booby-trapped mines, about body parts strung from trees. I learned about horribly wounded men lying bandaged and tossed by nightmares, reliving horror that, according to my friend and pen pal, doctors said they couldn’t remember. I learned that a man can return from a war that a boy went off to, and even though he looks whole, he isn’t. advertisement Vietnam was a long time ago, but it was just yesterday. They were boys, but now they are men—the ones who came back. The rest are dead—names on a black wall. But they will always be boys in someone’s mind. Boys crossed an ocean to fight in a steamy jungle where the enemy often seemed like ghost soldiers—deadly ghost soldiers. Many of those boys came back broken, and older than they ever thought possible. Too many came home in body bags and too many came home with only their bodies. Their minds, their dreams, still stumbled and slashed through a jungle that would never let them go. Some boys fled to Canada, knowing that if friends or loved ones fell ill or died, they couldn’t come home to be with them. Some went to jail, choosing imprisonment over a war they didn’t believe in. Some cut off fingers (an index finger was the recommended digit) to get out of the draft. Those of us who watched the war on TV waged a version of it at home. The Vietnam War divided everyone. You either supported it or you were opposed—adamantly. It’s hard to imagine this now, but it happened—there were individuals who, doused with gasoline, lit themselves on fire and burned to death on the streets of America simply to protest an ugly war in a faraway country. If you are too young to remember, ask someone who isn’t. You’ll hear stories—war stories from Vietnam or from right here at home. We were all at war. It formed and informed who we grew into. That’s why it matters what President Bush did during the war. If we are to trust the person who has been elected to lead us, guide us, define us as a country, we need to be able to define him. You cannot truly define any man who was draft age during the Vietnam War without knowing what he did in that tumultuous time, or what he planned to do if his number came up in those televised draft lottery evenings—dreadful white balls bounced down from a clear dome that would determine a boy’s fate. Life and death were reduced to that. Nineteen-year-old boys had to make decisions that were—simply and resolutely—about life and death. Courage is a relative thing. Who is to say that a man who fought in a war is more courageous than the man who went to prison for his beliefs, or who maimed himself to ensure that he wouldn’t end up in that dark jungle? Who is to say, this many years later, what any of us would have done if we were faced with those brutal choices? If we could have joined the National Guard and stayed away from the front lines, wouldn’t some of us have done that? War heroes are a special group. We hear the stories, shake our heads, and we wonder: would I have been able to risk my life, crawl that far, plunge into the sea, reach my arm out for another knowing it could mean my life? We don’t expect people to become heroes, but we’re glad that some have been. In the end, we just want to know: where did you stand during a time in history that carved up lives and hearts and an entire country? “What did you do in the war?” is not as important as “Who were you in the war?” It doesn’t matter how long ago some events occurred; they will always be immediate and important. The Vietnam War is one of those events. A generation was forged in its turmoil and has grown up in its shadow. "The V.C. seems to come out of the mist, silent as ghosts," my friend wrote to me so long ago. In many ways it was a war of ghosts and they haunt us still. In the end there is only one stark thing that war asks of us: to tell the truth. The point now is not to scoff at somebody who scored the easy road of National Guard duty, and even figured out how to avoid some of it … if that’s what happened. We just want to know, and we want to know truthfully. Because we all have a war story from those years, and if you know that story you know a lot about who we are now. Tim O'Brien, in his brilliant book "The Things They Carried," wrote: “… in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.” It’s about looking behind today and wondering what led up to it.

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (73)	2/27/2004 12:01:08 AM
From: American Spirit	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1483

Yes ban all opinions, censor, that's the answer rightwing. Maybe is you censor everyone but yourselves you'll see the world as black and white. Sadly, that's your main problem. You bought into the Hannity-Bush school of good vs. evil, not realizing that sometimes the "good" people are also evildoers. For instance, both Bush and Cheney have done far worse things than Martha Stewart has even thought of doing. And far worse things than Clinton ever did for that matter.