From The Washington Dispatch
Opinion
John Kerry's Ambivalent Patriotism
Exclusive commentary by David Householder
Feb 27, 2004
I feel like that guy in the UPS commercial:
It’s not that I’m questioning John Kerry’s patriotism . . .
Yes, I am.
Now, I didn’t fight in Vietnam. I had a lottery number in the mid-nineties and a 4-F classification as a result of a congenital spinal deformity discovered in my last year of high school football, and when I turned 18, the American military had already been pulled out of Vietnam, anyway.
I resent equally the implications that anyone who didn’t fight in Vietnam can never question another’s patriotism and that anyone who did fight in Vietnam can never have his patriotism questioned. Combat experience and patriotism are two completely different issues. Benedict Arnold fought for American independence, should he therefore not have had his patriotism questioned when he committed treason? Timothy McVeigh was a combat veteran of the Gulf War. Do we therefore laud him as a patriot even as he’s blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City?
If combat experience trumps patriotism, then George McClellan, another Democrat with combat experience, should have been elected president against a Republican candidate whose only military experience - other than three years as a wartime commander-in-chief - was serving for a short time in what was essentially the National Guard without seeing combat. (For those of you educated by members of public teachers’ unions in the last two decades - look it up, you might learn something.) Like John Kerry, McClellan was both in favor of and opposed to the war being waged by the President. McClellan thought the war was unwinnable, primarily because the President had fired him for not winning it. Liberals and pacifists loved him because he was a military man who dared to question the military. Had he won, Al Gore would be president of the United States today in a landslide, primarily because the “Solid South” would be a foreign country. Many Democrats today would view that as the more favorable outcome. But, sadly for the left, McClellan lost the election and the President won the war. McClellan was the experienced combat veteran. And the President was lauded by his own and successive generations as a great patriot (until teachers’ unions in our generation put a stop to the practice).
In short, history teaches us that the leader who saves his country need not have combat experience. And that all the actions of men with combat experience are not necessarily beneficial to their nation. And therefore that combat experience and patriotism are two different things.
John Kerry wants to know “what it is Republicans who didn't serve in Vietnam have against those of us who did.” Now, I wasn’t aware that Kerry was ever a Republican who served in Vietnam, but apparently grammar is no more important to Kerry than consistency on the issues. But as a Republican who didn’t serve in Vietnam, I’m more than happy to tell Kerry what I have against him. I don’t like that fact that he now attempts to wrap himself in the same flag he was all too happy to watch being burned thirty years ago. I don’t like the fact that, despite his combat experience, he was too gutless to throw his own medals away when his comrades in ideology did so. I don’t like the fact that he believes that the United Nations should call the shots for the United States military. I don’t like the fact that he has a lengthy congressional record of voting against proposed improvements in the military and intelligence communities so that America can be better defended against foreign fanatics.
Let’s face it. Kerry didn’t think his own combat experience was particularly patriotic, so why should anybody else? I don’t denigrate his service, nor do I think it appropriate to belittle it by saying he was only “slightly” wounded three times. That’s three times more than I and most of the people who are either attacking or defending him have ever been wounded in combat. To the contrary, it was Kerry who denigrated his own service upon returning to America. It was Kerry who defamed Vietnam veterans as rapists, torturers and mutilators. It was Kerry who derided the entire National Guard as campus murderers. It was Kerry who said “Those of us who have served in Vietnam know that the real guilty party is the United States of America.” It’s statements like these that should make any rational person question Mr. Kerry’s patriotism.
Something happened to Lt. John Kerry in Vietnam. Near as I can tell, according to a story on the admittedly hostile VietnamVeteransAgainstJohnKerry.com, it happened in a “free fire” zone, after the smoke had cleared, when Kerry discovered that his crew had killed women and children as well as draft-age males with guns. He couldn’t reconcile that result with his Profiles In Courage-engendered view of the American hero. Who could? If he still occasionally wakes with a start from a nightmare of bloodied children’s faces, who could blame him? The story is not inconsistent with Kerry’s acknowledged public statements, including his admission on Meet the Press in April 1971 that “I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones,” and with his epilogue in the 1971 book, A New Soldier, claiming that “we were sent to Vietnam to kill Communism. But we found instead that we were killing women and children.”
Struggling to reconcile his actions with his own sense of right and wrong, Kerry did what most normal people would do. He blamed his bosses for telling him to do bad things. And, truth be told, he had a point. The Vietnam War was badly mismanaged by the Democratic administration of the man who would be damned before he’d be the first American president to lose a war. (Madison, of course, beat him to it, but LBJ had no battle of New Orleans, won after the War of 1812 was over, to help him spin it the other way.)
The Vietnam experience of Lieutenant Kerry appears to have engendered the profound ambivalence that now characterizes Senator Kerry. He was proud to have served and ashamed of the service he committed. As a result, we have a candidate who voted against the Gulf War but was in favor of it, who voted in favor of the Iraq War but was against it, who voted against funds for the reconstruction of Iraq but favors Iraq’s reconstruction, who voted for NAFTA but is against free trade, who voted in favor of No Child Left Behind and the Patriot Act but is against them. The man who “stands second to nobody” in his support of the American military but voted against almost every proposed improvement for the American military during his entire tenure in Congress.
Yes. I question John Kerry’s patriotism. I’m not saying he doesn’t have any. But I seriously wonder if he has enough. The question isn’t whether he loves America more than George W. Bush. Kerry’s running to represent America on the world stage. The real question, therefore, is whether John Kerry loves America as much as Jacques Chirac loves France or Vladimir Putin loves Russia. If he doesn’t, he’s going to get pushed around, which means America is going to get pushed around.
And it doesn’t take combat experience to know that won’t be a good thing.
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