To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (8698 ) 9/9/2004 3:31:32 PM From: Richnorth Respond to Claptrap and hogwash again from Ann.".........The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have turned out to be anything but--- the only "lies" they've turned up are a mistaken date or a mild Kerry exaggeration about operating in Cambodia and a Purple Heart received for a minor wound -- we are told their real gripe is that Kerry protested the war after he came home and sullied their service by testifying to atrocities committed by American troops in Vietnam. These are heartfelt gripes, perhaps, but wrong on the merits. Kerry's protest was not only honorable, it was accurate. The war in Vietnam was an unnecessary disaster, entered into under false pretenses---the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident---and fought because of a mistaken intellectual theory: that the Vietnamese national liberation movement was part of an international communist conspiracy to overwhelm Asia. (The subsequent war between Vietnam and China put a crimp in that one.) And, yes, there were atrocities aplenty. I spent three years in the 1980s writing about a platoon of former Marines, men I consider heroes, and several unburdened themselves of awful memories before we were done: tossing a Vietnamese prisoner out of a helicopter, shooting an obviously innocent woman civilian in the back, collecting the ears of enemy dead. It was a meaningless, despicable war, and insane brutality was not an uncommon reaction.
