The Smearboat hits the fan -- Get ready to revisit 1971!!!

[Sparkly]

Now it's going to get down to what it was always about: 1971.

It's about a war America had come to hate, a peace movement and a counterculture youth movement, all coinciding.

It's about boys coming home and finding they didn't get the hero's welcome their fathers had from WWII. The country's heart wasn't in it -- there was My Lai, Woodstock, and a whole lot of protests.

It's difficult to accept that you've risked your life, seen comrades killed and wounded, and suffered immense pain for what you thought was "defense of your country," only to find it was a prolonged mistake. It's even worse to realize that the country you thought you were fighting for considers you evil for your complicity in war.

One slogan asked, "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" The soldiers "came" to the war, and thus they were considered a part of the government's machine, willing pawns, violent killers. They even looked uncool, with their short haircuts.

The anger had to be overwhelming. For some, there was no accepting the truth of the war's futility. They'd hung their honor on the hook of American pride. Protestors -- indeed, truth-tellers -- were interfering with all the proud fantasies they had left, and they couldn't let go. Fresh from combat, smarting from insults, looking for a fight to defend themselves, they saw John Kerry -- a good-looking man with President Kennedy's initials, a Yale education, a strong following, and enormous potential -- protesting the war they'd already hung their honor upon.

John Kerry, Yale graduate and decorated hero, returned and decided to join Vietnam Veterans Against the War. His testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was powerful. Senators lauded him, VVAW followed him, the press covered him. He was a natural leader in war, and he was a natural leader against the war.

His statement was about ending the war, saving any more men from dying for a mistake, and holding the government accountable. Early in the statement, he recounted what soldiers had revealed in Winter Soldiers meeting in Detroit, speaking for a group that had fought for such representation before the Senate.

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command....

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

This is what men like John O'Neill seized upon. It's all they chose to hear, it's all they still choose to hear. What explains their skewed perspective on Kerry's pro-soldier, anti-government efforts and testimony; how can they see it as "spitting on fellow veterans?" Jealousy. Anger. Revenge. Bitterness. Shame. Remorse. Guilt. Fury. And scapegoating: somebody must be responsible for this nasty reception home, and it can't be Nixon.

When Nixon recruited John O'Neill as his own answer to John Kerry, O'Neill came on like a fast-talking mass of distortions, with notebooks of talking points, accusations, "facts" and figures. But even at the height of that attempt to smear John Kerry, nobody claimed his actions in Vietnam were short of heroic. Not Nixon, not O'Neill, not one member of the swiftboat veterans group now funded by Republicans. Why not?

Because it was no more true then than it is now.

The election of John Kerry could be a healing point in our history, especially for the generation of baby-boomers who experienced the Vietnam war. We've seen a coming together of Wesley Clark and George McGovern, of Bill Clinton and Max Cleland and Michael Moore -- people with a range of decisions and experiences at that time, willing to heal the divisions and move forward. But the Bush campaign is tearing new divisions, misleading a new generation with distortions, lies, vitriol and disgraceful invocations and manipulations of fear, pride, and patriotism.

Get ready to revisit 1971, because distortions about what John Kerry was standing for then are about to get dirtier than ever, no matter the cost to the country. The shame of that alone is enough reason to vote this administration out of office.

[DenverDem]

1. John Kerry's true heroism BEGAN when he RETURNED from Viet Nam.

His courageous challenge of the morality of that war was America loving PATRIOTISM.

Why do the SBV for Revenge HATE AMERICA?

[DemBones DemBones]

3. I don't think they hate America, I think they hate us.

I'm sure they would hate me because I opposed the war in Viet Nam. But the guys in VVAW (and I knew some of them, good guys) were hated even more because they'd been there and then told the truth that it was a dirty, rotten little war that we had no business fighting. This hatred today, this polarization of our country, is indeed a revisit of those days.

[DaveinMD]

2. his heroism

didn't begin when he returned. It continued. His service in the war was heroic, as was his courage in speaking out to end the war sooner. He is a true American hero. I love Kerry as much as I hate Bush.

[kestrel91316]

4. Words cannot express how very proud I am of this man...............n/t