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August 29, 2004

The words of John Kerry

John Kerry doesn't want you to read his book, "The New Soldier." Published in 1971, he has not authorized a reprint; used copies can be found on e-bay for more than $700. This is what the Democratic candidate had to say in his book:

We will not quickly join those who march on Veterans' Day waving small flags, calling to memory those thousands who died for the "greater glory of the United States." We will not accept the rhetoric. We will not readily join the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars - in fact, we will find it hard to join anything at all and when we do, we will demand relevancy such as other organizations have recently been unable to provide. We will not take solace from the creation of monuments or the naming of parks after a select few of the thousands of dead Americans and Vietnamese. We will not uphold traditions which decorously memorialize that which was base and grim.

It is from these things the New Soldier is asking America to turn. We are asking America to turn from false glory, hollow victory, fabricated foreign threats, fear which threatens us as a nation, shallow pride which feeds off fear, and mostly from the promises which have proven so deceiving these past ten years.

For many of us there is little to remember but the promises and, most poignantly, the loss of the symbols of those promises -- of John and Robert Kennedy, of Martin Luther King, Jr., of Medgar Evers, of Fred Hampton and Malcolm X, of Allison Krause, Sandy Scheuer, Jeffrey Miller, and William Schroeder from Kent State and Philip Gibbs and James Green from Jackson State; the loss, too, of friends, of Richard Pershing, Peter Johnson, Johnny White, Don Droz, and the other 53,000 Americans who have lost their lives in this degrading and immoral war. The promises of peace candidates who were not peacemakers; of civil rights laws which were not enforced; of educational and medical aid which was downgraded in priority below bombs and guns; of equal opportunity while Mexican-Americans and blacks were drafted in numbers disproportionate to their representation in this country and then made up casualties in even greater disproportion . . .

We were sent to Vietnam to kill Communism. But we found instead that we were killing women and children. We knew the saying "War is hell" and we knew also that wars take their toll in civilian casualties. In Vietnam, though, the "greatest soldiers in the world," better armed and better equipped than the opposition, unleashed the power of the greatest technology in the world against thatch huts and mud paths. In the process we created a nation of refugees, bomb craters, amputees, orphans, widows, and prostitutes, and we gave new meaning to the words of the Roman historian Tacitus: "Where they made a desert they called it peace."

The New Soldier has come back determined to make changes without making the world more unjust in the effort to make it just. We have come back determined that human will can control technology and that there is greater dignity and power in human spirit than we have yet been willing to grant ourselves. In Vietnam we made it particularly easy to deny that spirit. We extended an indifference which has too often been part of this country's history and made it easy for men to deal in abstractions. "Oriental human beings" -- "gooks" -- "body count" -- "Nape" -- "Waste 'em" -- "free-fire zone" -- "lf they're dead, they're VC" -- the abstractions took command from the commanders themselves and we realized too late that we were the prisoners of our own neglect and callowness.

By discussing crimes committed in war, the New Soldier is trying to break through the callowness and end the neglect. Regardless of whether crimes have been committed in other wars or even by the other side in this one, America must understand how our participation in Vietnam and the methods and motives used by American fighting men are part of a continuing national moral standard. As New Soldiers we are seeking to elevate that standard as well as to demonstrate where it has been part of a significant illusion. Individuals are trying, by denying themselves the luxury of forgetting about their acts, to spare others the agony of having to commit them at some time in the future . . .

I myself went into the service with very little awareness of the people in the streets. I accepted then and still accept the idea of service to one's country. But because of all that I saw in Vietnam, the treatment of civilians, the ravaging of their countryside, the needless, useless deaths, the deception and duplicity of our policy, I changed. Traditional assumptions and expectations simply were not enough. I still want to serve my country. I am still willing to pick up arms and defend it -- die for it, if necessary. Now, however, I will not go blindly because my government says that I must go. I will not go unless we can make real our promises of self-determination and justice at home. I will not go unless the threat is a real one and we all know it to be so. I will not go unless the people of this country decide for themselves that we must all of us go.

J.K.

Hard to believe some vets don't want him to be the Commander in Chief.

Of course, it's also hard to believe that a man who wrote, "We will not quickly join those who march on Veterans' Day waving small flags, calling to memory those thousands who died for the 'greater glory of the United States.' We will not accept the rhetoric. We will not readily join the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars," has the stones to speak at the VFW and American Legion and ask for their support, proclaiming himself "one of them."

Wretched.

Posted by Mike Lief at August 29, 2004 12:17 AM

Comments

Wow! I'm not sure what planet you're from. These men weren't trying to disparage the USA! They were trying to tell us all that patriotic slogans and doubletalk were not enough to help us regain our honor as a nation. The only way we can do that is to accept the mistakes we made in Vietnam and resolve to improve. These are men who wanted to be part of something that had real honor -- not the dimestore kind that civilians wave around on Veterans Day and then throw away the same afternoon.

Maybe you'd better read the stuff you post before you comment on it. It would be far less embarassing.

Posted by: R. A. Williams at September 9, 2004 09:31 PM

Riiiiight.

"These are men who wanted to be part of something that had real honor -- not the dimestore kind that civilians wave around on Veterans Day and then throw away the same afternoon."

Kinda like when Kerry threw away his -- er -- someone else's medals?

These maroons, the "New Soldiers," were consumed with a contempt for both the United States and the men fighting in Vietnam. Or was the baseless accusation parroted by Kerry on the floor of the U.S. Senate simply a misunderstood, nuanced show of support for our fighting men?

"Jenjis" Khan. Cripes.

Your claim that these men wanted to be part of something of honor, to reclaim our honor as a nation is, quite frankly, ludicrous.

The New Soldiers never had the first idea of what honor is.

The POWs who withstood torture at the hands of their North Vietnamese captors, refusing to say that GIs were war criminals, they understood the meaning of honor.

"Mistakes we made in Vietnam"? The only mistakes we made were allowing the efforts of the Winter Soldiers to undermine our defense of the South Vietnamese people. The U.S. was never at risk of losing the war. Gen. Giap said that the Tet Offensive effectively destroyed the North Vietnamese Army.

Giap also attributed the North's victory to the American anti-war movement.

Honor? Vietnam was the right war. At the right time.

The thousands of Vietnamese who died trying to escape to freedom after the North invaded; the hundreds of thousands who braved the dangerous voyage in leaky boats, the attacks of pirates; years in refugee camps; all to flee the socialist paradise of Vietnam and seek refuge in America, home of the savages who raped and slaughtered and pillaged their former homeland in a manner reminiscent of "Jenjis Khan."

Sorry, pal. I'm not the one who should be embarassed.

But thanks for visiting and commenting.

Posted by: Mike Lief at September 9, 2004 11:21 PM