Forget your salad days, John Kerry.

[plazul]

The swift boat story is still at the top of the fold and I have to agree with the conservatives on one thing: You made Vietnam an issue, John Kerry. You thought that if you juxtaposed your service, your silver and bronze stars, against George Bush's avoidance of combat you would win on the character issue. Thanks to you, the race has turned into a character assassination contest and both sides are losing.

When are we going to get over Viet Nam and leave behind all the war stories, and resentments, and the mythology about what happened to our returning soldiers? Sure, there were some overblown incidents involving people spitting on service men and calling them baby killers but most soldiers returned home without encountering any hostility. They adjusted and moved on with their lives.

Last night on local radio I heard an interview with a Viet Nam veteran who actually started crying about John Kerry's "treason" towards his fellow veterans and he went into the usual routine about being spat on when he came home from Viet Nam. Jesus God, you'd think America would have run out of spit the way some of these vets tell it and I'm sick of the sniveling.

My father saw more men killed in one day on Tawawa in World War II than we've lost so far in Iraq. He was decorated for bravery under fire and received two purple hearts but he and his generation didn't come home and whine about it for the rest of their lives. Nor did they take every opportunity to talk about their war medals. In another post, I mentioned that I was in my thirties before I even knew my father was a war hero and my friends say that their fathers never talked about the war either. At least not ad nauseum.

I don't think that Kerry's war record is an indication of how he will lead as president. And I don't give a rip that Bush avoided combat. I just think it's a shame that while men are dying in Iraq their sacrifice has to be clouded by a crazy debate about who did what in a war that ended decades ago.

I wonder if the so called swing voters are as sick of the war stories as I am. They could very well reject Kerry's silver star campaign and send him packing. The way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised.

[Warsai]

The anger of the entire campaign being wasted on Kerry's service is certainly generating a lot of threads.

Nothing good is coming out of this whole whether-Kerry-deserved-three-purple -hearts thing. People are either fed up with it becoming the central issue or people are sad (the Vietnam veterans) that a terrible event 30 years ago is being brought up today.

[plazul]

Yeah, the whole thing has really got me down. I wish John Edwards or Dean had been nominated. I'll vote for Kerry but not with gusto.

[anastrophe]

i don't think it's necessarily accurate/reasonable to compare veterans of world war II with veterans of viet nam. the times were dramatically different, the mood of the country was dramatically different, the nature of the conflict was dramatically different.

i believe the experience of conflict was likely much the same, but the world that veterans came back to from those conflicts were completely different. i think just as many veterans of world war II suffered post traumatic stress - my dad among them - but in those times, you simply did not talk about it, you bottle it up. as my father did for fifty years, before alzheimers slowly opened back up the memories, and he suffered terribly for several years from that. after viet nam, it was the middle of the seventies - get in touch with yourself, express yourself, share your pain - these were expected. the problem was, when they did, there was great disdain for them, because of the great disdain for the war.

i don't think viet nam vets 'whine' about their experiences. a great many *were* treated like crap after the war. john kerry's testimony to congress after the war could easily have been seen as a betrayal - treason if you will, though that's not really accurate.

i'm rambling again. i definitely think this current brouhaha needs to fall to page 16, and fast, otherwise, well, the voters may *stay home* in droves.

[plazul]

Sorry, I'm going to stand my ground on the whining thing. I have a number of friends who served in Viet Nam, some as officers, and some as draftees, and they've all been to the wall to pay there respects and remember. But they moved on when they got home from the war and I don't think they like like the fishing for sympathy any more than I do. What do some of these professional combat vets want from us? Okay, we're sorry you were hurt, and we're sorry you had to go through hell, but that was 30 years ago. Get over it. And nothing pisses me off more than guys who served during the Viet Nam era, never saw combat, and go around telling bogus war stories. I've met a few of those types. Did you know that you can order war medals on the Internet? Just like the real thing. How pathetic.

You're right about WW II vets coming home with PTSD. According to my aunts, my dad had it. As a corpsman, he had to shoot himself up with morphine just so he'd be steady enough to treat the men that were falling all around him and getting their heads and limbs blown off. And he had to mop up the wounded while he was suffering from malaria. Nothing that happened in Viet Nam can compare to the major battles of WW II and they didn't have medi-vac choppers and modern field hospitals back then.

I lived in Marin County during the Seventies and I saw the worst of the anti war movement first hand. There were some violent protests in the City and Berkley but in every day home town America Viet Nam was out of sight, out of mind. In my home town of Auburn California guys would come home and people would say, "Hey, where have you been dude?"

They were oblivious of what was really going on except for the body count on the nightly news. Sadly, most of the young people I knew didn't watch the news and there wasn't anything like the coverage we get now from Iraq via satellite with inbedded reporters.

I know some guys got dissed at the airport or on the street when they came back but most of the soldiers I knew were out of uniform in a hot second when they arrived home and you wouldn't have known they had been there. I never knew anybody who was spat on or attacked and I don't know anybody who ever saw that kind of behavior. Again, I know it happened but to tell you the truth I question the veracity of vets who say it happened *all the time*.

All I know is that at some point we went from bad mouthing the war to glorifying it. I think it started with movies like Rambo and then, lo and behold, all of a sudden there were vets coming out of the woodwork telling combat stories and acting crazy.

I feel for the men who are languishing in VA hospitals and the combat vets who had breakdowns and never recovered. I'm grateful for the service of all of them but I don't want where you were or what you did during Viet Nam to be a litmus test for the Presidency. Even John McCain wants us to put that dirty war behind us once and for all.

[anastrophe]

on that last, i am in complete agreement.