Three weeks ago, according to a late-Friday-night-hope-no-one-notices Associated Press story, 633 former soldiers had so-far refused to return to uniform for assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
After "talk" that all of them would be charged AWOL, the number's now up over 800.
Great quote, especially for thugs at AP:
Refusing to report for duty normally would lead to AWOL charges, but the Army is going out of its way to resolve these cases as quietly as possible.
Here's the link to the AP article on NYT (reg req).
And here's the dilemma. Below.
It's the same dilemma John Kerry faced back in the 1970's.
Those 800+ refuseniks are doing the right thing, the heroic thing, the morally correct thing in refusing to return to duty and ship out for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Moreover, what they are doing gives power to the idea that the war is wrong, to the idea that we ought to be working as hard as we can to rectify that wrong before the American idea is irreparably disgraced.
True, it's likely some of them are doing the ass-saving thing, but we human beings have laws and regulations and a common sense of fairness that all say they've served their commitment honorably and they deserve our respect and our gratitude for having done so.
The dilemma
In my opinion Kerry's greatest heroism was exactly what has drawn the pseudo-ire of the Swiftaholics. The part of John Kerry's past that most clearly illustrates why (a) he deserves to be the next President, (b) we need him to be the next President and (c) why hardly anything else, past or present, matters more, was the work he did after he returned from Vietnam.
I was a freshman at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Fla., when National Guardsmen opened fire on students at Kent State University. Enamored of one "Radical Jack," I joined SDS, marched in candlelight parades, vandalized the ROTC building and peed in the back seat of the dormitory RA's car the night before his big ROTC ball. Hey, I was 18.
But for me and most of my friends, a system which drafted us for duty in Vietnam, for reasons wholly unconvincing, was a world turned upside down. Rules didn't seem to matter much.
They mattered for John Kerry. When he came home from the war he worked inside the system, publicly, boldly, and willfully. During a time not so far away from the assassination of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, and speaking out against the sort of people who all own guns, John Kerry was articulate and, in several ways, he so capably addressed the issues that for me and most of my friends, it was like God talking.
It was something like the feeling I got when I saw Jon Stewart lambaste Tucker Butt-Boy Carlson the other night, but it was way more profound, much more like the Watergate investigations, it was deep-in-the-bones important.
He was speaking the truth then. He was using his voice, and his words, to bring justice to a place where justice simply wasn't, and it was pretty electric. He made us all feel like maybe the world wasn't going to end after all, that maybe everything was going to turn out all right.
My friends and I didn't listen to him as much as we might have then, we were a bit more radical. Now that I'm a wise old fart, however, my admiration for Kerry is deep. His way was a lot more powerful than ours.
Even so, the fact that there were people in the world able and willing to speak the truth to evil, people like John Kerry, was reassuring. Newscasts and newspaper reports portrayed him as an anomaly, a flash-in-the-pan, an opportunist.
But there were hundreds of us who heard his words and knew then he was a hero, and that the media was mostly bullshit. Some things haven't changed except in degree.
The coolest guy I ever knew was a Vietnam vet wracked with guilt over what he'd seen and done over there. He joined Vietnam Veteran Against the War (VVAW) as a way to redeem himself, he got pretty fanatic about it and I think it probably saved him.
If 800 former soldiers say no way to service in Iraq and Afghanistan, it means some men and women who are there now will have a tougher time. Those soldiers who refused the suicide "convoy" the other day did the same thing, there were other soldiers elsewhere who were stressed by their refusal. We Americans can accept on our own souls the sin of forcing them to make those decisions, but that doesn't relieve them of the pain of having done so.
Kerry was right back then, and he's right now. How can you ask someone to be the last to die for a lie?
Any thoughts?