I periodically get comments on my blog from an anti-Kerry conservative. (I hesitate to call him a "freeper" or "wingnut" or some other pejorative because this one at least doesn't use fake email addresses like "blowme@fuckyou.com" and the like.) His most recent comment: "Just finished watching 'Stolen Honor'... Kerry should be ashamed of himself."
I of course suggested he should watch Going Upriver, but this also got me thinking, and I posted an essay that I thought I'd also share with any Kosmopolitans who may care to read it...
I'm reminded from time to time of the play by Henrik Ibsen,
An Enemy of the People. Usually, I'm reminded by some current event that harkens to the play's "kill the messenger" theme.
In the play, a doctor in a small town, a town famous for its hot springs that brings in tourists from all around, discovers that the springs may be harboring a bacteria that is making people sick. Being a public minded person, a man with a conscious, he tries to press the town leaders to clean up the springs.
But the town leaders, rather than see the urgency of cleaning up the bacteria, or at least stopping people from using the therapeutic baths, instead decide to try to silence the doctor. The town's economy would collapse without the tourism that the hot springs bring in, and if they just keep the little matter of the toxic bacteria silent, no one will be the wiser.
Eventually, the doctor is labelled an "enemy of the people," and he and his torn-apart family are all but driven out of town. Rather than saving the town he loves, he is made a pariah.
I bring this up because I think, in a small way, this is allegorical to the divide between those who admire John Kerry for what he did after he came home from Vietnam, and those who consider him a traitor.
I can understand, I guess, that some Vietnam vets may feel this way. Like the townspeople who depend on the tainted springs for their very survival, what soldier wouldn't want to hold on to the feeling, the illusion, that he is serving in a just and righteous cause? And what is a vet to think when he is told, by parties whom he may trust and respect, that the messenger in this case, the one bringing the news he doesn't want to hear, is acting against his interests, even, perhaps, is collaborating with his enemy?
John Kerry was one of thousands of warriors who served in Vietnam, saw the horrors firsthand, understood the reality, and tried to pull the veil away from the eyes of the American people. The members of Vietnam Vets Against the War didn't come home to betray their brothers-in-arms. They came back to try to save them. To save innocent Vietnamese. To warn their fellow citizens of the toxic bacteria that was the war plans of Johnson and MacNamara, Nixon and Kissinger. To ask these men, how dare they "ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
As I said, I understand if other Vietnam vets are angry. But their anger is being directed at the wrong people. Don't call the messenger a traitor. John Kerry's efforts to do right didn't prolong that war. The activities of the VVAW didn't cause POWs to be tortured.
There is no room here to fully discuss the long history of the conflict in Vietnam, a conflict which really started not long after World War II (if not before - the people of Vietnam have seen their homeland occupied by outsiders many, many times over the centuries). One of the best histories is A Bright Shining Lie, by Neil Sheehan. A Rumor of War, by Philip Caputo, gives a firsthand telling of a soldier's eventual disillusionment. There are many others.
I strongly recommend that any of Kerry's critics, those who weren't there, or who perhaps weren't even alive during the Vietnam War, do some research. Those vets who served there, though I believe they are wrong, have at least earned the right to feel the way they do.
You, my young friends, have not.