John Wayne's "
The Green Berets" depicted the Vietnam War as we wanted it to be: A tough but winnable fight that good men would be proud to have been a part of. About a decade later we started seeing a series of movies (
The Deer Hunter,
Apocalypse Now,
Platoonand
others) that laid bare realities many of us have never come to grips with: Our motives in Vietnam were questionable; The war was mostly not fought by the older seasoned warriors we saw in The Green Berets but was mostly fought by frightened innocent teenagers who, if they made it home alive, were often so traumatized by the war that they had trouble functioning; Some of our soldiers did things that left the good men who fought, and others, with the conflicted emotions of pride in service and sacrifice and feelings of shame over ugly episodes and actions.
Similar internal conflicts can be seen in the Iraq War: We are proud of those who serve and sacrifice and want to show support for them... but we are appalled by what was done in our name, especially at Abu Ghraib. But it seems that even as we are trying to come to grips with our conflicting emotions over Iraq, unresolved internal conflicts from the Vietnam War are rising to the surface. Wounds to our national (and for many of us personal) psyche are still unhealed some 30 years later because we never really dealt with them as we should have. Some say to let the past be the past and not reopen old wounds. I think the wounds are already opened and can only be healed with a proper focus.
Indeed, it is exactly the unexorcised demons from the past that lie behind much of the support for SBVfT. From
WaPo:
But while the group appears to be rooted in Republican politics and big money, several veterans who signed the letter said in interviews yesterday that they are casually into politics and generally are not convinced that Kerry is lying, but they do not like the candidate because of his polarizing speeches in the 1970s.
James Zumwalt, who attended the group's first news conference in May, said he joined the group solely to set the record straight about the allegations of war crimes included in "Tour of Duty," a Douglas Brinkley book about Kerry's Vietnam service. Now, Zumwalt says, "I kind of have mixed feelings" about the tone of the group's attacks. "I would not try to question the awards given to him or his service."
Many of the veterans, scattered across the country, learned about the anti-Kerry group through friends, at reunions for Swift boat vets or on the Internet, and most have limited their involvement to signing the single letter to Kerry. Some say they voted for Al Gore in the last election but are still deeply hurt by what Kerry did when he returned from battle.
I suggested here yesterday that Kerry should stand by his statements that atrocities did occur but that he did not mean to accuse everyone who served in Vietnam. In Vietnam, as in Iraq, most of our troops have served honorably. Just as we needed to know about Abu Ghraib but do not blame it on our soldiers who have served honorably in Iraq, we needed to admit that atrocities happened in Vietnam but we should never have blamed all the soldiers in Vietnam for the atrocities that occurred. Likewise, instead of blaming soldiers who served honorably, we needed to blame the leaders who were responsible for what happened in Vietnam... just as we need to lay most of the blame for Abu Ghraib on the leaders who were responsible instead of (like George W. Bush and his administration) trying to pass the buck to a "few bad apples" way down the chain of command.
And the best way to honor the service and sacrifice of our veterans both then and now is to give them the care and benefits they so richly deserve instead of forcing them into a backdoor draft, cutting their pay, and giving them lousy medical treatment.