Trashing Kerry on Vietnam: what are they thinking?

Don't get me wrong for a second.  I support Kerry and I'm glad to see the Republicans doing this.  As I've said before, if they want to compare Kerry's record on either fighting or opposing the Vietnam War to that of the Republican Party candidate, I say: Brang it on!

House GOP Critical of Kerry's '71 Actions Washington Post 04/23/04

Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Tex.) began the attack by denouncing the Massachusetts senator on the 33rd anniversary of his testimony before a Senate panel in which he sharply criticized the conduct of some U.S. troops in Vietnam. Kerry, a decorated Navy officer in Vietnam, became a prominent antiwar spokesman after his discharge.

Johnson, who spent seven years as a North Vietnamese prisoner of war, said the young Kerry "blasted our nation, chastised our troops and hurt our morale. . . . What he did was nothing short of aiding and abetting the enemy." Comparing Kerry to former antiwar activist Jane Fonda, Johnson said: "He's called Hanoi John."

The presiding officer, Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), briefly cautioned members not to disparage senators by name, but other Republicans poured it on. Rep. John Kline (Minn.) said Kerry's service in the war "does not excuse his joining ranks with Jane Fonda and others in speaking ill of our troops or their service, then or now." Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (Calif.), whose plane was shot down over North Vietnam, said Kerry's 1971 remarks angered Cunningham and his comrades at the time. "We do not need a Jane Fonda as commander in chief," he said.

Are they all tripping on Oxycontin or something?  Billmon (whose blog tipped me off to this article) thinks it's something other than chemicals.  "These guys are like rabid dogs, and they don't need any particular excuse to foam at the mouth."  I think he was disgusted by it, though.  My first hint was that he titled his post, "The Fascists Have a Field Day."  He's been on a bit of a 1930s-romantic theme lately.

But as long as the Democrats are willing to do the obvious and shove this back in their faces, there could be other benefits to this nonsense than helping get Kerry elected President.

One relates to the topic of my last post.  The more the Republicans remind us of Kerry's antiwar activism of three decades ago, the more holes they will shoot in their own mythical bogeyman image of antiwar protesters.  And as we start to hear more and more Iraq War veterans speak out against the war and the Bush Administration's disastrous war policies, the press will be tempted to look among antiwar veterans for "the John Kerry of 2034."

Since the drooling-at-the-mouth faction among the Reps are beating this particular war drum, I think another quote or two from Jerry Lembcke's The Spitting Image (1998) would be entirely appropriate.  Did the antiwar movement and activists like Kerry demean or insult Vietnam veterans or soldiers in uniform? Lembcke:

Not only is there no evidence that these acts of hostility against veterans [like spitting on them or calling them "baby killers" as the war-lovers' mythology claims] ever occurred, there is no evidence that anyone at the time thought they were occurring.  A search of poll results published by the New York Times, the Gallup Organization, and the American Public Opinion Quarterly between 1968 and 1974 revealed that relations between the two groups was ... not a question on America's mind.  Further searches of an on-line collection of polls by the Roper Center for Public Opinion and of some key secondary sources, such as John Mueller's War, Presidents and Public Opinion (1973) revealed that when the last U.S. troops were withdrawn from Vietnam in 1973 the question of the anti-war movement's behavior toward veterans was simply not being asked.  Nor was there any evidence at the time that Vietnam veterans perceived the anti-war movement as hostile to them or their interests.  To the contrary, a U.S. Senate study, based on data collected in August 1971 [the year Rep Cunningham reference] by Harris Associates, found that 75 percent of Vietnam-era veterans polled disagreed with the statement, "Those people at home who opposed the Vietnam war often blame veterans for our involvement there."  Ninety-nine percent of the veterans polled described their reception by close friends and family as friendly, while 94 percent said their reception by people their own age who had not served in the armed forces was friendly.  Only 3 percent of returning veterans described their reception as "not at all friendly" (U.S. Senate 1972, ["A Study of the Problems Facing Vietnam Era Veterans on Their Readjustment to Civilian Life"] 13, 19).

One interesting feature on which Lembcke reports is "the scant evidence of organized pro-war veteran sentiment."  He writes:

I once saw a reference in a letter to a North Carolina group called "B-52s for Peace" and, in 1972, something called "Vietnam Veterans for Nixon" made a brief appearance.  Almost no one remembers the latter and those who do, recall it as a political front with no members set up by Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President [CREEP, as it was widely known at the time].  Except for one letter in the New York Times I found no record of its existence[.]

But we have a present-day link to the Nixon-Agnew Administration's efforts to discredit antiwar veterans like John Kerry in the person of John O'Neill, a Vietnam veteran who has been eager to criticize Kerry.  O'Neill's been at it for a while, as Joe Conason describes in The GOP's not-so-impartial hit man Salon.com 04/23/04.  Chuck Colson, the Nixon aide whose immortal quote was that he would walk over his own grandmother to get Nixon re-elected, picked out O'Neill "as a perfect foil to Kerry, whom Nixon and his aides feared as a decorated, articulate and reasonable opponent of the war and their regime," as Conason says.

Indeed, O'Neill was perfect -- a crewcut officer who had served on the same Navy swift boat that Kerry had commanded, although their stints in the Mekong Delta didn't overlap. In June 1971, Colson brought O'Neill up to Washington for an Oval Office audience with Nixon. His impressions live on in a memo filed later:

"O'Neill went out charging like a tiger, has agreed that he will appear anytime, anywhere that we program him and was last seen walking up West Executive Avenue mumbling to himself that he had just been with the most magnificent man he had ever met in his life."

Now O'Neill has emerged from those decades of silence, roaring denunciations of the man who will become the Democratic nominee for president this summer. "I saw some war heroes," he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday. "John Kerry is not a war hero."

To establish his nonpartisan credentials, O'Neill assured the CNN anchor that he was "never contacted" by the Bush-Cheney campaign. What he didn't mention, however, is that his law firm boasts long-standing and powerful connections with the Bush White House.

Conason desribes the latter in some detail.

While we're on the subject, does criticizing the war itself or the particular policies being followed that are having obviously disastrous results, as in Iraq right now, damage the morale of the troops or constitute "nothing short of aiding and abetting the enemy," as that sleazy fool Congressman Sam Johnson from Texas said of Kerry above?

If war is like a football game, the cheers of the fans in the stands may have some effect on the performance of the teams.  But war is not a football game.

It's worth noting another observation of Chris Hedges in that connection from War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), drawing on his own long experience as a war correspondent:

The myth of war rarely endures for those who experience combat.  War is messy, confusing, sullied by raw brutality and an elephantine fear that grabs us like a massive bouncer who comes up from behind.  Soldiers in the moments before real battles, weep, vomit, and write last letters home, although these are done more as a precaution than from belief.  All are nearly paralyzed with fright.  There is a morbid silence that grips a battlefield in the final moments before the shooting starts, one that sets the back of my own head pounding in pain, wipes away all appetite, and makes my fingers tremble as I ready myself to go forward against logic.  You do not think of home or family, for to do so is to be ovecome by a wave of nostalgia and emotion that can impair your ability to survive.  One thinks, so far as it is possible, of cleaning weapons, of readying for the business of killing.  No one ever charges into battle for God and country.

"Just remember," a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel told me as he strapped his pistol belt under his arm before we crossed into Kuwait [in the Gulf War of 1991], "that none of these boys is fighting for home, for the flag, for all that crap the politicians feed the public.  They are fighting for each other, just for each other."

There's little actual evidence that politicians lying about the reason for war, generals pumping out endless phony happy talk to the press, or veterans and non-veterans speaking out against the war has any direct impact on the performance of troops under fire.

Not that the Oxycontin crowd has ever needed evidence to sling their sleaze.