Clearly, Kerry meant to say something like “blacks have taken the highest percentage of casualties” rather than “blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties”. The first sentence could still be a little ambiguous but would more obviously mean that if you look at the percentage of different racial or ethnic groups that have been killed (or injured?), it is highest for blacks.
So, Kerry made a small misstatement over 30 years ago…Stop the presses!
(By the way, if you watch the movie “Going Upriver” you will hear that Kerry had a lot on his mind that day…It is not surprising he’d make a misstatement. He was one of the main coordinators of the entire protest of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and he was literally running around doing other stuff until a few minutes before the meeting. Besides which, I think it was only earlier that week…maybe even the day before…that he found out he was going to testify at all. He was literally picked out by one of the sympathetic senators [Fulbright(?)] when that Senator went down to the Mall and met with the protest leaders because the Senator was particularly impressed by Kerry and thought he would be the best spokesperson for the cause.)
So, just to get a gauge of how you feel here, do you feel that the soldier who reported the Abu Ghraib prison abuse, or those who were subsequently disturbed by it, were wrong because they were holding the U.S. to a higher standard than “the enemy”? After all, the enemy is kidnapping people and chopping their heads off (although I think this particular gruesome tactic started after Abu Ghraib).
I don’t believe the soldier was wrong to report it. I am glad he did.
I believe it is wrong of the press and those who oppose the war on other grounds to lavish such attention upon it, and ignore the thousands of other stories of American acts of generosity and selflessness to the Iraqi people. I will make it clear that I am speaking as a father whose son is on his second tour there. My son has extraordinary stories to tell of American goodness and the depravity of the Saddam regime and its successors (he was in the battle of Najaf, and told me of the murders committed by Sadr militia) Yet, when he was speaking once publicly about his service when he was home between his two deployments, a person whom I know as a 60’s leftist accused my son of being a cold blooded killer. That is the inheritance from Vietnam.
Those who oppose the war, and I believe they have good reasons (I certainly have doubts), will do anything they can to disparage American efforts there.
American success there does not fit the agenda of those who oppose the war, or oppose Bush. I understand that – if you want to defeat Bush, you have to describe the war as going badly, and the American military making mistakes. If you oppose the war, you have do the same thing.
Yeah…Well, I agree that it is really too bad that the brave men and women in uniform have to take the blame for piss-poor policy decisions. And, I don’t think there is any way in which Kerry was trying to put the blame on the Vietnam soldiers themselves.
Thanks, I really appreciate that. It is a tough time. I never thought I would have a son in war, twice now.
I hope we succeed there. Naive or not, they (the Marines in my son’s unit) believe in what they are doing and they believe in the Iraqi people – that they deserve a chance to have least a little of what we have here, and that if we stay the course with them, we can help them achieve it. My son has fought alongside Iraqis. He has grown to really admire them and want the best for them and their children.
I disagree with the first statement. Kerry, (well or poorly) held the U.S. up to the standard that the U.S. claimed for itself. In the early years of the U.S. involvement, much was made of the poisoned traps used by the “bad guys” and later in the war we heard a lot about the terrible way that “they” were “using children” as weapons. There was a clear effort to depict the Viet Cong and the North as failing to measure up to our standards of humanity. Kerry’s flawed testimony was intended to offset our own claims of purity and goodness. A constant theme of the VVAW was not that the U.S. was sending thugs and murderers to Vietnam, but that the hypocrisy of the government and the horrors of the situation were beginning to erode the human values of the troops who had been stationed there.
I also disagree with the second statement. The consistent testimony that has come out in opposition to the war has actually defended the U.S. military, portraying the decisions to invade with too few troops, to rely on civilian contractors for resupply operations, and to ignore the human rights of prisoners as having been the direct results of the civilian DoD interference with planning, setting objectives, and micro-managing the situation. It is neither necessary nor fruitful to blame the U.S. military for the problems that are occurring in Iraq.
The comments of the individual who accused your son of being a cold-blooded killer represent one mindset that can certainly be discovered among the U.S. population, but it is hardly the prevalent feeling among people who oppose this war, nor was it, in my experience the attitude expressed by the VVAW 30 years ago. (Even people whom I knew to deride soldiers during Vietnam have generally come to recognize that their scorn was misplaced.)