This second swift boat veterans ad, the one about Kerry’s anti-war testimony after his service, is making me crazy. The anti-Kerry crew are harboring a thirty year grudge against the man they believe betrayed them by speaking the truth about the war in Vietnam. But why is truth betrayal? Let’s take a second to recall what he said when testifying to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations in 1971:
They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
This, they say, is unpatriotic, an affront to the soldiers. In 1971, John O’Neill pointed at John Kerry on the Dick Cavett show and said, "this man has attempted the murder of the reputations of 2.5 million of us [servicemen], including the 55,000 dead in Vietnam." Today, O'Neill and other anti-Kerry swifties are being quoted daily saying how much Kerry’s remarks hurt them.*
Which would maybe be valid complaint — if it weren’t that everything John Kerry said was true for chrissakes. You can’t cry foul when the criticism is fair. Kerry did not say, “all soldiers are bloodthirsty demons”; he said that for some soldiers, the war was corrupting their souls and taking their lives unfairly, and with that famously eloquent line towards the end, he made a patriotic plea for the country’s colossal mistake to end. The anti-Kerry forces have drilled down into the details of the Winter Soldier Investigation, which is the testimony Kerry cited at the hearing, trying to impugn the credibility of some of those soldiers’ specific comments. But who cares? It’s not like those didn’t happen — it happened. Everyone knows it. My Lai was already front page news in 1971. And as for today — how could any one try to dispute the war crimes committed by some American forces in Vietnam? It’s a pathology of self-delusion that they’d need a whole new chapter in the DSM-IV to describe.
And if we didn’t already have proof enough, why hasn’t the entire country been re-reading the Toledo Blade’s excellent investigative report into the activities of the Tiger Force unit in Vietnam? The series describes how a culture of atrocity was cultivated among some soldiers in Vietnam. The only place I saw reference to the series in connection with the Swift Vets’ hallucinatory memory of Vietnam was in the Jerusalem Post, where they always read our news more closely than we do. The series, which barely got play when it came out, managed to win the Pulitzer, but that didn’t seem to help get it noticed again when the question of Vietnam war crimes became front-page news again.
I urge everyone to check it out.
The whole discussion gets at a sinister problem infecting the language of this election, which revolves around the question of what's more important: truth or loyalty? Of course, the Swifties for Truth are uninterested in truth; their declared highest value is loyalty — loyalty to your brothers-in-arms, to your country, right or wrong, and so on. This is what John O’Neill & Co. continued on to say on the Dick Cavett show, and it’s become the boilerplate of their crusade against Kerry today. In their view, any criticism, even truthful and moral, is somehow disloyal. But isn’t it the opposite? Isn’t the greatest loyalty one that is unshakable even when calling your country’s judgment into question? Isn’t it more loyal to want your country to correct it’s errors and right itself?
It is not patriotic to be a blind follower. O'Neill said that he’s been taught to support the army no matter the circumstances; that criticizing them breaks an unspoken military ethic. That’s what the Swift Vets call patriotism — to not think for yourself; to subjugate your entire identity to a higher authority; to become a reflexive part of some larger apparatus; to become, in essence, less human?
That’s O’Neill’s understanding of duty to the patrie if you take it at face value. And they have a name for that. It’s called statism, and it’s a failed political philosophy pioneered by one Benito Mussolini and improved upon by a fella named Adolph Hitler. O’Neill is basically saying that a soldier should never question orders, even if those orders entail war crimes or emanate from a government making a grievous error. It sounds familiar, because it's what the Nazis said at Nuremburg — “we were only following orders.”
Immoral orders, of course, don't have to be followed. That's called morality, an endowment that comes with our human agency. It seems the vets should be more pissed off at Bob McNamara and the government that sent them there, rather than the guy who had the temerity to say what even McNamara has now admitted: that the war was a mistake?
Which is what opponents of today’s war in Iraq are trying to avoid. Do we really want another Commander-in-Chief who won't try to correct an obvious error? Holding a steady course is only a valuable characteristic if the captain knows where he’s going. Not so for the Swift Vets. They don’t mind that our little Ahab from Texas has lashed himself to the helm and is muttering to himself about Iraq links to Al Qaeda while taking us straight into a goddamn gale. Can’t mutiny, the false patriots say, he’s the captain. But without a little mutiny, we're headed for Davy Jones' Locker.
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* What kind of soldier is it, anyway, who would be "hurt" by senate testimony? A guy who spent who knows how long crawling around in the mud dodging punji sticks is now so thin-skinned that a few honest words would scar them for three decades? It doesn't hurt him that cynical bureaucrats put him near those punji sticks? Feh.