Posted on 04/05/2003 7:21:17 PM PST by Pokey78
OUR PRESIDENT has spoken.
The military is fighting. And the time for public dissent is over, at least until the initial phase of the assault is done. We owe that much to the quarter-million Americans fighting this battle.
As I write this, I'm thinking of the David Christians of Gulf War II.
David Christian was a Bristol kid, a proud product of Bucks County, when he went off to war. He came out as one of the most highly decorated Vietnam vets. Counterintelligence. Special Ops. Green Beret. The youngest officer in Vietnam at 18; a captain at 20. Retired due to wounds received in combat by 21.
Christian came home having been shot in the back, chest and legs. He was stabbed in the left arm. His right hand was partially paralyzed from shrapnel. He had napalm burns on 40 percent of his body. And he spent six years recovering in Philadelphia hospitals.
Christian was twice nominated for the Congressional Medal of Honor. He was awarded the Combat Infantry Badge for 30 days under enemy fire. He received the Distinguished Service Cross for using a bayonet to knock out six enemy machine guns. He twice received the Silver Star for valor, and he received a Bronze Star. He was awarded the Air Medal for 25 combat assaults in "hot" landing zones - plus seven Purple Hearts!
Perhaps you assume that he returned to a hero's welcome? To some, perhaps, but certainly not to all. There were people who treated David Christian as a pariah. He was ostracized when he tried to rehabilitate his life by going to Rutgers law school.
CLOTHING MASKS many of Christian's disfiguring injuries. When classmates challenged his war record and his deformities, Christian found himself stripping his shirt in a lecture hall to prove his hardship.
"We were fighting to bring home the soldier next to us, in front of us and underneath us in terms of command. Many of us didn't understand the different 'isms' of the world. We were just Americans sent to do a job," Christian told me.
"What you have to realize is that if people in America don't come together and support soldiers during battle, they won't support them when they come home."
Christian's message is that we need to support our troops right now.
"It all started with the indifference when we were over there." The protestors "first hated the war, in which they were not participating, and then they started hating the veteran."
I think of David Christian when I see peaceniks protesting the president's Iraq policy. In Vietnam, Christian was aware of the peace demonstrations at home. He told me that news of the protests demoralized him - and he wasn't alone.
Tony Gudonis, of Lansdowne, was a sergeant in Vietnam from the end of 1968 until 1969. Gudonis told me that he would see the Philadelphia newspapers with regularity and would get a "sinking feeling" when reading about demonstrations.
"The question of right or wrong goes out the window when the first bullet goes by," Gudonis said, echoing a line from "Black Hawk Down."
David Christian agrees about the destructive nature of protests at home on the psyche of the soldier far from home.
"We would see the news and would see the peaceniks, and we wondered how they felt when the boy next to us died in our arms. This guy was dying for them. Without the soldier, they would have no First Amendment rights."
In this Internet and cable era, today's troops will know what is going on at home. That's why we don't need more protest headlines as conflict begins.
To achieve the rank of Captain and having been awarded 7 purple hearts and having been retired from the Army at the age of 21 is just incredible. Capt. Christian is a patriot of the first order!
If anyone knows if he's written an autobiography, please let me know by posting a reply here of FReepmailing me.
Hey, this makes sense! Let's see if it catches on and becomes FR lexicon.
We had a guy from our church spontaneously stand up from his seat last Sunday to announce he'd been called to duty in Iraq, who pleaded with us to support he and the troops because the protests were bothering him...
He then started to weep. Of course there wasn't a dry eye in the place after that...
Think of all the clymers Miller could sink in one show -- Daschle, Kerry, Moore, the anti-war crowd and knock a handful of media houses down a couple notches.
YES. I actually don't like this article for that reason. These anti-American fools have even less of a moral compass than the anti-Vietnam protestors. They are just plain anti-US, in that they are eager to maintain a status-quo that slides towards more anti-US hostility; violent hostility such as 9/11 and the treatment of the POWs we've witnessed.
The press falls for about 1/2 of these protestors' lies. The protestors have no concept of peace in relation to the real world, they are simply "pro-status quo" which in the case of Iraq means pro-WMD, pro-torture, and pro-terrorist. Not remotely peaceful, and every article about them (or for that matter France, Germany, Russia, and China) should blow that myth right out of the water.
Chirac too, who devoted his life to the Iraq nuclear weapons program, can't be called a "peaceful" kind of guy but even the most critical press seems to let him get away with "anti-War" and "pro-Peace" lie. Chirac is 10000 times as anti-Semitic as he is pro-Peace, and such anti-Semitism is an endorsement of terrorism.
The US should take back the word "Peace" because the people truly fighting for Peace are our military, not the sick, mentally diseased "protestors."
Like you might actually be an American.
A search turned up Victor Six.
There is no right to immunity from criticism. If there is, what has happened to the rights of those who disagree with peace protestors? Maybe that's the whole idea of this stereotyped tactic of the left, conflating opposition with oppression so it can eventually be criminalized.
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