Posted on 06/02/2004 9:03:09 AM PDT by Bob J
I moved away from Columbine Knolls many years ago and seldom return since everyone else did the same thing. I get in touch with Pete once in a while and it won’t surprise some of you but he certainly isn’t a liberal. He grew up the day of the funeral in many ways. Many years after moving away from Colorado I picked my wife up from work at the ammo plant nearby and she asked me a strange question. “Who was that guy you used to know who was the top guy in Vietnam?”
“Why?”
“The guy I work for was talking all day about his experiences in Vietnam. He was telling me about this guy who used to pull all of the locals together and get them motivated and infiltrating the Communists. He was a really tough guy. He knew how to motivate people and how to find all of the ones he needed to do the job. He said this guy was a real hero.”
Needless to say the guy was already sounding pretty familiar to me. So I told her what his name was. The next night she got into the car and said he was the one that he had been talking about. Colonel Dunn had indeed been talking about General Vann. He told her stories about how he was absolutely destroying the Communists in Vietnam in spite of the best efforts of others to stop him. He never discussed the strange coincidences regarding the usual demise of those he managed to gather together. He didn’t have to however. I remembered on my own. I remembered something else too.
A few years after that Sheehan finished “A Bright and Shining Lie”. It was a book I never bothered to read because I knew he was one of those who didn’t see the big picture. I also knew about one thing he wasn’t going to put in that book for certain. Because of that I had no use for him or his book. He spent a lot of time writing about the dark side of John Vann and how that affected him and his view.
I already had a pretty good idea what his view was without bothering with reading the book, especially since he sold the rights to the movie to Hanoi Jane and her then husband, Ted Turner. I did see the movie when it was in the cheapo bin at one of the local stores. It paints the appropriate image of the type of soldier I always read he was when I happened across commentaries about General Vann. It showed the Vietnamese soldiers letting the enemy snipers get away and him grabbing a rifle and a chopper pilot and hunting them down. Now that’s a real soldier. The movie also showed the corruption in the government as well the Vietnamese military.
It also shows something happening that I know didn’t happen, unless it was an act for public consumption and a lot earlier. I don’t know if it was in the book but it was in the movie. It showed Daniel Elsberg basically calling General Vann a sellout and a bunch of other things. It shows Elsberg angry with him as they are in the airbase in Vietnam just before he died. Unfortunately Elsberg had already left Vietnam one year earlier. Why would a liberal bother with the facts though, they get in the way so much. They’re so darn thorny.
To me as I watched the movie I was amazed how they could intermix fact and fiction so seamlessly. I have to admit that I’m as impressed as I am disgusted. I get that same feeling when I see Kerry touted as a war hero. I know what a hero is, and Kerry isn’t one. He is a spin master reinventing himself like some changeling in a fantasy novel. I wonder if he will be able to reinvent himself when Hillary and company move in to destroy him politically so she won’t have to run against an incumbent Democrat in 2008. I suspect that will be happening pretty soon.
Next week the conclusion…
R.A. Hawkins is the author of "Through Eyes of Shiva", available through http://www.amazon.com/. Visit http://www.entropical-paradise.com/ -- Entropical Paradise - The Home Of R.A. Hawkins for more commentaries and editorials by R.A. Hawkins.
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© 2004 R.A. Hawkins
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