Posted on 09/17/2004 7:56:38 AM PDT by presidio9
ARLINGTON, Va.
The rows of simple white headstones in the broad expanses of brilliant green lawns are scrupulously arranged, and they seem to go on and on, endlessly, in every direction.
It was impossible not to be moved. A soft September wind was the only sound. Beyond that was just the silence of history, and the collective memory of the lives lost in its service.
Nearly 300,000 people are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, which is just across the Potomac from Washington. On Tuesday morning I visited the grave of Air Force Second Lt. Richard VandeGeer. The headstone tells us, as simply as possible, that he went to Vietnam, that he was born Jan. 11, 1948, and died May 15, 1975, and that he was awarded the Purple Heart.
His mother, Diana VandeGeer, who is 75 now and lives in Florida, tells us that he loved to play soldier as a child, that he was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam and that she longs for him still. He would be 56 now, but to his mother he is forever a tall and handsome 27.
Richard VandeGeer was not the last American serviceman to die in the Vietnam War, but he was close enough. He was part of the last group of Americans killed, and his name was the last of the more than 58,000 to be listed on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. As I stood at his grave, I couldn't help but wonder how long it will take us to get to the last American combat death in Iraq.
Lieutenant VandeGeer died heroically. He was the pilot of a CH-53A transport helicopter that was part of an effort to rescue crew members of the Mayaguez, an American merchant ship that was captured by the Khmer Rouge off the coast of Cambodia on May 12, 1975. The helicopter was shot down and half of the 26 men aboard, including Lieutenant VandeGeer, perished.
(It was later learned that the crew of the Mayaguez had already been released.)
The failed rescue operation, considered the last combat activity of the Vietnam War, came four years after John Kerry's famous question, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
Although he died bravely, Lieutenant VandeGeer's death was as senseless as those of the 58,000 who died before him in the fool's errand known as Vietnam. His remains were not recovered for 20 years - not until a joint operation by American and Cambodian authorities located the underwater helicopter wreckage in 1995. Positive identification, using the most advanced DNA technology, took another four years. Lieutenant VandeGeer was buried at Arlington in a private ceremony in 2000.
The Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation put me in touch with the lieutenant's family. "I'm still angry that my son is gone," said Mrs. VandeGeer, who is divorced and lives alone in Cocoa Beach. "I'm his mother. I think about him every day."
She said that while she will always be proud of her son, she believes he "died for nothing."
Lieutenant VandeGeer's sister, Michelle, told me she can't think about her brother without recalling that the last time she saw him was on her wedding day, in May 1974. "He looked so handsome and confident," she said. "He wanted to change the world."
Wars are all about chaos and catastrophes, death and suffering, and lifelong grief, which is why you should go to war only when it's absolutely unavoidable. Wars tear families apart as surely as they tear apart the flesh of those killed and wounded. Since we learned nothing from Vietnam, we are doomed to repeat its agony, this time in horrifying slow-motion in Iraq.
Three more marines were killed yesterday in Iraq. Kidnappings are commonplace. The insurgency is growing and becoming more sophisticated, which means more deadly. Ordinary Iraqis are becoming ever more enraged at the U.S.
When the newscaster David Brinkley, appalled by the carnage in Vietnam, asked Lyndon Johnson why he didn't just bring the troops home, Johnson replied, "I'm not going to be the first American president to lose a war."
George W. Bush is now trapped as tightly in Iraq as Johnson was in Vietnam. The war is going badly. The president's own intelligence estimates are pessimistic. There is no plan to actually win the war in Iraq, and no willingness to concede defeat.
I wonder who the last man or woman will be to die for this colossal mistake.
Besides the propaganda about Vietnam that the liberals spew, how about Iran/Contra and the Reagan tax cuts that they keep lying about?
I think that Iran/Contra didn't make Reagan look bad, it actually made the liberals look bad. It showed that they wouldn't fight communism and wouldn't fund the Contra's. A communist puppet state in our backyard was fine with them. We all know how many Marxist/Communist states popped up during Jimmy Carter's administration. Nicaragua, Grenada, Angola, Afghanistan, etc, etc.
As for the Reagan tax cuts, let it be clear! The tax cuts did not cause the Reagan deficits, it was the spending. Govt. tax receipts never really declined during Reagan's term. Want proof? Go to...
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/TaxFacts/TFDB/TFTemplate.cfm?Docid=200
The left-most column is government receipts the next column is govt. spending. For crying out loud, even my kid's 8th grade social studies textbook says that Reagan tax cuts caused the deficits. It's disgusting!
Knowing what a hotbutton, and a still-festering wound, the Vietnam War was for most Americans, the mainstream media is all so eager to hammer home this analogy.
The difference between Iraq and Vietnam, or one of many differences I should say, is that we've had 1,000 soldiers die in Iraq. In Vietnam, we lost as many as 2,000 a month.
Get a perspective, NYT!
HOW DARE Herbert (didn't he write "The Brightest and the Best"?) try to undermine the morale of our nation by using the grief of loved ones as the tool. My son is in the Army and if he were sent to Iraq and killed I would be devastated. But if Herbert tried to use my grief as a mother to justify pulling out of Iraq they'd have to pry my hands from around his neck!!
And the left's "oh woe we're losing lives in Iraq" mantra gets a bit old, especially when we know it encourages the terrorists there to step up attacks against our troops, and ignores the fact that under Saddam thousands of Iraqis lost their lives. Where was the left's "grief and anguish" then??
MEGA BARF!!! One thing good coming out of this election is that regular everyday people are starting to see the liberal media true colors. The MSM is so pissed off that Bush is climbing past Kerry right now after they thought it would be a lock for Kerry to take down Bush, all I have to say is "HA HA"
EXACTLY! And everybody, including the terrorists know it. Since both candidates are "for" the war, this election is really a referendum on whether we want to discourage or encourage the terrorists. Kerry doesn't care because he can always pull out and blame it all on Bush.
And those crying so hard against it have NEVER SERVED in the military. Draft dodgers like Clinton who went overseas to avoid VietNam?
Kerry had the courage to plead with the draft board for a deferment to go to Paris. When that was denied he tried to get the light duty. Oops, there is an opportunity to get a service medal. I better jump on that.
GET OUT OF HERE TROLL!!!!!
He didn't get a choice. He signed up for the reserves to avoid combat, because his deferments to France were denied. It just so happened his reserve unit was called up. It's not the way he planned it.
What a lot of people still are not aware of is that the leadership of the MSM (Time mag, etc) was led by people who were sympathetic to the Communists back then. They knew the power & influence they had on the society and used it to the max to destroy the military morale as Kerry, Kennedy, Hillary & Co is legend to do.
History repeats itself in our lifetime.
Ho Humm! Another hate GW article from the house organ of Gay Activist pretending to be journalists, the NY Slimes.
Yep. The left gives the enemy hope.
When John O'Neill debated him on the Dick Cavett show on June 30 of that year this exchange occurred according to Unfit for Command:
For what it is worth the actual number of deaths occurring after America pulled out was closer to 3.5 million! (Can we afford to elect a President with judgment this poor?)
I doubt that Kerry cares as much as President Bush for the loss of lives in Iraq; Kerry's only purpose for mentioning the numbers is to advance his hypocritical campaign. But as sorry as we are for every soldier who has lost his life or been wounded in Iraq, we honor them for the noble work they are doing in that country. John Kerry's complaints does them great disservice, and is just one among many things that disqualifies him from being our next Commander in Chief.
Dear Mr. Herbert,
I see you are taking the same tack as your hero John Flippin' Kerry. The longer you and your ilk browbeat, mischaracterize and slander the Brave Fighting Soldiers in Iraq and their CIC, the longer it will take to win this war and bring those Soldiers home. You and Walter Cronkite, John Kerry and Jane Fonda did it back in the early seventies and you're trying to do it again today. I'll have no part in your treasonous non support of the war effort and furthermore you can kiss my proud American @ss!
Regards,
Liberty
But--Herbert did write a book, too--I think....
These are precisely the same style of "reporting" and commentary that were used by the leftist media to defeat the U.S. three decades ago. They are hoping they can once again demoralize and discourage enough of the citizenry to force a retreat and abandonment of the war effort. Back then when I read this stuff it worked pretty much as the writers intended. Today when I read it I go to the internet and start searching for sites reporting and analyzing the war to get multiple viewpoints from people both here and in Iraq.
And guess what? I find that the people who write this defeatist tripe are lying through their teeth. The war is going well. The terrorists are still confined to 3 or 4 hotspots. They are indeed becoming more proficient in their tactics (practice makes perfect) but are still taking heavy losses. The vast majority of Iraqis do not support the Baathist die-hards and hate the foreign terrorists that have infiltrated into the country since major operations ended. Of course they want the fighting to stop. But they don't want a return of the Baathist regime or the establishment of an Islamofascist theocratic despotism.
Our troops are not suffering from lowered morale or discouragement and aside from the normal desire to get this over with and back home their main complaint seems to be that they haven't been allowed to go in and clean out the terrorist enclaves. But they uniformly report that they have the situaion under control and rebuilding is proceeding apace.
This war, like all wars, has its good days and bad. But the trend is overwhelmingly in our favor and will remain so as long as the people of this country maintain their determination and resolve.
The leftist media is the gravest enemy we face in this war. The term "enemy" is quite accurate.
My dream is to see Bush on stage after winning the election holding a newspaper headline that says KERRY DEFEATS BUSH! I wouldn't put it past the MSM to pull a stunt like that ala DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.
Worse. The Mayaguez incident was an act of piracy on the high seas. Is Herbert suggesting that without Vietnam there would have been no Khmer Rouge pirates? (The Khmer Rouge had also captured 27 crewmen of 7 Thai fishing boats, shot at a South Korean freighter, captured 7 South Vietnamese vessels, and held a Panamanian ship for 35 hours.) Or is Herbert suggesting that the next time a US container ship is captured by pirates, we should ... I don't know, what IS he suggesting that we should do????
http://www.usmm.org/mayaguez.html
My husband came home from work saying military personal who'd been to Iraq testified before congress about how the war was going.
The biggest problem they said they had with the war was the U.S. press. They say they can't believe what they see on TV when they get home. According to them, Iraq is a huge success except for a few hot spots.
Here in America more people die every day in the liberal city war zones!
BARF ALERT BUT BOB HERBERT= BARF ALERT
w2004
ciao
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