Vietnam sparks war of words on election panel

LUBBOCK - • Provocative debate on the Vietnam War's effect on the 2004 election wraps up a three-day conference at Texas Tech.

"The Tactical Nuclear Weapons Option in Vietnam" was informative. "Re-education and Its Aftermath" was moving.

Then there was "The Vietnam War and the Election Year," as seen and told by former members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and members of the Swift boat Veterans for Truth.

"Welcome to the steel-cage death match" portion of the 5th Triennial Vietnam Symposium, remarked one panelist.

The Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University saved its most controversial panels for last at its three-day conference in Lubbock, with much of the discord centered on Sen. John Kerry, the unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate.

"John Kerry is the only swift boater who butchered women and children in a boat," said B.G. Burkett, a Dallas stockbroker and Army veteran involved in the Swift boats group. "When he says he's a war criminal, he's absolutely right. He is a war criminal."

Then consider this comment made about the Swift boat group: "They have played fast and loose with the truth, acting as an Orwellian ministry of misinformation, taking half-truths and statements out of context, spreading libelous lies," said Terry DuBose, an Army veteran and former leader of the VVAW.

Among the Kerry and VVAW bashers were Jerome Corsi, co-author of Unfit for Command; Larry Bailey, president of the Vietnam Veterans for Truth and a retired Navy captain; Burkett, author of Stolen Valor and a national expert on outing phony veterans; and Scott Swett, Webmaster of swiftvets.com.

On the other side of the issue gathered former VVAW leaders DuBose, Alex Primm, Bill Hager and Nancy Miller Saunders, as well as Gerald Nicosia, who authored Home to War, about the veterans' anti-war movement.

In front of the largest crowd at any panels during the conference, the two groups proved that the Vietnam War generates every bit of emotion that it did 35 years ago and that Kerry, at least for many veterans, remains a lightning rod on the order of Jane Fonda for his anti-war activities and statements in the early 1970s.

The Swift Boat supporters said Kerry's statements about atrocities alleged to have been committed in Vietnam and his involvement in the VVAW -- a group full of "radicals, leftists and communists," Corsi said -- made him unsuitable for the White House.

"John Kerry was trying to convince the American people we were committing war crimes on a daily basis, up and down the chain of command," Corsi said.

Burkett called the VVAW "ragtags" who helped cement the image of Vietnam veterans as disaffected, unemployed, longhaired radicals. He said Vietnam veterans "were the most successful veterans in the history of the country" and blamed Kerry and the VVAW for bringing an end to a war that could have been won.

"They didn't elect [George] McGovern, but they did change the course of the war," he said, a view that many historians would disagree with strongly. The VVAW's activities and marches took place in the early 1970s, when the United States had already begun its troop pullout and public opinion had largely turned against the war.

The VVAW backers asserted that Kerry and other anti-war veterans never criticized U.S. troops or called them war criminals. Several said the Swift Boat veterans "cherry-picked" comments and took them out of context and that it consistently disavowed violence and communism.

"Our arguments focused on U.S. government policies," Primm said, which he said is very different than blaming individual troops.

Hager defended his right to be against the war and said he strongly resented his service in the Marine Corps in Vietnam being "smeared" by the Swift boat veterans.

"We see ourselves as patriots, standing up for what America is about," he said. "We see ourselves as honorable." He then accused them of the same heavy-handed tactics of the Nixon administration, which spied on thousands of American citizens and was brought down by the Watergate scandal.

About the only issue on which both sides found common ground was that Kerry brought the attention on himself.

Burkett even dropped this bombshell: "I personally think George Bush is a draft dodger. But George Bush never lied about Vietnam. John Kerry did."

The Vietnam Center has always been unconventional in its approaches to symposiums, unafraid of presentations by nonacademics. That doesn't mean that the center director, James Reckner, wasn't apprehensive about Saturday's panels.

Despite repeated admonitions about maintaining civility, Reckner -- a two-tour Vietnam veteran and self-described "hard-core conservative" -- said he was disappointed by the behavior of the Swift boat veterans. Bailey, for example, irritably interrupted the daughter of a soldier killed in Vietnam and told DuBose to "sit down" and refused to hear his question.

Reckner said he found Bailey's actions "totally unacceptable. There can't be a dialogue without questions and answers. You can't answer questions just from your friends."

[Burkett] blamed Kerry and the VVAW for bringing an end to a war that could have been won

I dunno. I can't claim anything approaching the expertise and experience of Mr. Burkett, but my judgment at this point is that Kennedy made a huge strategic error, circa 1960, when he decided to limit the fight to South Vietnam. Once North Vietnamese forces were ensconced in Laos and Cambodia they could supply South Vietnamese insurgents, or insert their own forces, virtually at will almost anywhere along the long Western border of South Vietnam. This made the war nearly impossible to win (with the level of forces it would be politically possible for America to contribute).

The correct strategy, IMHO, was to have fought the North Vietnamese in Laos. The Laotions hated the North Vietnamese, there was no analog to the significant ethnic North Vietnamese populations that existed in South Vietnam, and the North Vietnamese wouldn't have been able to sustain an insurgency as they did in South Vietnam. Thailand almost certainly could have been persuaded to support this effort. The necessary commitment of U.S. forces for this strategy would have been drastically lower than required for the strategy of defending South Vietnam from within.

As to the anti-war movement, as seditious as most of those bastards were during the phase of American involvement in Indochina, I personally think their most atrocious, shameful betrayals -- and those most damaging in the long term to American foreign policy -- came after:

Nixon came to office realizing that the country was indeed deeply divided about Vietnam, and that the well of political support for our efforts there would soon run dry. Therefore Nixon promised to extricate U.S. forces after concluding an honorable and sustainable peace agreement. This was basically a "deal" that was struck between the "hawks" and the "doves". The hawks in effect agreed to bring the troops home, and the doves in exchange agreed that this would satisfy them and in exchange they would support our allies and enforce a peace agreement (if it did not require recommitting U.S. ground troops).

In short Nixon and the hawks lived up to their end of the deal, and the doves utterly (and maliciously) failed to uphold their end. Nixon did bring the troops home, he did secure a peace agreement that if enforced would have allowed South Vietnam to survive, and Nixon (and later Ford) made every effort to secure the necessary aid to our allies in Indochina.

The doves claimed they only wanted to bring the troops home, but that was a lie. After every American soldier was safe they aggressively and gratuitously strong-armed through Congress cut after cut to aid, and restriction after restriction on operations necessary to enforce the peace. In the end aid to Cambodia was slashed to nothing, and even reconnaissance flights there were rendered illegal, and aid to South Vietnam was reduced to as near to nothing as made little difference. The South Vietnamese were rationing artillery shells even before they faced North Vietnamese regulars alone, and one of their main forces literally ran out of bullets during North Vietnam's final offensive.

This willful betrayal of an ally with a just claim on our support, let alone one two million American boys had fought for, and without being motivated by any countervailing American interest whatsoever, was monstrous. And what is worse it is portrayed as "honorable" even to this very day.

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