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Welcome Home.

One of the primary reasons I find this revisionist state of affairs so irritating and offensive is that I have seen it before.

I watched this in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, where people in the media and government were given free reign to disparage the men who served, and their mission.

There are plenty of reasons to disagree with the fundamental mission our men have been involved in, but their mission was to do their job, to the best of their ability, when we, as a country asked them to do so, and the vast majority did that, and with honor.

I watched firsthand how our men were treated by their countrymen while fighting over there, and how they were treated coming home. I hated and despised it, but I was weak, like many others were who felt as I did, and I said nothing. I allowed that to happen by remaining silent.

I vowed never to do that again, and I won’t. I can disagree with the execution of the plan, the money spent, the equipment used, the politics involved, and even the justification, but the men who served did what they were told and kept the faith.

George W. Bush may not have held a rifle in his hands or slept on the ground next to the treads of a tank, but the execution of his job took its toll on him just as surely as it did on many who he sent into combat.

I get the impression many who served with him as CIC understood that.

There are plenty of reasons to disagree with the fundamental mission our men have been involved in, but their mission was to do their job, to the best of their ability, when we, as a country asked them to do so, and the vast majority did that, and with honor.

They did more. The grand-tactical mission failed, and we couldn't keep Ho Chi Minh from enslaving South Viet Nam, but our guys achieved a strategic result.

The CIA spurred the Indonesian colonels to get rid of the bugbear Sukarno, who was a stalking-horse for the Communist PKI, and they fell on the PKI itself and slaughtered them in the hundreds of thousands, 800,000 of them by one count, so that the Andaman Sea and the Java Sea were full of floating corpses for two years.

As for the Vietnamese Communists, our guys destroyed the Viet Cong in two great campaigns in 1968, even as the KGB and the New Left plotted to overthrow the Democratic Party from within, and then our people went on to kill over a million other Communist cadre in the field in the big battles and air campaigns of 1967-73.

The NVA cadre we killed, and the tanks they were riding when SAC arclighted them and piled their T-54's on top of each other like Tootsie Toys, were the ones Ho was counting on to lead his thugs to Singapore and break a blood-red flag over the Malacca Strait, one of the world's great maritime highways.

The Sino-Soviet grand campaign to cut the East in two and deprive Japan of her energy supplies, failed thanks to the sacrifices of American soldiers, Marines, and airmen, and the efforts, however uneven, of the ARVN, the Mikes, the Hmong and Montagnards and the rest of the people who fought with the good guys in the Lost Armies of Indochina.

George W. Bush may not have held a rifle in his hands or slept on the ground next to the treads of a tank, but the execution of his job took its toll on him just as surely as it did on many who he sent into combat.

You don't see BamBam or Mooch or Skerry or Colon Powell running and cycling with the troops and paraplegic veterans.

Character tells. It's a huge tell.