Rush Limbaugh & Vietnam

Thanks, I feel so much better about it now.

That is just stupid. First of all, not everyone was called. Of those that were called, not all were eligible. Lack of service does not a draft doger make.

Serving in the military is an honorable vocation, but there are other honorable ways to spend your time too. Not serving (because of medical or other reasons) is not akin to leading demonstrations in England or trotting around Russia in lieu of serving.

"It's simply not in their interest to enlist someone that is likely to spend time taking up medical resources, as well as potentially squandering the effort that went into training them."

This has been my experience.

My Sr. Year (77) I took the military Aptitude test and wished to join the service but my father (Army Reserves plus served in Korea) explained to me that With my Bad Knee they probably would not take me.

I told my recruiter and he said not to mention it to anyone and I would be fine.

My dad told me that was a sure way to earn a Black mark and get off on the wrong foot in a career in the sercvice. He told me when asked in the medical section of the paper work to be truthful.

I was and when I went in to sign up I remember being led to a room with two other guys and we were given a physical test when we got to knee bends I couldn't do it. I was taken aside and told by a severe looking man in uniform that unless I could perform that exercise 50 times on demand to not bother coming back.

I tried all summer to rehab the knee but the doc told me it was futile unless I had an operation and then he would not guarantee it would fix the problem and we just did not have the money to do it. (Insurance would not cover it)

I had a freind who went in and signed up for the Rangers (He enlisted in 77) and scragged his knee jumping. They army fixed his knee up (but he was done in the rangers) and went on to a career in the Army and retired just a few years back.

Short story: They didn't want someone they had to fix but they fixed someone they had already trained!

Inoperable or convenient?

And you served how many years? And with what service, and where were you stationioned?

Mild nitpick: I believe Kerry was actually the single POOREST Senator for many years, until he married the Widder Heinz.

Oops, his draft board would have called him back in 6 mo or a year later (I assume these thinks don't always last forever).

should have been

his draft board would have called him back in 6 mo or a year later (I assume these things don't always last forever) if it had happened a few years earlier.

Look, I don't care if he did or did not serve. I would just have a bit more respect for the man if he would just come out and say: "Thank God, I got out of going to Vietnam." As many others did. I can't say I would not have tried every thing posible to avoid Vietnam. I just don't know.

I do not agree on the near-hysterical push for war involving a two-bit secular dictator in a poor country with a population of 16 million, two-thirds of whom hate him.

Well, if 12 million Iraqis hate Hussein, then it won't be much of a war, will it?

Answer the call, just don't be anxious to die, but if called upon, then serve with honor. The only ones I consider draft dodgers are the ones that fled the coutry.

Agreed, though I'd add those who manipulated the system (fake gay or fake med problems) to the dodger category.

That's a very handy chart. The DNC will probably put it on their public policy cheat sheet for their candidates. ;-)

Four years. Navy. Stationed in Va. for two years. Was a navy corpsman with Marines two years at Camp Lejuene, NC.

Thanks for asking!

Have a great day!

Ted Nugent tells a story about how he avoided the draft by not changing clothes or washing for a few weeks before he had to show up at the recruiting office.

Rush's number, picked in the 1970 lottery, was 152. I don't know if this was high enough not to be called (mine, also picked that year was higher). The previous year they took as high as 195 but they also drafted significantly more men.

At that time, 1970, most of us took the que sera sera attitude. If called, go, if not, leave it alone. We all knew enough returnees to know that it was nothing but a cluster****, certainly not an issue worth dying for, not in the 70s.

...must EVERYTHING on FreeRepublic relate back to clinton...

mg39 signed up 2002-09-07.

New around here, aren't you? :~)

"Well, did you serve in a Combat Arms branch?"

When Congress decided that salary earned when you were in a theater operation was not subject to Income Tax, there was daily flights over the Tonkin Gulf, in order to get the Tax free salary, as well as an armed forces expeditionary medal. (One day exempted the whole months salary)

"PLEASE post a picture of an ANAL CYST!!!!"

Sorry, I've seen enough pictures of Sen. Daschule to last a life time.

The DNC has revised the chart:

Military status	Pro-war	Anti-war
Volunteered for service, served in combat	Opinion ~~valid~~ invalid (in the pocket of military contractors)	Opinion valid
Volunteered for service, served in non-combat in 'Nam	Opinion invalid	Opinion valid
Volunteered for service, served stateside	Opinion invalid	Opinion valid
Volunteered for National Guard, served stateside	Opinion invalid	Opinion valid
Drafted, served in 'Nam	Opinion invalid	Opinion valid
Drafted, served stateside	Opinion invalid	Opinion valid
Drafted, medical deferment	Opinion invalid	Opinion valid
Drafted, college deferment	Opinion invalid	Opinion valid
Drafted, fled to Canada	Opinion invalid	Opinion valid
Undrafted during Vietnam era	Opinion invalid	Opinion valid
Undrafted, not of age during Vietnam era	Opinion invalid	Opinion valid

John Kerry: The Chameleon Senator
By Ted Sampley
U.S. Veteran Dispatch
October-December 1996 Issue

Despite the prayers and wishful thinking of POW/MIA families and Vietnam veteran activists, Sen. John Forbes Kerry, the "chameleon" senator from Massachusetts, was re-elected to the Senate in the 1996 election. Apparently Kerry's well publicized history as a longtime radical supporter of the Vietnamese communists and a recent flap about whether or not he is guilty of a war crime meant very little to the voters in Massachusetts.

Sen. Kerry, the "noble statesman" and "highly decorated Vietnam vet" of today, is a far cry from Kerry, the radical, hippie-like leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) in the early 1970s. After Kerry, as a Navy Lieutenant (junior grade) commanding a Swift boat in Vietnam, was awarded the Silver he found it advantageous to quit the Navy, change the color of his politics and become a leader of VVAW. He went to work organizing opposition in America against the efforts of his former buddies still ducking communist bullets back in Vietnam. Kerry gained national attention in April 1971, when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then chaired by Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-AR), who led opposition in the Congress against U.S. participation in the war. During the course of his testimony, Kerry stated that the United States had a definite obligation to make extensive economic reparations to the people of Vietnam.

Kerry's testimony, it should be noted, occurred while some of his fellow Vietnam veterans were known by the world to be enduring terrible suffering as prisoners of war in North Vietnamese prisons. Kerry was a supporter of the "People's Peace Treaty," a supposed "people's" declaration to end the war, reportedly drawn up in communist East Germany. It included nine points, all of which were taken from Viet Cong peace proposals at the Paris peace talks as conditions for ending the war.

One of the provisions stated: "The Vietnamese pledge that as soon as the U.S. government publicly sets a date for total withdrawal [from Vietnam], they will enter discussion to secure the release of all American prisoners, including pilots captured while bombing North Vietnam." In other words, Kerry and his VVAW advocated the communist line to withdraw all U.S. troops from Vietnam first and then negotiate with Hanoi over the release of prisoners. Had the nine points of the "People's Peace Treaty" favored by Kerry been accepted by American negotiators, the United States would have totally lost all leverage to get the communists to release any POWs captured during the war years.

Kerry was fundamental in organizing antiwar activists to demonstrate in Washington, including the splattering of red paint, representing blood, on the Capitol steps. Several hundred of Kerry's VVAW demonstrators and supporters were allowed by Fulbright to jam into a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in 1972 and to chant "Right on, brother!" as Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), then the only declared Democratic presidential candidate, accused U.S. troops of committing barbarisms in Vietnam.

Kerry became even more of a press celebrity during a highly publicized "anti-war" protest when he threw medals the press reported were his over a barricade and onto the steps of the Capitol. Kerry never mentioned that the medals he so gloriously tossed were not his own. The 1988 issue of Current Biography Yearbook explained: " . . . the ones he had discarded were not his own but had belonged to another veteran who asked him to make the gesture for him. When a 'Washington Post' reporter asked Kerry about the incident, he said: 'They're my medals. I'll do what I want with them. And there shouldn't be any expectations about them.'" Kerry's medals have reappeared, today hanging in his Senate office, now that it is "politically correct" for a U.S. Senator to be portrayed as a Vietnam War hero. Alas, so much for integrity.

Recently, Kerry became extremely defensive when David Warsh, an economics columnist for The Boston Globe, questioned the circumstances for which Kerry was awarded the Silver Star. Kerry, who was in a close re-election battle with Gov. William F. Weld, a Republican, quickly gathered his former crew from his Swift boat days to rebuff the "assault on his integrity."

According to the official citation accompanying the Silver Star for Kerry's actions on the waters of the Mekong Delta on February 28, 1969: "Kerry's craft received a B-40 rocket close aboard. Once again Lieutenant (j.g.) Kerry ordered his units to charge the enemy positions. . . Patrol Craft Fast 94 then beached in the center of the enemy positions and an enemy soldier sprang up from his position not ten feet from Patrol Craft 94 and fled. Without hesitation Lieutenant (j.g.) Kerry leaped ashore, pursued the man behind a hootch and killed him, capturing a B-40 rocket launcher with a round in the chamber." In an article printed in the October 21st and 28th 1996 edition of The New Yorker, Kerry was asked about the man he had killed.

"It was either going to be him or it was going to be us. It was that simple. I don't know why it wasn't us--I mean, to this day. He had a rocket pointed right at our boat. He stood up out of the hole, and none of us saw him until he was standing in front of us, aiming a rocket right at us, and, for whatever reason, he didn't pull the trigger--he turned and ran. He was shocked to see our boat right in front of him. If he'd pulled the trigger, we'd all be dead . . . I just won't talk about all of it. I don't and I can't. The things that probably really turn me I've never told anybody. Nobody would understand," Kerry said. In the column, Warsh quoted the Swift boat's former gunner, Tom Belodeau, as saying the Viet Cong soldier who Kerry chased "behind a hootch" and "finished off" actually had already been wounded by the gunner.

Warsh wrote that such a "coup de grace" would have been considered a war crime. Belodeau stood beside Kerry and said he'd been misquoted. He conceded that he had fired at and wounded the Viet Cong, but denied Kerry had simply executed the wounded Viet Cong. Dan Carr, a former Marine from Massachusetts, who served 14 months as a rifleman sloshing around in the humid jungles of I Corps, South Vietnam, questioned whether or not Kerry deserved a Silver Star for chasing and killing a lone, wounded, retreating Viet Cong. "Kerry is certainly showing some sensitivity there. Most people I knew in Vietnam were just trying to pull their time there and get the hell out. There were some, though, who actually used Vietnam to get their tickets punched. You know, to build their resumes for future endeavors," Carr said.

In 1991, the United States Senate created the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs to examine the possibility that U.S. POW/MIAs might still be held by the Vietnamese. As chairman of the Select Committee, Kerry proved himself to be a masterful chameleon portraying to the public at large what appeared to be an unbiased approach to resolving the POW/MIA issue. But, in reality, no one in the United States Senate pushed harder to bury the POW/MIA issue, the last obstacle preventing normalization of relations with Hanoi, than John Forbes Kerry. (Remember the middle name "Forbes").

In fact, his first act as chairman was to travel to Southeast Asia, where during a stopover in Bangkok, Thailand, he lectured the U.S. Chamber of Commerce there on the importance of lifting the trade embargo and normalizing relations with Vietnam. During the entire life of the Senate Select Committee, Kerry never missed a chance to propaganderize and distort the facts in favor of Hanoi.

Sydney H. Schanberg, associate editor and columnist for New York Newsday and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist veteran of the Indochina War whose book, The Death and Life of Dith Pran, became the subject of the Academy Award-winning film The Killing Fields, chronicled some of Kerry's more blatant pro-Hanoi biases in several of his columns.

In a Nov. 21, 1993 column, Schanberg wrote, "Highly credible information has been surfacing in recent days which indicates that the headlines you have been reading about a 'breakthrough' in Hanoi's cooperation on the POW/MIA issue are part of a carefully scripted performance. The apparent purpose is to move toward normalization of relations with Hanoi.

"Sen. John F. Kerry, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, is one of the key figures pushing for normalization. Kerry is currently on a visit to Vietnam where he has been doing two things: (1) praising the Vietnamese effusively for granting access to their war archives and (2) telling the press that there's no believable evidence to back up the stories of live POWs still being held. "Ironically, that very kind of live-POW evidence has been brought to Kerry's own committee on a regular basis over the past year, and he has repeatedly sought to impeach its value. Moreover, Kerry and his allies on the committee - such as Sens. John McCain, Nancy Kassebaum and Tom Daschle - have worked to block much of this evidence from being made public."

In December of 1992, not long after Kerry was quoted in the world press stating "President Bush should reward Vietnam within a month for its increased cooperation in accounting for American MIAs," Vietnam announced it had granted Colliers International, based in Boston, Massachusetts, a contract worth billions designating Colliers International as the exclusive real estate agent representing Vietnam.

That deal alone put Colliers in a position to make tens of millions of dollars on the rush to upgrade Vietnam's ports, railroads, highways, government buildings, etc. C. Stewart Forbes, Chief Executive Officer of Colliers International, is Kerry's cousin. Kerry was portrayed in The New Yorker as a proud Vietnam veteran and "war hero" who, as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, dared to take on and defeat the "mendacious POW lobby."

In its 1993 final report, the Select Committee determined that live U.S. prisoners of war were left behind in the hands of the Vietnamese after the end of the war. The committee also claimed it found no "compelling" evidence proving the POWs remain alive today. Kerry's committee stopped there without answering three of the most profound questions of the entire Senate POW/MIA investigation: What happened to those U.S. prisoners of war who the Select Committee said were alive and in the hands of the Vietnamese but not released at the end of the war? If they are dead, where are their remains? Who is responsible for their deaths?

No doubt most of the Establishment press will continue to obscure from the public and themselves the raw truth about Kerry, the communist Vietnamese and the POW/MIA issue because it is politically convenient. There is also no doubt the POW/MIA families and Vietnam veteran activists know the truth and recognize Kerry for what he truly is--a traitor, hypocrite, liar and

There was a guy who was posting anal pictures on his website. The Archbishop closed it down and moved him to a different parrish.