Posted on 05/01/2003 7:52:57 AM PDT by areafiftyone
CONCORD, N.H. - The "Doghunters" are on the prowl. The band of Vietnam veterans who have been protecting John Kerry's political flank since 1984 will be canvassing American Legion halls and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts in coming weeks to mobilize support for the Democrat's presidential bid.
The timing suggests a counteroffensive designed to help Kerry with military voters after he angered Republicans — and upset a few Democrats — with his wartime comment that the United States, like Iraq (news - web sites), needed a "regime change."
Not so, say the Doghunters.
"It has nothing to do with regime change," said John Hurley, an Army veteran and semiretired lawyer from Wellesley, Mass. "It's based on John's war record. John became very engaged with veterans as soon as he got back from Vietnam, and veterans in turn have become engaged with John."
While serving as an officer on a Navy gunboat, Kerry earned a Silver Star, three Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. Back home, he joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
Years later, when Kerry ran for the Senate in 1984, a Democratic rival suggested that Kerry was a hypocrite for fighting in a war he didn't believe in. During a debate, Kerry sought an apology from his primary opponent, Jim Shannon, who instead responded, "That dog won't hunt."
So began the Doghunters, a group of a dozen-plus Vietnam veterans who traveled through Massachusetts to make the case for Kerry. They've done it in every Senate campaign since and plan to travel to New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina to push Kerry's White House candidacy.
"We're sort of brothers in blood, that's why I support him," said Wayne Burton of Durham, N.H., a retired Army captain and president of a Massachusetts community college who has been swayed by the group's campaign. "For people of my generation who have children who might be put at the risk of war ... I would prefer to have someone in office who understands how awful combat actually is."
Kerry and the Doghunters have their work cut out for them.
Veterans and enlisted people tend to vote Republican, with analysts citing the Vietnam War, the Reagan-era military buildup, Bill Clinton (news - web sites)'s checkered draft history and Republican presidents' success in the Persian Gulf as a few reasons.
In 2000, absentee military ballots in Florida showed stronger support for President Bush (news - web sites), who was in the Texas Air National Guard during Vietnam, than Democrat Al Gore (news - web sites), who served in Vietnam.
Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, said support from veterans could help Kerry in the primaries but not in the general election against a Republican.
"There's something about the military culture — I don't know if it's discipline or the use of force," Smith said. "And since the Vietnam era, the Republican Party has been seen as the party that's more supportive of the military."
And Vietnam veterans are far from a homogenous group when it comes to elections.
Geoff Lombard, who was wounded as a Marine in Vietnam, considers Kerry a hero and an asset to the Democratic Party, but he favors rival Sen. Joe Lieberman (news - web sites) of Connecticut. "Bombast and landing hard with your hand on a podium to stress a point does not really give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the individual," Lombard said.
Kerry often speaks without thinking through the implications of his words, Lombard said, citing the regime change comment.
"I was disappointed," said the Durham, N.H., resident. "I wanted him to rethink before he spoke. Those words were powerful, they were disrespectful to the president."
Still, the Doghunters press ahead, determined to build support for a fellow veteran.
"I think we can put together the largest veteran organization ever to support a political candidate," Hurley said. "The message is simple: We want a veteran in the White House."
I'm sorry, but the veterans who parrot this line have lost a few of their marbles. Tip your hat to Sen. Kerry for his medals and his service to the country -- and then question the guy's judgment when he "faked" the tossing away of his medals and joining Vietnam Vets Against The War. The Vietnam War was a mess because of the way it was managed -- LBJ's micro-managing, using public opinion polls to guide his bombing plans, the Gulf of Tonkin lies used to expand the war, McNamara's and Westmoreland's lying -- but it was part of the containment strategy established in 1946-7 that served the US and Free World very well in the Cold War. The original objectives were noble even though the situation was horrible (trying to replace the feckless French who bailed on their "colony" and then did nothing to support the replacement regime). The faint hearts like LBJ who didn't have any conviction one way or the other, let this country down BIG TIME and allowed that war to just fester with no objective. Over 50K lives were lost in the effort and that is a horrible legacy and terrible tragedy but put the blame where it belongs: on the leaders and not the purpose or original objective in our being there. Nixon's "secret plan" and "peace with honor" turned out to be pretty much just face-saving, but consider the mess he inherited -- and the lack of conviction that followed in the wake of his resignation. We ended up losing the "battle" when Saigon fell in 1975 -- but thanks to "non-veteran" Ronald Reagan (I'm sure that's how John Kerry would consider him because he was "just an actor" during WWII), we won the damn war with the unbelievable collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989. What a difference "leadership" makes -- something that John F. Kerry will never, apparently, know.
JMHO.
Was the train prosecuted?
Bah, Humbug!
George McGovern was a decorated veteran. The problem was what he stood for as a politician, not what he did as a bomber pilot.
If the Dogshitters Doghunters want to support Kerry, that's their right, but they don't speak for me. It is this Vietnam veteran's right to oppose him and the rest of his Liberal ilk. I wager there are a lot more of us than of them!
Besides, I didn't throw my medals over the White House fence and in doing so join hands with the Dark Side. Now, he just wants to have it both ways!
As Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, considers a bid for the White House, Americans should know a few things about him that he might prefer go unmentioned -- and I don't mean his $75 haircuts.
When Mr. Kerry pontificated at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Veterans Day, a group of veterans turned their backs on him and walked away. They remembered Mr. Kerry as the antiwar activist who testified before Congress during the war, accusing veterans of being war criminals. The dust jacket of Mr. Kerry's pro-Hanoi book, "The New Soldier," features a photograph of his ragged band of radicals mocking the US Marine Corps Memorial, which depicts the flag-raising on Iwo Jima, with an upside-down American flag. Retired Gen. George S. Patton III charged that Mr. Kerry's actions as an antiwar activist had "given aid and comfort to the enemy," as had the actions of Ramsey Clark and Jane Fonda. Also, Mr. Kerry lied when he threw what he claimed were his war medals over the White House fence; he later admitted they weren't his. Now they are displayed on his office wall.
Long after he changed sides in congressional hearings, Mr. Kerry lobbied for renewed trade relations with Hanoi. At the same time, his cousin C. Stewart Forbes, chief executive for Colliers International, assisted in brokering a $905 million deal to develop a deep-sea port at Vung Tau, Vietnam - an odd coincidence.
As noted in the Inside Politics column of Nov. 14 (Nation), historian Douglas Brinkley is writing Mr. Kerry's biography. Hopefully, he'll include the senator's latest ignominious feat: preventing the Vietnam Human Rights Act (HR2833) from coming to a vote in the Senate, claiming human rights would deteriorate as a result. His actions sent a clear signal to Hanoi that Congress cares little about the human rights for which so many Americans fought and died.
The State Department ranked Vietnam among the 10 regimes worldwide least tolerant of religious freedom. Recently, 354 churches of the Montagnards, a Christian ethnic minority, were forcibly disbanded, and by mid-October, more than 50 Christian pastors and elders had been arrested in Dak Lak province alone. On Oct. 29, the secret police executed three Montagnards by lethal injection simply for protesting religious repression. The communists are conducting a pogrom against the Montagnards, forcing Christians to drink a mixture of goat's blood and alcohol and renounce Christianity. Thousands have been killed or imprisoned or have just "disappeared." The Montagnards lost one-half of their adult male population fighting for the United States, and without them, there might be thousands more American names on that somber black granite wall at the Vietnam memorial.
As Mr. Kerry contemplates a run for the presidency, people must remember that he has fought harder for Hanoi as an antiwar activist and a senator than he did against the Vietnamese communists while serving in the Navy in Vietnam.
Also another interesting article on John Kerry from The New American!
Plenty of Ammmo against John Kerry!
April 23, 1971
I would like to talk on behalf of all those veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit - the emotions in the room and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.
They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
We call this investigation the Winter Soldier Investigation. The term Winter Soldier is a play on words of Thomas Paine's in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriots and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.
We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out....
In our opinion and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.
We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.
We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American.
We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search and destroy missions, as well as by Viet Cong terrorism - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.
We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.
We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.
We watched the United States falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings." We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater. We watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese. We watched pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point, and so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 81s and Fire Base 6s, and so many others.
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.
Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?....We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country - the question of racism which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions such as the use of weapons; the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything.
An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation of Alcatraz put it to me very succinctly. He told me how as a boy on an Indian reservation he had watched television and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped in Vietnam and he said, "my God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people," and he stopped. And that is what we are trying to say, that we think this thing has to end.
We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country....
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission - to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so when thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.
I believe the current President is considered a Veteran for his service in the TX ANG...and as far as veterans supporting dim libs...what about their wholesale ignoring of absentee ballots each election cycle?
Another Viet Nam Vet here who wouldn't support Kerry for any elected position, including dog catcher. What a maroon!
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