The "Wimp Factor" is back front and center in another Bush reelection campaign. Knowing he cannot go even one round in the battle with John F. Kerry over who is best equipped to be a bona fide Commander-in-Chief, the AWOL Kid sends the shrew of the "Florida Coup d'etat," the ball-busting Karen "Low Blow" Hughes instead. It isn't a fair fight, of course, and it has nothing to do with her being a woman; it has everything to do with her being an ignorant human being:
"I wish we knew a little bit more about that," Karen Hughes, the former White House communications director, said on CNN's "Late Edition."
"Did he think he did commit them or not? And who else did? And what was he really saying? Was he totally exaggerating? Was he making it up? I think the press ought to follow some line of inquiry about that." ...
Bush campaign officials -- who have had to handle persistent questions about the president's National Guard service during the war -- have largely steered clear of the topic, preferring to focus on Kerry's Senate votes on national security issues.
But Hughes, who remains a close political adviser to Bush even though she is no longer on the White House staff, waded into the dispute.
"I remember watching Senator Kerry, back when he was against the war, when he came home, and I was very troubled by the kind of allegations that he hurled against his fellow veterans, saying that they were guilty of all kinds of atrocities," said Hughes, the daughter of a retired Army officer who served in three wars, including Vietnam.
"As someone whose father was over there fighting, I don't appreciate that. I resent that. I know my father was not guilty of any atrocities, and I really find that that's an irresponsible kind of charge to make."
Anyone who claims that "atrocities" are never committed by even the good-guys during war, most particularly in civil-wars based upon ideology when the enemy is indigenous, utilizing guerilla and insurgency tactics, is exceedingly ignorant of military history, recent and past.
There is no question that American soldiers committed atrocities in Vietnam, as did their opponents; it is well-documented fact. I don't know about you, but almost all of my close friends who served in combat in Vietnam, and returned alive, spoke to me of the terrible things that that war forced them to do almost routinely. One of my closest boyhood friends told me a story. During his first week in country, an adolescent Vietnamese girl came running up to a convoy of personnel carriers with other children to get the candy he and his buddies were handing out as they passed through a village. Suddenly she tossed a satchel charge into the truck just ahead of his, killing and maiming many of his comrades in arms. He said from that moment on during his year in Vietnam--which included being decorated for bravery during the siege of Khe Sanh, one of the very few pitched-battles our troops fought in Vietnam--he shot everything, man, woman, child and beast that even moved whenever he was "in the field," which in that war was just about every place that wasn't a base camp or Saigon.
On the same night he told me that story, he also told me proudly of a competition he and his fellow Marines would sometimes "play" when in a "free-fire zone." It went like this: How much living flesh can you destroy with one burst of an M-60 machine gun? This young man, one of the sweetest, friendliest, kindest teenagers small-town America ever produced, and perhaps the best pure running back I ever played with, chugged a beer, smiled, and told me that his best effort had been "one mama-san, three kids, two chickens, a dog and a water buffalo."
Was he exaggerating? Perhaps, but I will never know. Later that night, with far too many beers in him, which he drank in my family's restaurant as we celebrated his and his twin brother's homecoming--together, they had just returned from combat in Vietnam only the day before--were killed in a head-on collision on Highway 90 in Biloxi, Mississippi. I remember and cry every time I visit their graves, which is often; as fate would have it, Mike and Joe are buried only a few feet away from my father.
War itself, almost by definition, is an atrocity. What the sights, sounds, smells and fears of combat do to the human conscience of very young men is surely an "atrocity." Because, for years or months at a time, they become almost immune to the horrors that steel, lead, napalm and TNT inflicts upon human flesh.
