There is a dynamic at play in the bashing of Senator Kerry's Vietnam War experience that to me is so obvious I have been baffled why no one else seems to get it, much less write about it. It takes a very special kind of courage to go to war and do the best one can in the service of one's country: Indeed to do it under fire, in close-quarter combat, is even more courageous; many, many soldiers in many, many wars never fired their weapons in anger during the entirety of their service. Studies by the military proved that only 25% of soldiers during World War II ever squeezed the triggers of their weapons during combat. Then, of course, there are the millions of soldiers who serve during wartime in support positions and never have the opportunity to find out if they have the moxie to not only stay present in the middle of a battlefield but also to take aim at a living enemy combatant, fire and kill. Forget war movies and novels, killing fellow human beings is painless only for psychopaths.
Conversely, it takes at least as much courage to do one's duty, to do it to the point of killing in the service of one's country, and then turn against the barbarity of war and speak out against it as publicly as one can. I know very few combat veterans who served and killed that did not come to hate war in all its manifestations. The vast majority of these combat veterans only let this terribly conflicting conundrum take voice when they are amongst those who likewise served and killed--or perhaps with a very close relative, or maybe a psychologist or counselor.
However, in every war I know the history of, there have always been a brave few who came back and spoke out their revulsion of what they did, what they saw, what they felt. They spoke out in the always futile hope that perhaps the politicians who start wars but do not fight them would think long and hard and then twice more before they sent young men to kill and be killed again. In almost all cases, these men were not castigated for it. To the contrary, they were and are remembered and revered throughout the ages. In truth, how can anyone honestly take issue with a soldier who has seen too much of war and speaks of its horrors as a cautionary tale?
Senator John F. Kerry had that very special courage to be a hero twice: In combat, killing human beings who were trying to kill him and his men; and when he came home and did what those few other brave men throughout history had done in the aftermath of their service in war: cry out for the carnage to end; cry out that the goals of any particular war almost never justifies the bloodletting, the destruction of so much young flesh.
I believe that the two shades of hero that Senator Kerry proved himself to be make him uniquely qualified to lead this nation at a time when bloodletting and the destruction of young life is more senseless than it has ever been. Below are a couple of graphs of a Frank Rich review of a new documentary film in The New York Times. He gets it:
LESS than 48 hours after Bill Clinton, speaking from his hospital room, advised the politically ailing John Kerry to start talking less about Vietnam and more about health care, seven American marines were blown up outside Fallujah. So much for the pipedream of changing the subject of this election. Vietnam keeps popping out of America's darkest closet not just because Mr. Kerry conspicuously served there and Mr. Bush conspicuously did not, but because of what's happening half a world away in real time: a televised war in Iraq that resembles its Southeast Asian predecessor in its unpopularity, its fictional provocation and its unknown exit strategy. That war isn't going anywhere by Nov. 2, even as it is sporadically obscured by Florida storm clouds, and its Vietnam undertow isn't going anywhere either. Everyone knows that a Tet offensive, Sunni-style, could yet tilt this election in a direction unknown. ...
The person who might most benefit from seeing "Going Upriver" is Mr. Kerry himself. "It takes a special courage to speak out against a cause for which you were once prepared to die," Jeffrey Smith, a West Point-trained C.I.A. man of the Kerry-Bush generation, wrote in The Washington Post last weekend.
