“Swiftboat Veterans for Truth” brought the damage on themselves
In response: Terry Sater 3/13/08 “Swiftboating” insults the sacrifices of U.S. sailors in Vietnam
Mr. Sater laments the entrance of the term “swiftboating” into the language ever since a privately-financed group of opponents of Vietnam veteran John Kerry smeared Kerry’s record of service as well as his character. While Mr. Sater admits he contributed in a small way to this attack with his own letter, he complains that the term itself now insults all veterans. Putting aside the question of why Sater thinks some veterans are fair game and others are not (perhaps only if they run for President?) there is an excellent lesson to be found here. Actions have consequences — and not all of them are intended or foreseeable. While Sater points no fingers, he fails to reflect on whether he himself shares a bit in the responsibility for the term’s appearance in the first place. Another way of putting it: People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.
Dan Alamia
University City
“US VETS WHO SAW IT HAPPEN”
Al Hubbard?
Jesse McBeth?
The guy from McCaskill’s add?
Ha! No, that’s someone else. Where do you keep your purple heart band-aids, happy pants? By the way my being right has nothing to do with chickenhawks. It has more to do with the efforts of people to cover up the crimes committed by some American soldiers in Viet Nam. It’s connected to Mr. Sater’s letter. Some will use the misdeeds of the few to tarnish the many, but that doesn’t mean those misdeeds should be ignored or forgotten. The misdeeds of American war criminals should be acknowledged and remembered, just as the misdeeds of the SBVFT should.
William (or “William”),
So you didn’t mention “chickenhawks,” on #4? That was a DIFFERENT Willam?
What war crimes did you witness in Nam? Do you have any names, dates, or places, of crimes that were committed and the people who did it were not punished?
If you are simply saying that as a “general rule,” that guys in Vietnam committed war crimes, can we extend that kind of thinking to classifying other groups of people as guilty of certain behaviors? Do we apply your line of generalizations to races, nationalities, or religions? How about saying all Muslims are terrorists? We KNOW some of them have been terrorists!
How about people who go by “William,” instead of “Bill,” are self-important, egotistical morons?
Who said “Truth is the first casualty of war”?
It’s interesting in a way that this conversation is happening today, the 40th anniversary of My Lai.
Were there terrible things done to civilians in Viet Nam by men in American uniforms? Yes, but they were the minority. They should not be ignored, and those who dare to talk about them should be honored, not pilloried.
What I think is that, in many ways, we’re still fighting the Viet Nam war, 35 years after it ended. We’ll keep fighting it for another 20 years at least, until the last veteran dies of old age.
What exactly happened on the Mekong river on a particular day in 1969 is known only to those who were there….and they, all of them, see it in a mirror dimly. Those of us who weren’t there should not be passing judgment on any of them, they, and they alone, have to live with their memories.
“It’s a good thing that war is so terrible, else we could come to love it too much” Robert E. Lee
That’s what I think , too, hs. Happy pants you misread my post. I wrote “some American soldiers” and also wrote that the misdeeds were committed by a few. Please take the time to read the posts you respond to, dumb-ass.
Ditto to William’s last post! O’Neill reported to Nixon his and Kerry’s ventures into Cambodia, I never said Nixon sent anyone there….he and Henry Kissinger just ordered the illegal bombing of Cambodia which killed hundreds of thousands of innocents and led to the Khmer Rouge and the Killing Fields, sprayed chemicals on Mexican marijuana leading to those guys going into Colombia and sending us cocaine, and wiretapped us like W!
Timmy,
Did that make sense to you, as you wrote it?
Having read Kerry’s testimony again, I am having trouble seeing what the uproar is over. Unsubstantiated? Certainly, but I have no doubt as to it’s truth. I know that I have talked with Nam vets who have related similar tales to me. I remember the guy at the Texaco station in St. Charles who was an artilleryman telling stories of routinely firing on elephants visible in the highlands and calling in body counts for them. Stories of tossing C rats between trucks in convoy in order to run over the kids retrieving them abound. I’ve been hearing these stories for over 30 years now, and while no doubt these are attributable to a very small minority, there is no question they happened in one form or other. While we would all like to believe the American serviceman IS that guy who gives his John Wayne bar to the little kiddies, you are bound to have a couple of misfits in an organization that size (especially one that consisted of draftees) and they will get the publicity and that will afix itself to the whole in some minds. John Kerry is guilty of speaking his mind in a country where you are allowed to do that. He mentioned no names but I’ll bet he knew some.
While it may be true that there were “some” guys who “williamed” villages, they had their “timmyhogans” handed to them, when they were thrown in the stockade.
Slam, what do you think of Kerry, as recently as the last few years, accusing troops in Iraq of “terrorizing” women and children in the dead of night on useless raids?