Cowardly Congressional Snipers

In May 1970, I and my fellow Marines in Vietnam gathered around our shared radio to listen to what I still consider one of President Nixon’s great speeches, why American and Vietnamese armed forces were entering Cambodia to root out the sanctuaries from which the North Vietnamese had virtually free rein to attack us and South Vietnam. We all there in our hootch cheered.

I sent off a letter to Time magazine, about the only way we might be heard, and got on with my job.

The next week, this young Corporal was, as every morning, standing at attention – holding my map pointer -- before the 1st Marine Division general staff for its daily intelligence briefing. The presenting Major interrupted to read:

“I had lost hope of the survival of even a spark of political courage in Washington. No longer. My one gut reaction is, it’s about goddam time! Let us work for peace in the only way possible: by defeating and containing aggression against helpless nations. Some of us do this by serving here in Viet Nam. The rest of America must do it by vociferously drowning out the anti-Americans and petty despots of the fanatic left fringes, and providing backbone for our misled legislators.” (Time magazine, May 25, 1970)

The Major then turned to me, told the general staff who the author was, and they stood to applaud me -- maybe a first by a general staff for a Corporal unless receiving a medal for valor.

Over the next weeks, as news arrived from home in America, we Marines were all dumbfounded and saddened by reports of giant protests against our cleansing the Cambodia sanctuaries.

Fast forward to April 1971.

Back in Brooklyn, awaiting entering grad school, I was again dumbfounded and saddened by seeing John Kerry and a small scruffy group of real and fake Vietnam veterans headlined as heroes of protest against a “Genghis Kahn” America and its armed forces. I got mad, and did something about it.

I phoned Vietnam veteran friends across the country, and organized the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. The anti-war but fair, seasoned journalist and historian, who ran the New York Times’ op-ed page, Harrison Salisbury, ran my piece on May 13. I said, “I am sure the overwhelming majority of Vietnam veterans and Americans bitterly resent the charge from the left that we are all war criminals.”

Vietnam veterans flocked to the banner. We set up a press conference at Washington’s National Press Club for June 1. A few days before, a just mustered out Navy Lieutenant, John O’Neill, contacted me to join, in frustration that the Kennedy-Fulbright Senate Foreign Relations Committee propaganda fest provided to John Kerry refused to hear his rebuttal, although he served in the same unit.

Our press conference received fair and prominent coverage in the mainstream media. We proceeded over the next several months to get the word out. Kerry and his band of bluffers receded from the newspages. We returned to our lives.

Little did we expect we’d be called out of our middle-age to finish the job in 2004, but we all volunteered again for the front, and tilted the election’s margin of victory by exposing again John Kerry’s self-created false-front of patriotic valor.

Fast forward again, to now.

Hugh Hewitt correctly summed up the doings in Washington, as only three members of the House had the guts to go on record and vote in accord with what their Democrat Party leaders had been sniping through their allies in the mass media.

Thanksgiving conversation “should also dwell on the profound hypocrisy of the left and its Congressional representatives…The Democrats took their walloping last year and instead of resolving to return to D.C. as an opposition party that would work to craft alternatives to domestic policies while remaining supportive of the GWOT and of the troops, have spent a year digging deeper and deeper into anti-war conspiracy theories and committing themselves to Vietnam Syndrome 2.0.”

Ronald Brownstein, the L.A. Times’ reporter of conventional liberal takes on the news, recognized the Democrat strategy for what it is: “Many Democratic political strategists and foreign policy analysts have long believed the party can benefit more from criticizing Bush’s handling of the war than from specifying an alternative.”

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld – via a round of the talk shows -- yesterday reminded that war critics should “think about the troops that are there and how it sounds to them.” Rowan Scarsborough reports:

“Commanders are telling Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that ground troops do not understand the generally negative press that their missions receive, despite what they consider significant achievements in rebuilding Iraq and instilling democracy….they relate comments from troops asking, ”What the heck is going on back here’…”

Stephen Hayes reports from his visits to Iraq:
“Talk to senior American diplomats and military officers in Iraq today and they will tell you that the insurgents closely monitor the debate here in the United States. As domestic support for the war dwindles, the insurgents increasingly believe they can win; they fight harder, they raise more money, they gain new recruits. If these U.S. officials are correct, then continuing to make the case for the war in Iraq – to remind people with specifics, not platitudes, why we’re fighting – is not a distraction but a central component of fighting to win.”

That’s now what should be the foremost task of every American who cares about America’s and the world’s security and future peace.

The soldiers and Marines in Iraq now do not have to just send a letter off to Time magazine, as I did in 1970. They have the Internet to get out the facts and truth of what’s happening where poolside pundits in Baghdad, or on the Potomac or Times Square, dare not go. Those following the milblogs get it, but the mainstream media virtually ignores their frontline reporting.

Guess what? They’re coming home. And they are pissed off. Democrats who undermine their efforts for petty, and transitory, current electoral advantage, will be brought to task. We of Vietnam waited until 2004 to do so. The veterans of Iraq, and Afghanistan, will not have to wait so long, and won’t.