The Swift Boat Veterans

8/23/2004

The Swift Boat Vets

Someday, Kaitlyn, there may be listed a President Kerry in your history books. If so you may likely be speaking Arabic and wearing a Burqua.

Allow Grandmother to document the current rage about the Swift Boat Veteran controversy as it burns on this date. I shall try, too, to explain the depth of pain and betrayal I feel by the revelations hitting my ears this week. That pain, Kaitlyn, comes to Grandmother on a most personal level.

There is an entire and thoughtful entry on the effect of the Vietnam war on Grandmother’s life earlier in this tome to you (see entry titled 4/20/04 titled “Vietnam”). To my horror and dismay, Grandmother must again re-live that confusing period in this country’s history anew with the rhetoric of our day. She learns, on this day of our Lord, that she was once again fooled and deceived during that era before the Internet and cable news when the transmission of “truth” over the public air ways was determined by the metrosexuals at the NY Times and Dan Rather.

I had no idea, Kaitlyn, that John Kerry was organizer of the Vietnam Vets Against the War, or VVAW as it is more commonly known. At the time, Grandmother was one confused American woman who suffered, on a personal level, greatly due to that bizarre and ill-run conflict.

As you will read on my earlier missive on Vietnam, Kaitlyn Mae, Grandmother turned 18 while that war was raging. Grandmother married her first husband and that entire, short-lived union was wracked with the shadow of Vietnam and its consequences on my own would-be happy life. For Grandmother’s young husband was subject to the draft and indeed, his birthday popped up right at the top of that sad lottery of death.

My memory at the time, Kaitlyn, was that it wasn’t that the general American populace was necessarily against the war, but there was almost a visceral general malaise because the body bags of young men kept coming home while the politicians couldn’t decide if they wanted to fight the thing to win or fight it with a kind political correctness. Of course, Kaitlyn, Grandmother is now almost 40 years older than that young dewy-eyed woman who did love her country but also loved her husband. I did not want my husband coming home in a body bag for a war fought with no evident hope of winning.

At least this is Grandmother’s memory of the time. My young husband was adamant that he was not going to Vietnam and his liberal parents offered to finance his escape to Canada.

I didn’t want to move to Canada, Kaitlyn, as Grandmother is quite firmly American and naturally there was the logistics of the act.

Our youthful marriage didn’t make it, Kaitlyn, and it broke my young heart.

After our divorce, young husband became a hippie and anti-war protestor of the highest order. I adjusted to my new single life and life went on. Over the following few years, Grandmother became disenchanted her own self. That dirty war in Vietnam continued, the body bags kept being unloaded on the TV, and it seemed that the whole thing was a quagmire of the highest order. Grandmother herself donned some fringe vests and began to march against that war. When I heard about the Vietnam Vets against the war I felt an inner sense of smugness and justification.

“Even the guys that fought in the war are against it,” I would say to my political father, who thought America should be loved or left.

Today I see the testimony that John Kerry gave before congress in 1971. His words break my heart.

The ad was compiled and presented by an organization called the Swift Boat Vets against John Kerry. Seems many of these men served with Mr. Kerry during Vietnam and their version of events is quite different than the lies Kerry’s been spewing about his “heroics” during the war. If you must adjust your burqua any time during this read, Kaitlyn, it’s because those brave veterans who risked their reputations to step up to the public podium and challenge a lying presidential contender that not only was not a hero, but was a coward of the highest order, lost their battle to get out the truth.

John Kerry was in Vietnam for four months. During that time he won three purple hearts and a medal of valor. The man, Kaitlyn, did not bleed once.

I remember the body bags and now know that this blowhard who would be our President connived and schemed to get fake Purple Hearts, after he got three he resorted to some little known naval rule that with three purple hearts a sailor can be returned state side.

Through all the political rhetoric over the cable waves and talk radio outlets, one fact stands out bright and shining in Grandmother’s mind. Kerry has plenty of sycophants out defending his pathetic hide-how decent people can sell their souls like Kaitlyn Grandmother will never understand-and yet the one fact still shines bright.

He was there for FOUR (count ‘em) months. He got three Purple Hearts. Even without the Swift Vets, Kaitlyn, how likely is that? With one of his overseas months spent in some sort of training facility in a posh area of Vietnam, Kaitlyn, is John Kerry the sort of fellow capable of wracking up all those honors in so short a time? While being the pilot of nothing more than a big cabin cruiser?

Over 250 of Vietnam Vets who served with Kerry have written a book and they have extensively documented Kerry’s questionable actions. The book is called “Unfit for Command” and as she writes, Grandmother is trying to get a copy for posterity.

For the Kerry campaign does not respond to the accusations. Instead they call for book stores to refuse to stock the book, for the publisher to stop the printing and for the President of the United States to call upon those veterans to stop their accusations, depriving them of the first amendment rights that they fought for. So not only might you be wearing a burqua, Kaitlyn, you might well not be able to even read this missive from your grandmother, should there be a President Kerry in your history book. He will decide what is read in America as he is an expert at manipulating opinions and indeed, truth itself.

I cry at those old clips of Kerry testifying before the senate because he flat-out accuses all of those soldiers of horrific actions in the theater of war. And Grandmother knows, Kaitlyn, she knows NOW, that if his words aren’t flat out lies they are certainly gross exaggerations. Grandmother knows in her bones that most of the soldiers sent to fight that ill-run war didn’t commit those crimes. Grandmother was once married to a sweet young man who would have been such a soldier were it not for his flat feet, and Grandmother knows that the soldiers were but pawns of the politicians. They were not war criminals, Kaitlyn, though Grandmother would allow that war can bring out the worst in humankind. Perhaps SOME, probably very few by Grandmother’s trusted instinct, did some of those awful things Kerry delineated before congress, to include rape, cutting off hands and heads, and torching huts of innocent villagers.

One more searing and shining truth comes out from that lying senate testimony, Kaitlyn, and Kerry cannot deny them for they are caught on video for posterity.

Grandmother paraphrases: “The United States cannot fight communism all over the world,” the then young John Kerry stated in summation. America lost the war in Vietnam with the great assistance of young John Kerry.

Kaitlyn, you will never know or fear the scourge of communism because, and this is a fact not that John Kerry had anything to do with it, but a great Republican President stood up to the once mighty and menacing Union of Soviet Socialist Republic and it is no more.

Senator John Kerry threw in the towel while Ronald Regan stared it down.

John Kerry was wrong then, Kaitlyn. Were it for the likes of the lying and cowardly John Kerry, there would still be a USSR and America would be supplying them with nuclear reactors for “peaceful” purposes like the Democrats of Clinton did for the sweet Kim Jong Il of North Korea.

I’ll end with this thought, Kaitlyn. If John Kerry made that statement about communism then read the following quote, read it long and read it hard. Grandmother is making but one substitution in the phrasing but I argue it’s crucial.

“The United States cannot fight TERRORISM all over the world.”

The above a statement of President John F. Kerry in the 2005 state of the union address. He then announces the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, Afghanistan and the entire middle east.