New Book Sheds Light On Kerry’s Service; Vets Will Support Bush
By Isaiah Z. Sterrett (08/06/04)
WE WERE ASSURED that Kerry’s Convention speech would be the Speech of His Life, yet most of his life went unmentioned.
We heard the epic account of the day he breathed life into the family rodent, yet Democrats wish someone would breathe life into his campaign.
He berated George Bush, John Ashcroft, and Don Rumsfeld, but spent much of his speech pretending to be a Republican. “The future does not belong to fear,” he said, poorly imitating the president.
He also managed to work in a few lines about his post-war, anti-war activism. Just as some would call this turning against his fellow warrior, many of his fellow warriors are turning against him.
During a pit-stop at a Wendy’s restaurant the senator from Beacon Hill attempted to schmooze with a couple of Marines. Being military men, they were polite, but they displayed their displeasure as soon as he left. "He imposed on us and I disagree with him coming over here shaking our hands," one of them said, according to the New York Post. "I'm 100 percent against [him]."
The Marines said they supported the war in Iraq, and that they were “eager” to serve.
Had Kerry been honest, he would have told the Marines that he was “eager” to let them serve, but that he couldn’t quite muster support for funding their service. The Marines may have been “reporting for duty,” as Kerry aggravatingly said of himself, but Kerry isn’t about to support their duty.
Despite Kerry’s service in Vietnam—you knew he served, right?—President Bush’s support among veterans continues to increase, as does the list of veterans openly unsupportive of Kerry. One website alone, Vets4Bush.com, has rounded up over 5,000 Bush supporters who once fought for America. A relatively new group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, is also doing well, as is the more well-known anti-Kerry faction, Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry.
“Our organization is non-political,” Jerry Kiley, a cofounder of V.V.A.J.K. told me. But if he had to address Democrats’ endless badgering of Bush over his National Guard service, “I'd use a two word response, Bill Clinton.”
Distressed that military men and women of the past and present seem to oppose Kerry, liberals are doing what they always do: inventing wild theories about that invisible assemblage of nimrods that we lovingly refer to as “undecided.”
"There are many young people in uniform who feel like they have been let down," said Doug Wilson, chairman of the Kerry campaign in Arizona. “Disillusioned Republicans are one reason Kerry is competitive with Bush in western states like Arizona and Colorado,” wrote Marie Cocco in Newsday.
Kerry’s Vietnam Veterans Against the War may have been embraced by the liberal sophisticates of the 1970s, but Vietnam veterans were overwhelmingly against it. Of a possible 9 million members, V.V.A.W only had 7,000. A poll taken in 1980 found that 91% of Vietnam veterans were glad to have served, and, very surprisingly, 74% “enjoyed their time in the military.” A majority of participants in the poll also said that people in Washington—perhaps like a certain long-faced activist from Massachusetts—wouldn’t let them win the war they were instructed to fight.
Kerry’s prospects with veterans aren’t helped by John E. O’Neill and Jerome R. Corsi’s new book, “Unfit for Command,” in which the authors—both Vietnam veterans—contend that two of Kerry’s three Purple Hearts were the result of self-inflicted wounds; that Kerry entered a Vietnamese village, killed the domestic animals, and burned down the houses with his Zippo lighter; and that Kerry’s horrendous behavior in the military is the reason he is the only Swift Boat veteran to have served only four months.
A Kerry spokesperson, who seemed to be slightly angry about the new book, called it “trash.”
The reason George W. Bush will be supported by veterans in November is that he will let the troops fight to win. Unlike the architects of Vietnam, President Bush doesn’t presume to be a military expert; he leaves the commanding to the people on the ground. Admirably, he understands that he’s responsible for military policy, not military tactics.
Sen. Kerry, who just this week accused the White House of encouraging terrorist recruitment, doesn’t share Bush’s modesty.
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