A recap for those of you reading this at some point in the future: the big news for the past week or so has been a group of Vietnam veterans calling themselves "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" releasing an ad charging John Kerry with lying about his experience in the Vietnam War. Did he really deserve his Bronze Star, was he really injured, etc. But this is all a smokescreen. Their latest ad gets to the root of their beef with Kerry: in 1971, they say, he accused American troops of committing war crimes in Vietnam. Yes, and? We know American troops committed war crimes in Vietnam! If these guys are trying to suggest that US soldiers did not commit atrocities in Vietnam, there's an easy two-word rebuttal: My Lai. I mean, hell, the 2004 Pulitzer for investigative journalism went to a team of reporters who ran a series about the "Tiger Force" that butchered hundreds of civilians in Vietnam in 1967. Casualties of War was a true story. The list goes on. Yet it seems like not a day goes by that I don't run across a quote in which someone says something like, "Me, I don't take issue with John Kerry's service in Vietnam. It's what he did after he got home I have a problem with." What did Kerry do after he returned from Vietnam? He became a leader in Vietnam Veterans Against the War. That's when he first became a public figure, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Vietnam War was a fiasco. Again: yes, and? Like Vietnam wasn't a fiasco? What was he supposed to do? Support the war? I know the political pendulum in the US has been swinging into increasingly disturbing territory over the past few years, but the past couple of weeks have me wondering at exactly what point we crashed through the looking-glass. How on earth did it, for the first time in my lifetime, become a mainstream opinion to be in favor of the Vietnam War? I guess most of it has to do with the fact that we once again have over a hundred thousand troops in a foreign country we have no business being in, killing and being killed, and so it's back to denial about the nature of war. It is difficult to accept Vietnam for what it was and still be able to blather on about "honorable service" by a bunch of people who chant "We're trained to kill and kill we will" and who "enjoy killing Iraqis." (alternate link) You can't really accept Vietnam for what it was and still dismiss Abu Ghraib as an aberration, as the product of a few bad apples. So it's back to siding with Nixon. Back to siding with Nixon aides like Charles Colson with his cheesy supervillain lines: "Let's destroy this young demagogue!" he said about Kerry in '71. (Whether he added "muha muha muha" is unrecorded.) Maybe it's not hard to figure out why attitudes have shifted. But still. The idea that having opposed the war in Vietnam could be held against a person... this is flabbergasting to me. I mean, seriously, what's next? Are we going to decide that Joseph McCarthy wasn't so bad after all and attack people for denouncing him? Oh, wait, Ann Coulter's already working on that one. Hey, those of you reading this at some point in the future: please tell me it gets better from here.
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