Where Have All the Flowers Gone
Now that the SwiftVet’s lies are starting to stink like roadkill left out in the sun, the defenders of this pack of sleazy hatchet men are left with one final shred of an excuse to explain their campaign of slander. “Whether or not it’s true, Kerry had it coming because of what he said in ’71.” This, of course, refers to Kerry’s Senate Testimony and his activities as spokesman for Veterans Against the War, which, it is claimed, dragged the good name of American soldiers through the mud.
Maybe it’s hard to imagine in the light of today’s unified cultural field of flag-waving, yellow ribbon-tying, support-the-troops frenzy, but in 1971, Vietnam was wildly unpopular. Something like 65% of Americans opposed our continued involvement there. Even Nixon was talking about “peace with honor,” not victory.
1971 was not 1967. Opposition to the war was not limited to a bunch of hippies. It was abundantly clear by this time that America had made a ghastly mistake getting involved in the first place, that there was no hope for the corrupt and autocratic SVN government (by then an outright military dictatorship without a shred of domestic legitimacy), and that there was no scenario that could be construed as a military victory for US troops. By this time, a steady stream of veterans had been returning with harrowing, nightmarish stories and ugly scars, both physical and emotional. Atrocities like My Lai had been reported in the press; there was growing suspicion that America was widening the war into Cambodia and Laos; military and political leadership was almost entirely discredited.
In short, anyone who continued to support US efforts in Vietnam in 1971 was a in a deep, deep state of denial. Sure, there was a lot of anger. Most of it was sensibly directed at the leadership: Johnson, Nixon, McNamara, Westmorland and the other architects of the failed policy, whose pride and ego had caused and then perpetuated a national catastrophe. But it wasn’t all that simple.
America wasn’t used to losing wars. A huge number of men in their 40s and 50s had fought struggles every bit as brutal as Vietnam and had returned home triumphant (or, in the case of Korea, at least not in defeat). What was wrong with kids today? Then there was the alarming matter that the protesters had been right all along. What seemed at first to be a motley rabble motivated in equal parts by hard-core Left wing ideology and physical cowardice (middle class white suburban kids afraid to serve their country) had indeed been the first to understand that Vietnam was not just bad policy, but a fundamentally unwinnable situation for America. To this day, many still refuse to admit this, and have, through psychological alchemy, transferred responsibility for America’s defeat in Vietnam from the policymakers to the protesters. However, this phenomenon is more pronounced in the current day than it was back then, when American lives were still on the line.
In 1971, America still had hundreds of thousands of troops in Southeast Asia, fighting and dying to support a spectacularly failed policy. The sane course of action was to bring them home as quickly as possible.
Enter John Kerry, an articulate and charismatic young man who had volunteered for dangerous duty in Vietnam and served with enormous distinction. No one could call him a coward back then – not even John O’Neill. He had been a good American and done his duty; now he was being a good American by speaking out. Unlike other critics of the war, Kerry was singularly hard to discredit, and he scared the hell out of Nixon, who put him on the famous “enemies list.”
Kerry knew first-hand what happened in Vietnam, and, with the credibility of his own experience, earned the trust of other vets who were eager to unburden themselves of the terrible events they had witnessed or, in some cases, participated in. Here’s what he said:
I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago, in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit--the emotions in the room, and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. [emphasis added]
By this time, the cruelties of combat situations in Vietnam were well-known to the public, and many people already blamed the soldiers for the way they conducted themselves. By airing all this in testimony before Congress, Kerry and the other vets hoped to place the blame where it belonged: on the political and military leadership who put brave American forces into a situation where atrocities were a logical extension of the tactical and strategic conflict.
This sense of betrayal is the main theme of Kerry’s testimony:
We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country....
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us… [emphasis added]
Today, with the so-called “lessons” of the Vietnam era behind us, we claim some greater sophistication in making the separation between the policies of war and the actions of our troops, who are just doing their job. Back then, America didn’t have the benefit of that example. Instead, the image was of the Nazis in the dock at Nuremburg, explaining the indefensible with the claim “I was just following orders.” Soldiers returning from Vietnam felt the weight of that moral responsibility, or had it imposed on them by an unholy coalition of self-righteous war critics and unscrupulous politicians eager to evade their own complicity in failure.
Vietnam was a stain, a splatter on the starched and pristine colors of Old Glory. By 1971, no one wanted anything to do with it, and only the men who were there, who couldn’t escape being implicated, were left holding the bag. John Kerry bravely stood up for these men, brandishing the stained colors for all to see, describing the ugliness of failure and betrayal in unseemly detail, and saying to the leaders and the country, “This is your failure, not just ours.”
It was the dirtiest of dirty jobs, but someone had to do it. People hated him for it then; some may hate it for him today. Confronting failure is not a task for the weak or the cowardly, or least of all for the thin-skinned patriots too insecure in their faith to accept a degree of ambiguity and complexity in their relationship with their country or their leaders.
Those who can’t get over their hatred for what Kerry did in 1971 are welcome to their bile and rage. They just need to know that hated for Kerry is not all they are expressing.
9:41:02 AM 
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