Posted 1:39 PM by Paul
Echoes of Vietnam

Ray's e-mail about Iraq certainly set in motion an avalanche of testomonies characterised by total despair. Old Amercian friends reffered to Bush and co. as "straight out of the Manchurian Candidate" lamenting the "irreperable damage Bush is doing to the USA. Damage which will take decades to heal" No one believes Kerry has a hope in hell of coming close, never mind winning. All of them fear for the future. The New Yorkers were the most pessimistic of all. The very same people who had suffered most were now being used by the White House to justify what they had planned all along. They must feel violated. Even the famed Jersey Girls who lost their husbands and lobbied for a full inquiry about 9-11 are being pilloried in the media as "Rock Stars of Grief" because some of them have had the temirity to come out against Bush.

Ray replied to one woman who felt that the real story of corruption and chaos in Iraq would only surface in 2005 and 2006, with memories of his own experiences as a young man in the early 70s. This is what he wrote.

I remember well having a wife and child and not wanting to be part of that war in Viet Nam and being drafted against my will when I was in good standing in law school because McNamara needed more fodder for his war, a war the bastard has publicly cried about as he made "mea culpas" in a book, interviews and speeches over thirty years after killing off almost sixty thousand young Americans and maiming another half million (Robert McNamara went on to serve as President of the World Bank, got even richer, and at age 88 this weekend he wed an Italian heirness - - a nice life for a man, like Kissinger, who belongs in prison with many others), and having had that experience of being drafted out of law school with a wife and baby, I feel my perspective is far different from that of those who were not forced to wear the uniform and kiss their wife and child good-bye at ain airpor to go off and train to fight and kill people far away.

I was lucky and drew a German assignment, missing the jungle war, but I was carefully considering going AWOL as I awaited the assignmen, going to Canada and Sweden, and I was talking to my young wife on a pay phone ever night near a trailer that sold giant beers and had a juke box that seemed to only play two songs - - Forgerty's "Bad Moon Rising" and Dylan's "Lay Lady Lay." I remember everything about that time and I do not want my nephews or the children of friends to experience such a time in their life. I was excused from basic training barracks on weekend afternoons to visit a friend I played high school football with a few years earlier, a kid who was walking point when he stepped on a mine. I remember it all well, and I don't want to compound this present mess by dragging more innocent young American kids into it.

Moments after Jimmy Carter took the oath, before he departed the platform, he signed the first document of his presidency, an ammesty for all those in Canada, Sweden, and elsewhere, and Carter was a military man. He understood the horror of the wrongs prior administrations visited on American kids.