Swift Vets....

[PornoDoggy]

Originally posted by dantheman@Aug 31 2004, 04:10 PM
my uncle a retired bird saw 2 tours in nam has a infantry officer and NEVER saw the things kerry talked about. Now you would THINK that if theres these things happening on the scale that KERRY was reporting(after "4" months incountry) he would have heard, seen, smelled, hell guessed some of it. YES I know things happened I'm not totally blind and dumb but it was the exception NOT the rule that kerry reported.

It was a smart play on Kerry part though, hell he might make CIC

Gee, guys ... if what's important is Kerry's actual remarks , then he did not say he personally saw the things he described to the Senate. He did, however, say that these things have been told to him by other veterans.

Since we seem to be basing this debate on family ties , my cousin never saw any war crimes either ... but then again, to hear that mofo tell it he was so stoned out of his fucking mind for the tour and a half he (a month after Tet until late 69, when he was wounded) spent over there that it took him five years to get straight once he got back.

If you pressed him on the subject, however ... he rationalized away what he saw Americans do by describing it as no worse than what the Cong did. I have found that to be true with more than one person, btw.

I've done some work with support groups for vets dealing with Agent Orange and vets with PTSD. I've talked to people from the Army, the Navy, the Coast Guard, the Marines, and the Air Scouts; vets who were there before '64 through Tet all the way up to the day Siagon fell. I've talked with people who grunted their way through jungle, were on the rivers at the same time as Kerry and after, and people who were senior staff members for both Zumwalt and Westmoreland.

It varied from year to year, from command to command, from region to region. Some I've talked to never saw anything like what Kerry said others had relayed to him, including a couple with four tours. Some with the exact same amount of time saw stuff that makes Me Li look like a Sunday School picnic - including a fairly senior JAG officer on Westmoreland's staff who thought Barry Goldwater was a pansy-assed liberal and that John Birch was suspicously pink.

It was an ugly fucking war. The Air Force, Navy, and even more so, it's wholy owned subsidiary (sorry, Dan, I had to) the Marine Corps never suffered the collapse of the Chain of Command the way the Army did. Most of the horror stories that I've heard were told by Army vets. There was a relationship between atrocities and drug abuse (also a Chain of Command issue). The presence of "non-military assets" also played a role in the kinds of things that went on; and the bald-faced hypocricy of the Nixonger, er Kiisengon, "Vietmamization" (increase the operational demands on a diminishing level of troops) also played a part.

Just out of curiousity ... which website or talking head has started using the term "edgy" when describing the contempt some of us feel for this bogus non-issue?

I see the parrots are cawing it quite a bit.