Vietnam-era 'chickenhawks' deserve a swift kick
Friday, August 27, 2004
By Gordon Livingston
Special to The Baltimore Sun
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2002016661&zsection_id=268883724&slug=vietnamoped27&date=20040827
Among the human attributes that excite the most contempt, hypocrisy
occupies a special
place. Those who say one thing and do another or who criticize others for
moral
deficiencies they themselves exhibit are deservedly the objects of public
derision.
So it is with the "chickenhawks" of the Vietnam War generation currently
providing what
passes for leadership in this administration. They include Vice President
Dick Cheney, who
discovered he had "other priorities" during Vietnam, and Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz, who graduated from Cornell University in 1965 but decided to
forgo military
service during the war.
We recently have had a renewed opportunity to observe hypocrisy in action
in President
Bush's reluctance to disavow the contemptible attacks by a group calling
itself Swift Boat
Veterans for Truth.
This collection of veterans, angry at John Kerry's antiwar activism after
he returned home
from Vietnam, continues to run TV ads attacking Kerry's war record. One of
the group's
leaders, John O'Neill, has published a book, "Unfit for Command: Swift
Boat Veterans Speak
Out Against John Kerry."
The New York Times reports that "some people behind the ads had
connections to the Bush
family, to prominent Texas politicians and to President Bush's chief
political aide, Karl
Rove."
The Times also says that "the accounts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth
prove to be
riddled with inconsistencies. In many cases, material offered as proof by
these veterans
is undercut by official Navy records and the men's own statements."
Whether this strategy will work is still a question. Redirecting public
attention to the
Vietnam War may prove unwise, considering the facts of Bush's own choice
to avoid service
in a war he purported to support.
According to The Washington Post, "A review of Bush's military records
shows that Bush
enjoyed preferential treatment as the son of a then-congressman, when he
walked into a
Texas Guard unit in Houston two weeks before his 1968 graduation from Yale
and was moved
to the top of a long waiting list."
Safely spared the prospect of combat service, he then virtually
disappeared between May
1972 and May 1973. There are few records to indicate his whereabouts
during that time.
The Associated Press noted that a full release of Bush's records would
clarify
"allegations that potentially embarrassing material was removed in 1997
from Bush's
military file when he was running for re-election as Texas governor."
Perhaps it's not important who chose to serve and who did not in that
misbegotten war.
After all, Bush and prominent members of his administration simply made
the same decision
to find some way to avoid service that was made by many of the privileged
young men of his
generation, including Bill Clinton.
What smacks of hypocrisy, however, is to attack the service of Kerry, who
lived an equally
advantaged life yet made the choice to expose himself to the considerable
risks of combat.
That he was intelligent enough to learn something from this experience and
came home to
oppose the war appears to be the real sin in the minds of many Republican
hawks. They
still argue that Vietnam was, in the words of Ronald Reagan, "a noble
cause." To change
one's mind as the result of experience is, of course, to "flip-flop."
The issue here, in a presidential campaign, is not courage vs. cowardice.
People go to war
for many reasons. For young men of my generation, the system created a
situation in which
the largest proportion of those engaged in combat were those who lacked
the education or
connections to avoid it. It was a war fought largely by working-class and
poor kids. (The
majority of our soldiers in Iraq, despite an all-volunteer military, come
from similar
backgrounds.) Little sacrifice was asked of the society at large,
particularly its
most-fortunate members.
This is what makes Kerry's decision to go to war all the more remarkable,
whatever the
complicated motives behind it. Whether he deserved his medals, whether he
bled enough to
justify three Purple Hearts, is irrelevant. That he went, in contrast to
our current
bellicose commander in chief, is enough, one would think, to earn the
respect of those who
chose not to. We have all, especially veterans, had enough of this
contrived issue.
My Bronze Star citation contains some exaggerations written into it by the
officer in my
unit who submitted it. It was apparently felt that the award reflected
well on my regiment
and the Army and helped fill a national need for heroism in a decidedly
unheroic conflict.
I, too, opposed the war when I got home, based on what I had seen there. I
am prouder of
that than anything I did with a rifle in my hands. Like Kerry, I believed
I had earned the
right to speak out. I would prefer not to be criticized by those who
didn't go at all.
Gordon Livingston, a West Point graduate who served with the 11th Armored
Cavalry in
Vietnam, is a psychiatrist who lives in Columbia, Md.
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