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...the following is a post from
alt.obituaries that I came across today. The topic drift fell upon the subject
of John Kerry's military record and his anti-war activity once he returned
from Vietnam. The poster quoted is James Niebaur, a regular poster to that
newsgroup. The response is from Jim Beaver, also a regular poster; Beaver is
also the actor who plays Ellsworth on the HBO TV series "Deadwood"...I
thought it was worth reading...
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> I was only a teenager back
then. I completely bought into the whole
> protestor thing. Everyone I knew, vets or otherwise, spoke of Vietnam the > way Kerry did. Naturally I have nothing but respect for all of the men and > women who served. But I fully understand the actions of the protestors, > even after all these years. I would like to reinforce what you're saying here. I was a Marine in Vietnam during the Winter Soldier hearings. I got back too late to participate, and I was not so wildly political that I necessarily would have if I could have. (I could certainly provide my own recollections of the kinds of mistreatment of prisoners by Americans that Kerry alluded to -- rather than recalled first hand -- in his Congressional testimony.) But at the time, I can't recall anyone in my military world who didn't talk about the war and about the likelihood and actuality of atrocities exactly the way Kerry did -- except that in casual conversation it was not so likely to be brought up in horror as it was to be considered a fairly natural part of what was going on over there. I don't mean every minute of every hour in every locale, but common practice. It is my experience that the wildly angry opposition to the protest position was limited severely to upper-echelon officers and the rare, gung ho, my-country-right-or-wrong, they-do-it-to-us-we-should-do-it-to-them types. I didn't run across many of those. My sense is that the huge numbers of veterans who currently revile the protests of the war are much more conservative and reactive to this stuff now than they were at the time. Clearly I can't speak for all Vietnam veterans. This is just my sense. I didn't know many Marines over there who didn't think we were in a s****y little war to make people rich, that we were getting killed for reasons far different than the ones we were told were behind our going, and that there was an awful lot of really nasty stuff being done by some people in the U.S. military. I did NOT see or hear a great deal of anger or repulsion at the latter. Most of us were 19-year-old guys trying to out-macho each other, and conversation was usually pretty crude, even if we didn't always mean what we said. I never recall anyone talking with repugnance or even distaste about how the guys from S1 would get information out of VC prisoners by hooking the prisoners' testicles up to jeep batteries. I don't doubt many of us FELT repugnance, but it was not the best or most likely place to hear that emotion expressed. Instead it was generally discussed (it happened with some frequency in and around my unit) the way high-school boys talk about sex -- with a lot of hooting and hollering and not much sensitivity on display. The fact that so many are NOW so angry with Kerry is due, I think, in part to the natural tendency toward conservatism that comes with age and in part to a refusal for purposes of self-concept and self-protection to accept or acknowledge things that I'm sure many acknowledged much more easily at the time. I was a callow youth, just like most of my fellows. When I heard the screams coming from the S1 shack and someone said, "They're cranking up the jeep battery again," I laughed along with most everyone else. It sickens me today. The difference between me and what appears to be a goodly number of other vets today is that I'm not going to pretend I never heard those screams or never even heard ABOUT them. This is the kind of thing, I'm sure, that gets people labeled traitors. But I believe in "My country, right," not "My country, right or wrong." Jim Beaver GO CUBS!!!!!!!!!
King Daevid MacKenzie, La Crosse, Wisconsin, USA How Radio is done. No brag, just fact. http://ultimajock.blogspot.com "Fear and God do not inhabit the same space." DICK GREGORY Apply for Commercial Real Estate loans online and submit your deal to dozens of hungry lenders in just minutes. Loan programs for all types of business and commercial real estate. Apply anytime at http://realestatezoo.com b i s e x u a l =============== a bifem.net publication Post message: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] List owner: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web Site: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Bisexual
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