Vietnam and Truth

24 August 2004, By Todd Gitlin

Ghost war

excerpt:

And as for the charge that Kerry "betrayed" his comrades, Crandell insists: "The whole point we made was that the war crimes came from above." Kerry said the same in Washington in 1971. He repeated it on "Meet the Press."

And yet on Aug. 23, as if nothing at all had been learned from decades of scholarship and journalism, CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked former presidential advisor David Gergen whether Kerry should apologize for what he said about the war.

He didn't ask whether Robert S. McNamara should apologize. He didn't ask whether Henry Kissinger should apologize. He didn't ask whether Dick Cheney and George W. Bush should apologize for their support of a wrong war. (As recently as his interview with Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" on April 18, Bush repeated the right-wing stab-in-the-back demagogy that what had been wrong with the Vietnam War was that the civilians had run it.) Responsibility has never been George W. Bush's game. He represents the America that refuses to be sorry, and the unscrupulous John O'Neill does his dirty work as he did for that spiritual guide, Richard Nixon.

Some thought Kerry was overdoing his Vietnam credentials with his theatrics of "reporting for duty." But Kerry was on to an essential truth about the America that emerged from Vietnam: That duty begins when you open your eyes in the dark face of reality. It is the same truth with which he closed his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee 33 years ago:



"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. But all that they have done, and all that they can do by this denial, is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission: To search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war; to pacify our own hearts; to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last 10 years and more. And more. And so, when, 30 years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say 'Vietnam' and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned, and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning."


Complete article at SALON.COM (subscription or FREE DAY PASS): Ghost War