History will hold the candidate responsible for pain suffered by some returning from the war.

With the upcoming presidential election in sight, it appears that the Democrats have decided to make the Vietnam War an issue. Thirty years have passed since the end of the war and now the left wants to revisit the war and rehash the past, opening old wounds for many of us and rehashing old standard myths.

This time they will be challenged.

I am a Vietnam veteran who will be proudly going to the polls and casting my vote for President George Bush.

I served in the United States Marine Corps, enlisting in 1966 and being medically retired in 1969.

Like many Vietnam veterans, I believed then as I do now that we were right in fighting that war. We won the major battles, watched our brothers in arms maimed and killed while the cowardly and misguided youth of our homeland gave aid and comfort to our enemies.

Day after day, our countrymen marched in the streets carrying signs and North Vietnamese flags in support of the people that were trying to kill us. They branded us as rapists, baby killers and psychotic killers. When many came home, they not only had to reconcile within themselves the horror they had experienced during their tour, but now had to put up with the contempt piled upon them by neighbors and former friends.

Many, ashamed of their patriotic service, faded into the woodwork, afraid to talk about their experience for fear of censure and ridicule by their peers.

When I read Christopher Beams’ Op-Ed on Feb. 15, I was not surprised at the level of contempt that he showed for Bush. But I found it strange that a person with a leftist point of view would use the label “draft dodger” when referring to the president in a disparaging way. This was because “draft dodgers” were revered by those in the antiwar movement for taking a stand against the war and their government, risking possible jail time or exile for their actions.

The class card must be played. We are all familiar with the drill. The rich and many of the middle class stayed home, leaving the fighting to the poor.

Apparently, this is just a myth. In 1992, Prof. Arnold Barnett, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Timothy Stanley, a U.S. Army captain stationed at West Point, conducted a study of those 58,000 plus patriots killed in the Vietnam War. Their study revealed that 26 percent of those who died were from families in the upper third of this country. Another 44 percent were from the middle class, and 30 percent were from this country’s lower class. That’s 70 percent of the middle and upper class to 30 percent of the lowest class of our country. These figures refute the myth that it was a poor man’s war.

Lastly, let us look at John Kerry.

Here is a decorated veteran who served honorably in Vietnam only to return stateside and join a ragtag group known as Vietnam Veterans Against the War. This group was started by six Vietnam veterans who met at a peace rally in 1967.

In 1971, the group, along with Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland and other antiwar activists, convened the Winter Soldiers Investigation in Detroit. They took testimony of alleged atrocities committed by soldiers serving in Vietnam from veterans who would fail the simplest test for truthfulness. These questionable accounts were later read into the Congressional record.

John Kerry became part of this group, and in April 1971 participated in a demonstration in Washington called Dewey Canyon III, where he and other vets threw their medals over the White House fence. Later in the week, he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, giving what appeared to be an off-the-cuff impassioned speech railing against the war and those who were fighting it. It turns out that a man named Adam Walinsky, a Kennedy speechwriter, was the author of those impassioned remarks.

Like many other Vietnam veterans, I hold Kerry in contempt for his actions after his military service. I hold him responsible for the pain and hardships suffered by those who he is now trying to court.

I hope history will set a place for him beside another American hero gone bad – Benedict Arnold.

Robert E. Macdonald is the commandant of the Central Maine Detachment of the Marine Corps League, commander of American Legion Post 210 and Americanism officer for the Veterans of Foreign Wars Lewiston Post 9150. He lives in Lewiston.

Copy the Story Link