THE BONESMAN AND HIS BOXES

THE UNNECESSARY CRUELTY OF KERRY'S CAMPAIGN PROVES HE IS UNFIT TO BE PRESIDENT

This weekend I saw the protest in Washington held by Vietnam veterans opposing John Kerry's candidacy, based on his actions after he left his Vietnam service to become a willing useful idiot for the North Vietnamese. Any American who saw this event should be on the warpath today. The speakers, many of whom had suppressed the horrible memories of Vietnam and its aftermath in their long and otherwise ordinary lives, related how Kerry's statements before the Congress and his "Winter Soldier evidence" made their lives more miserable--while they were in country, when they came back to this ungrateful country, and ever after, ever since.

Let me make this clear. My primary differences with John Kerry pre-exist my learning of the extent to which he manipulated his war record and treasonously gave the enemy what it wanted by way of confession. My cutpoint for Kerry comes in other character issues, policies, the people with whom he surrounds himself, and his generally untrustworthy, self-aggrandizing Brahmin nature. There is plenty of Kerry for me to reject him without resorting to the cold case files of Vietnam that have recently been opened on both sides (though not BY both sides.)

But perhaps the worst thing Kerry has done, perhaps the most egregiously selfish act of his entire life has been, paradoxically, to wrap himself in the American flag at the Democratic National Convention and declare himself to be "reporting for duty."

For those who have long harbored a visceral hatred of the Fonda-Kerry crowd--the kind of hatred one can only know after years of festering misery, frustration, and shame--the idea of a Kerry presidency is a slap in the face. It tells them that the "loving" flower children that spit on them and threw bags of feces on returning vets, even the disabled, were right all along. It signals to them the possibility that the country they bled for, the country their comrades-in-arms died for, the country they were tortured for, the country they have maintained a strained and desperate allegiance to, to this very day--that country has determined by election that their efforts were, in fact, in vain.

If John Kerry and his theory of American error is allowed to be taken as fact beyond the rarified halls of the academic, political, and media elite, it will be the last gutshot to a generation of fine young men who did their duty, were tortured for their loyalty, and came back to no reward. It will be the triumphant howl of the draft-dodger and the tenured radical shouting down the patriotic hymns of American exceptionalism that have, though battered, survived the ravages of time and the revisionists of history. It is a cruel and nasty form of piling on, one the radical element of the Democrat left cannot resist--but one that Kerry should have been a better man than to have participated in.

Regardless of the Swift Boat veterans' accusations, this was the wrong time to bring Vietnam back into the national consciousness. To bring up a still controversial and divisive war while we are in the middle of a war for the very survival of Western Civilization is utterly without precedent. It is foolish and it is dangerous.

For a supposedly principled politician to purposely drive a wedge between Americans at war by insisting on his vision of another war is an unconscionable use of his public access. So long as Vietnam remains the battleground of the American psyche, and so long as the Iraq War is used to stand in for Vietnam, this nation is at risk. If we cannot agree that the war on terror is, regardless of the past, a war of necessity, a war of survival, and a war we must win, we will remain paralyzed and polarized. The Democrats do not care enough for the safety of this nation in the 21st century to give up their quest to take home the trophy on Vietnam.

The veterans of Vietnam have gone on with their lives, doing their best to help make a nation, as their forebears of nearly every generation before has done. American gratitude to her fighting men (and now women) has always been a source of honor and dignity. America honors her war dead. And, until Kerry's beloved revolution came, she honored her returning soldiers, as well.

By this time, one would think the nation would have healed. But it never could, because the patriotism of the Vietnam veterans could never be spoken after the war. The forces of radical pacifism had, in their own minds, ended a war and brought down a president. They were ascendent. It was to be the Age of Aquarius, a peaceful, loving time. Everyone was supposed to move on with their lives.

Except, as is always the case with the left, they never bothered with the healing. While there were therapeutic circles to which one could turn to learn how to deal with Vietnam guilt, or to manage post-traumatic stress disorder, where were the reconciliations sought or apologies offered by those who had taunted, teased, and trashed the returning heroes in ways that would make Lord of the Flies look like a Bahai tea party? Where were the imprecations to the hippies and the radicals to apologize for their part in the vicious battle of hard-hats and long-hairs? Why is it the left is always forcing other people to apologize, even when they give as good as they get in the fight?

John Kerry, by claiming his right to the presidency rests on a single, painful, divisive moment of American history, has torn open this wound and now the maggots of the left are in full squirm. Make no mistake--whatever Kerry's motivation may have been, the far left loves this argument. They won't be satisfied until the last American flag has been burned and the last American soldier has been brought by the truth squads before their 21st century Red Guard (though today they've changed the uniform to blue, thanks to Comrade Rather). They won't rest until every child whose parent served "understands" who was "really" right. They can't, because they know that maintaining a lie requires constant vigilance. The truth will, if not artificially suppressed, denied, and re-written, rise to the surface and be found.

There are veterans of Vietnam who have never stopped hearing the shots in their heads and smelling the blood in their lonely late night. There are those who put their uniforms in a trunk somewhere and tried to forget and go on. When I was working on my dissertation, an analysis of the image of Vietnam veterans Hollywood gave us, I met many men whose anger and bitterness and rage at those who sent them was matched only by the same emotions for those who forced them into silence when they returned. The very idea of dragging these walking wounded back through one of the worst moments of their lives--with the intention of denigrating their choice to serve and remain loyal to the nation--is simply unthinkable. I cannot imagine the callousness that can deliberately, for partisan political gain, bring this horrific episode back to the stage.

John McCain, the still proud warrior who has risen to the top in politics and in the esteem of many, speaks little of his own experience as a prisoner of war in the so-called "Hanoi Hilton." When all of this came up, he refused to make comment on Kerry's Vietnam service. No one listened to him, but he wished out loud that we could leave this 35-year old episode to fade into history.

But Kerry didn't let that happen. Instead, he orchestrated (or allowed to be orchestrated) a convention whose front and center claim was that Kerry's fitness for office was to be judged not by his 20 years on the public payroll, but by his moment in the sun 35 years ago, when he was winning medals (and filming himself for posterity) in Vietnam. He allowed a book to be written that purported to tell the story of his stunning heroism. He claimed to be proud to have been a soldier.

But it could never have worked. Unless he is utterly self-absorbed, he must have known that there were veterans and their families who had never forgotten the misery his words had inflicted on them. He had to have known there were those whose first-hand knowledge would refute his claims. At the very least, he should have suspected that there might even be those out there willing to say anything, do anything to get revenge on him and keep him from being president.

Yet he came to Boston and stood in the teeth of those whose bodies had been tortured based on his testimony, those whose minds had been tortured by the image of themselves his self-serving words had painted, those whose children and grandchildren had never been able to get them to say a word about their experiences--because people like John Kerry had pre-empted the story. Once Kerry had won the American debate on Vietnam--quite literally so, on the Dick Cavett show in 1971, against the very John O'Neill that now spearheads Swift Boat Veterans for Truth--their voices would not be heard.

Having put in motion the cultural mechanism that would shut down any attempt the veterans could have made to tell their own stories, Kerry abandoned them, moving on to become a rather unremarkable, though well-connected, Senator. He could have stayed there. He could have even come to this very moment of his life, running for the presidency, without mentioning his Vietnam experience. He could have, like President Bush, included it only as an incidental part of the resume, one you might miss if you blinked during the convention. He could have challenged his fellow member of Yale's Skull and Bones on the basis of almost anything else you could imagine, any shared aspects of their lives and history. Or he could have just stuck to "the issues."

But he didn't.

He opened this box and showed us his medals. But they weren't really there, because he threw them away. Or maybe he didn't. Or maybe they were ribbons.

When his fellow Swift Boat officers replied to what they consider his egregious lies, Kerry tried to shut the box. He held it over his head like a banner, but he didn't want us to look in any more. Instead, he went looking for President Bush's box.

But President Bush hasn't made the contents of his box an issue in the campaign. Its contents aren't the basis of his qualification for office. They weren't last time, and now that he has a track record as president, they aren't this time, either.

And now other men are coming forward to show us what's in their boxes. Long sealed from public view, sources of shame and guilt, these boxes aren't shiny and nice like Kerry's--and most of them aren't inconsequential like Bush's.

Theirs are the boxes that no one wanted to look in. Their boxes are full of bones and fear, of frustrated ambitions, of limbs and loves lost, of trust betrayed, of dignity denied. Like zombies staggering through the graveyard, these men thrust their boxes forward at Kerry, demanding that he finally look, that he finally see. For in them are their ruined reputations, their mental anguish, the blood of comrades, and the spit of hippies.

And now Kerry doesn't want to look. He wants to talk about something else. He wants to run away to the safety of Social Security and health care and the economy. He wants the accusations to stop, the boxes to close, the men and women whose 30-plus years he stole to go away.

But this is the graveyard he made. Now let him lie in it.