Reply #7: This attitude you encounter has a history.

[Waiting For Everyman]

I'm the widow of a VN combat vet, married 25 years, so I'll answer for my husband. From the age of 19 until he died at 59, he was chronically ill from what he went through in the war, 100% disabled at the age of 33 and finally paralyzed the last 5 years. I was a 1960's protester, but he was a combat vet! From hearing about my experiences, he came to understand "the divide and conquer" technique that was used here between protesters and vets, which has held ever since. He fairly quickly realized that the war protesters had been on his side as you said, and also why most vets didn't realize it - because a small minority of "instigated" jerks treated returning vets abominably. He knew for himself how active COINTELPRO was then, and how easy that anti-vet sentiment was to stir up with peer pressure among (rather ignorant) college students (mostly by inflaming them with the My Lai incident).

Who did the divide between protesters and returning vets benefit? Nixon, of course! (If protesters and vets had joined together, Nixon would've been gone in a heartbeat - all those boomers were of voting age by then.)

It was no different than the smear/spin we're still familiar with today, and it's part of the "cultural divide" we still have today. It was never addressed or refuted, but left as it was to sink in even deeper into the American consciousness, until now, it's simply taken as "common knowledge" with a lot of people, that criticism=disloyal. We see where that thinking got us with Iraq. It's also evident in the "Dems can't be Commander in Chief" meme.

This "you're against the troops" feeling when anyone criticizes the mission goes back to that VN experience. You are exactly right, and coincidentally I just today posted the information below on General Smedley Butler, in a thread that probably won't be read much, but since he happens to be relevant to this thread too, I'll paste it in further down.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=3530947&mesg_id=3530971

It's useful to know about what Butler had to say because he wasn't an "outsider civilian" or protester making these points, but one of "their own"; he was drawing attention to "the mission" of the military as you said. He went right to the heart of it, and it's still no different today, sad to say. I'd strongly suggest that people look into what General Smedley Butler had to say about how our military is used and abused, and his criticism about the treatment of our veterans - it's nothing new. Google him, because there's much more than what I'll provide here, this is just a start. After he retired, he let Americans know about his experiences and what he came to know about our military and how it's used, in a book he wrote "War is a Racket", and in speaking engagements he continued until he died, to wake up the public on this important subject.

Butler was by far THE most popular figure among vets in the country between the two World Wars, because he so staunchly stood up for them, and cared about exactly the concerns you bring up. For this, he had the vets' loyalty to such a degree, the RW Corporatists even tried to recruit him to lead a "coup" against FDR because it was known that all the vets would follow him. Instead, Butler tipped FDR off to the plans, and it was prevented.

For those unfamiliar with him:

Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, one of the most colorful officers in the Marine Corps' long history, was one of the two Marines who received two Medals of Honor for separate acts of outstanding heroism. General Butler was still in his teens when, on 20 May 1898, he was appointed a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps during the Spanish-American War. In the early part of the last century General Butler led assault troops in Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Mexico and Haiti. He was a regimental commander in France during World War I and later served in China. On 1 October 1931, he was retired upon his own application after completion of 33 years' service in the Marine Corps. Major General Butler died at the Naval Hospital, Philadelphia, on 21 June 1940, following a four-week illness.

After his retirement General Butler wrote a book WAR IS A RACKET, which begins as follows:

"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

And in a speech delivered in 1933, General Butler said:

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

General Butler has had a naval destroyer, a military base and a chapter of Veterans for Peace (the 'Smed Butts') named for him. He is loved and quoted not only in the United States, but around the world.

www.warisaracket.org
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McCain is all for the kind of military we have had though. He's coming from the same mindset.

I fought the VA for my husband's claim from 1984 until it was finally conceded in 1990. He had tried when he came back from VN and got nowhere. I can tell you 100% that from 1984 until now, *every time* the Repubs got control of Congress, veterans' benefits were cut and eliminated. I was shocked by this at first, because I had no idea that our veterans were not taken care of my Uncle Sam. Each and every time, it has been the Dems restoring these cuts - and it's a laborious process - proposing bills over and over to get one passed once in a while. When Repub presidents are in, that's the worst, because then the agency heads are Repub too, including the head of the VA. And the regulations of the VA, which are directed from the Secretary at the top, really have more to do with vets receiving care or not, than the law itself does. The VA creates regs which are loopholes for getting around the law. That is extremely hard 1) to find out about; and 2) to stop. Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) has fought this her entire career, and done SO much - and I know because she started helping us when she was brand new in government and we had just filed the VA claim. She revamped the VA several times, resulting in the "improvements" you hear about - in the 1980s it was unbelievably bad. PTSD wasn't even recognized as a disability! She sent one of her top aides into a hospital on a phone call from me for help once (I had no idea she'd do that), and she ended up catching a huge ring among the VA hospital staff stealing vets' medication, and then blaming it on the vets!!! Oh wow, you'd never seen anybody as mad as she was - and she turned it into action. Those at the Baltimore VA Regional office still quake in their boots at the mere mention of her name. For some reason she has never publicized all she has done, so most vets don't even know about it. She changed the entire VA system quite a bit - for the better.