NYT frontpage on SBVT effect on Nam vets: "Will this wound ever go away?"

[DeepModem Mom]

This article is posted in Articles and Editorials, but its subject has been discussed with some emotion in GD, as some among us are directly affected. I thought GDers might want to see it here.


Wounds Opened Anew as Vietnam Resurfaces
By TIMOTHY EGAN

Published: August 26, 2004

Many of them are bent and broken, grayer and wider. Some carry shrapnel from a step too far, an ambush replayed over and over. All carry memories. And now as the debate over service 35 years ago in a war that will not entirely fade roils the presidential campaign, Vietnam veterans wonder if they are doomed to take the arguments that divided a nation to their graves.

"It really upsets me, pitting one Vietnam veteran against another," said Frank Stephens, 55, of Granite Falls, Wash., who received a Purple Heart after being wounded during his Army tour in Vietnam in 1969. "I feel like the politicians are using us. They just won't let that war go."...

***

They profess to be brothers, and in veterans halls around the country the men who fought in Vietnam emphasized their common bonds and a view that most of the country may never understand them. But the advertisements by one group of veterans attacking the war record of Mr. Kerry, advertisements that are closely tied to supporters of President Bush, have reopened wounds about class and service and frayed some of the unifying threads....

***

It is unclear how the advertisements will affect the vote of the nation's 26.5 million veterans. Mr. Kerry had hoped his war record would help him to make significant inroads with a group that tends to vote Republican. A poll by CBS News last week showed a drop in veteran support for Mr. Kerry, but the margin of sampling error in that poll, plus or minus eight percentage points, of the small number of veterans sampled, 144, was too large to give a true picture of veterans' sentiment, other pollsters said. But interviews with veterans across the country found a hard-edged cynicism about both Mr. Kerry's using his Vietnam service to advance his candidacy and Mr. Bush for his ties to a group that has renewed some of the divisions of a long-gone war....

ON EDIT: Adding a statement by Colleen Helmstetter, who served with the Army Nurse Corps in Vietnam in 1970 and '71, made at the Portland protest against Deputy District Attorney Alfred French, one of the SBVT: "This Swift boat stuff is making life very, very difficult for Vietnam veterans, no matter who they support for president....Will this wound ever go away?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/politics/campaign/26voices.html

[Nashyra]

1. Why doesn't the Kerry campaign

come out with a spokesperson to counter, "Kerry based his convention and campaign on Vietnam so he asked for this" with NOOOOOOOOOO the * landed on an aircraft carrier to claim mission accomplished for a photo op, he was USING the armed forces for a photo op, he was again misleading the American people for a photo op, and John Kerry knows the dangers of a political war continuing and the wounds that evolve for the country and compare Vietnam to Iraq so that there can be a distinction on why Vietnam is important. The Vietnam war escalated 58,000 men lost their lives because of the lies of the Gulf of Tonkin and the same thing is happening in Iraq where we went to war on a falsehood. Have the spokesperson ask, will it take the draft, 58,000 lives on a black wall for us to leave Iraq? John Kerry presented to the American people that he knew what war was all about, he volunteered, the * stayed stateside with help of his dad, and they should point out that * requested NOT to go to Vietnam, so Kerry is more qualified to end the war because he has seen the horrors of war, and as respect to his testifying against war crimes why don't they invoke Abhu Garihb and the fact that the whistle blower and his family are now under protective custody from death threats.