Two Views

As the war in Iraq continues day after day, each time I hear John McCain or George Bush extol the benefits of the U.S. continuing to have a presence there, my blood starts boiling. A friend’s husband just returned after 18 months of service. He is an Arizona National Guardsman; he has a teenage daughter; he has a job; he flies the American flag outside his home. He came into the store in his combat fatigues to say hello; I thanked him for his service to our country and I cried because I was so glad that he arrived back in Arizona in one piece. Others haven’t been so lucky and we now have 4000 grieving families and friends in this country who have sacrificed a son or a daughter to a war that in my mind is not a war to be won; a war that is not our business; a war that requires that money we need here on our own shores– for medical insurance, for education, for the arts, for people who live in dire poverty–be spent on guns and killing and windfalls for unethical corporations.

My brother-in-law, Terry Kindlon, was in Vietnam. He almost died there when a bullet took off the top of his skull. His fellow Marines rescued him and got him into a helicopter and he spent months in a hospital. He, not George Bush, can speak about patriotism and what it means to sacrifice and pay the personal price that being a soldier requires. Daniel Shorr served in WWII. He, too, has thoughts about what we call patriotism.

Here is the link to Daniel Shorr’s NPR editorial and Terry’s OP ED piece in the Albany Times Union is reprinted below.

Bush’s view of war an insult to all

By TERENCE L. KINDLON
First published: Monday, March 24, 2008 in the Albany Times Union

“If I were slightly younger .. I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines. … It must be exciting … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger.” — President Bush, March 13

On the day after Christmas in 1967, I found a young Marine quietly lying on his back near the perimeter wire at our temporary base south of DaNang. He was just a boy, maybe 18, and he looked relaxed, as if he had drifted off to sleep under a warm sun while fishing. But he wasn’t asleep. He was dead and gone, taken down by a sniper’s bullet shot through the center of his chest. When I checked for a pulse he was still warm.

The same day I found that dead Marine, another young man, George W. Bush, then a senior at Yale, was probably home for Christmas vacation. Mr. Bush, 21 and just a few months from graduation, was at an ideal age to enlist in the military, where he could have had — to use his words — the fantastic, exciting experience, in some ways romantic, of confronting danger as a second lieutenant on the front lines of Vietnam. If he wanted, he could have actually had the exact same kind of combat experience he rhapsodized about just a few days ago.

Unfortunately, after graduation in 1968, he decided to cut and run instead.

Back when he was the right age, when a perfect opportunity to experience the glory of war was staring him in the face, instead of volunteering for the draft or enlisting in the Marines, instead of aiming an M-16 at the Viet Cong and taunting them to “Bring it on!” our future president timidly chose to stay home. So the sad, unavoidable truth is that rather than, “you know, confronting danger,” as did so many of his braver and more patriotic contemporaries, Mr. Bush used his family’s influence to join a safe, stateside Air Guard unit.

By now claiming to have found his inner Rambo, Mr. Bush seems like he’s lost touch with reality. Now, sounding more hypocritical, bewildered and tone deaf than usual, he has dishonored generations of combat veterans, living and dead, by dramatically misunderstanding, and thus trivializing, their courageous sacrifices.

To hear him speak it almost sounds like he thinks war is a fun place to spend an afternoon. Sort of like Disneyland. Or the beach — Muscle Beach, not Omaha Beach.

Only someone like Mr. Bush, who’s never been in combat or held the hand of a dying Marine in the aftermath of an ambush or heard the sickening sound a bullet makes when it screams past, can be naive or foolish enough to think there is any glory in war. Any real combat veteran knows better.

There is no glory in battle, only terror, massive jolts of adrenaline and a tangle of grotesque sights, sounds and smells that will eventually calcify into memories that will never go away.

And now, as we prepare to bury the 4,000th American killed in action, it is clear that if Mr. Bush had learned about the realities of combat as a young man in Vietnam, he might have had the wisdom when he became the President to stay the hell out of Iraq.

Terence L. Kindlon is an Albany lawyer and a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War. His e-mail address is tkindlon@aol.com.