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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels September 7, 2004 An issue that won't win Too bad Kerry is trapped in this argument about whether he was a genuine hero in the Vietnam War. At least we know he was not a slacker, but the comparison of a bemedalled combat veteran with a man who could only lamely cite an honorable discharge from a trainee assignment at home as his war record - maybe even that attributable to family influence - is unlikely to help him. The problem is the nature of the U.S. experience in Vietnam. It was not a hero's war. It was a war that tens of thousands decided, to their honor, not to participate in and opposed more courageously than the present Commander-in-Chief did; the war where officers got fragged; the war in which the class divide between officers and "men" was practically revolutionary; the war that produced scores of new-found enemies of war, even swearing never again to take up arms in any cause. It generated guilt, rage, shame, internal hatred in the ranks such as now may be quite genuinely directed against Kerry, without necessarily any stirring up by the covert war evaders, most prominent of whom are Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz. It gave birth to more post-war trauma, suicide, wrecked existences than the immediate battleground fighting itself. Of course, the ultimate national disgrace was that we didn't win it. Remember Bush's dad: "Thank God, we've licked the Vietnam syndrome" (i.e. as though it had been a medical condition), after the "First War of Iraq," or words to that effect. But we hadn't buried the syndrome after all. Kerry's ballyhooed combat record gets hung up on continuing ambivalence while, ironically, now-show, drop-out Bush is not much hurt by his history if not being, as Kerry put it, not so triumphantly after all, at the Democratic Convention, "present for duty." Imagine what Bush's political fate would have been if he had absented himself from a WW I.I.-like call to arms after enlisting; the discharge then might have been dishonorable, even dad, too, disowning him. Hal Jamison USAF (ret.) Ashland What about 9/11 terrorists? Thanks to Gerald Cavanaugh for his letter (Aug 23). He wrote, "America must wake up to the fact that there is no enemy out there that is a threat to our existence as a nation." I could have sworn America was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, by Muslim terrorists. Obviously, I was wrong. Whew, what a relief! Maynard Telpner Ashland DailyTidings.com Home Page Valley&State | Backpage | O&E | Sports | Archives | Weather | Classifieds Columnists | Faith&Beliefs | Obituaries | Revels | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2004 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Click Here Site Search: .:Advertisements:. RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams