Every time I think the Vietnam War is over, it comes back. Like a stick of political dynamite coated with Krazy Glue, we just can’t shake it off.
That’s how Bobby Muller, president of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, must feel. Every so often something happens that brings more chatter than usual about that war to the telephones in his Washington headquarters.
It happened in 1988 when questions arose about whether GOP vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle pulled strings to jump ahead of waiting lists for the Indiana National Guard so he could avoid the draft.
It happened in 1992 when Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s 1969 “draft letter” surfaced in which he thanked a ROTC colonel for “saving” him from the draft.
And it is happening again. Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, a bona fide war hero, has unexpectedly aroused the passions of Vietnam-era veterans who want either to help him get to the White House or to smear his later anti-war protests.
And President Bush is beating back allegations that he was AWOL from his wartime duty with the Texas Air National Guard.
“We have had a deep reservoir of veteran angst rising to the surface,” Muller told me in an interview. “This [election campaign] is almost a referendum on the war itself.”
Muller is in a wheelchair. He was leading an assault as a Marine lieutenant in April, 1969 near Vietnam’s demilitarized zone when a bullet severed his spinal cord and left him paralyzed from the chest down. That bullet changed him in many ways. “Back in the world,” which was what Viet vets called the USA, he became a lead spokesman for a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War, along with another young veteran, former Navy Lt. John F. Kerry.
After that era, Muller co-founded the Vietnam Veterans of America in 1978, the only national group chartered by Congress for Vietnam veterans. The foundation followed in 1980 as a service organization for clearing away old land mines and other humanitarian missions.
Should Kerry’s and Bush’s war years be an issue? Yes, says Muller, “It addresses one’s capacity to be commander in chief. That is naturally going to be a public concern.”
Besides, I would add, Vietnam was a defining moment for us Baby Boomers. Nothing rips open our old wounds like questions surrounding our fellow Boomers in pursuit of the White House.
Last week, Bush told NBC’s Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” that he would release all records regarding his National Guard service. A couple of days later, White House officials said instead that they would release only those records they thought were appropriate. On Friday evening, the White House released a large stack of records that still provided no evidence that Bush did any military service in Alabama, to which he had requested a transfer in the last two years of his six-year commitment.
Bush’s surrogates, official and unofficial, try desperately to smear Kerry. Unable to strip him of his record of courage under fire, pro-Bush Web sites, publications and talk shows portray Kerry’s post-war protests as if he were a handmaiden of Moscow and Jane Fonda.
Gee, imagine questioning someone’s patriotism for criticizing the government’s war policy. Sound familiar?
Of course, there were quite a few soldiers and sailors who appreciated those efforts to bring our troops home alive from Vietnam. By the time Kerry and Muller were protesting the war, almost everyone agreed it was a meat grinder. I remember. I was drafted in late 1969, eight months after Muller was paralyzed.
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Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara admits that he, too, had given up on our ability to win the war as early as 1967, but didn’t know how to get us out of it.
On the issue of who served, another Vietnam vet, Secretary of State Colin Powell, said in his 1995 autobiography, “My American Journey,” that “I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well placed and so many professional athletes … managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units. Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country.”
Flash forward. Powell berated Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) for mentioning during a budget hearing last week that Bush “may have gone AWOL.” Powell fumed. “Just don’t go there,” he told Brown.
Too bad. I wish we could “go there.” I’d like to know what Powell thinks these days about those sons of the powerful and well placed. Maybe we’ll have to wait for his next book.
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