Dead Cant Rant

Hackworth’s latest column is a carefully disguised hit piece against Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth. “Carefully disguised” because he couches it in the language of the war-weary veteran who only cares about the welfare of “his” soldiers. He even praises President Bush for flying F-102 fighter jets — though he does call him a draft-dodger:

Sure, Bush dodged the draft, along with a reported 14 million other Americans with the savvy to work out that Vietnam was a no-win, sorry war. But although he had the luck and the connections to land a spot in the Air Guard, he did put his butt on the line flying a machine for which he was entitled to hazardous-duty pay – and that’s because zooming around in a jet fighter was and still is highly dangerous.

Does he mean to imply that the 25,000 Guardsmen who served in Vietnam were draft dodgers as well? Many of them certainly joined in the expectation that they, too, could avoid combat in Vietnam. But when duty called, they answered, just like their active duty brethren.

He then goes on to say:

But politics and style aside, Kerry did serve with distinction in Vietnam when he easily could have avoided that killing field.
…
The stalwart Brown Water Navy warriors who fought at Kerry’s side say he was A-OK, which is good enough for me.

He then proceeds to call the Swift Vets “muckrakers,” “Swiftboat snipers” and “liars.” The man is an unbelievable — well, hack.

We have no intention of denigrating Hackworth’s service and experiences in Vietnam, nor anybody else’s; we whole-heartedly respect their sacrifice. However, Hackworth’s memory regarding Vietnam seems to be selective: on the one hand, he lauds his service in Vietnam as uniquely positioning him to comment on current world affairs; while on the other hand, he refers to Vietnam as a “killing field.” It is rather disturbing that he would appropriate the term used to describe the 2 million deaths that occurred under Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia. The implication is that the only victims of the “killing fields” were Americans, while the lives of the Cambodians who died in the real Killing Fields were unimportant.

Equally disturbing is the fact that the Khmer Rouge were pushed into the Cambodian interior when the U.S. and South Vietnamese troops entered the country in an attempt to remove the North Vietnamese presence — an attempt that would never have been necessary were it not for the American protesters prolonging the war. When the media promoted the 1968 Tet Offensive as an American failure and protesters took to the streets demanding an immediate withdrawal, the North Vietnamese, on the verge of collapse, became emboldened and knew they would eventually win the war. The protesters lost the war for the United States and the free people of South Vietnam — protesters like Jane Fonda, John Kerry, and Colonel David Hackworth. In Hackworth’s own words:

I suspect the decades-long fury is still fueled by Kerry’s high-profile anti-war stance when he returned home. A position that was taken by hundreds of thousands of other Viet vets, including myself in 1971.

General Vo Nguyen Giap, commander of the North Vietnamese Army, said in his 1985 memoir:

“[I]f it were not for the disunity created by… stateside protests, Hanoi would have ultimately surrendered.”

Not only did they lose the war, they condemned 2 million Cambodians to death under the Khmer Rouge. Because the war was prolonged, we had to enter Cambodia to drive out the North Vietnamese. This stirred up the Khmer hornets nest, driving them into the center of the country and into direct conflict with the pro-U.S. government. The rest is tragic history. Had the North Vietnamese remained convinced they were going to lose the war after their crushing military defeat during Tet 1968, the war could have been over by 1970. There would have been no North Vietnamese Army inside Cambodia, therefore Pol Pot would have remained a minor nuisance to Lon Nol and the Cambodian Government — a nuisance that American military advisors could have dealt with, quietly and efficiently. Instead, the ensuing chaos made it possible for Pol Pot to overthrow the Lon Nol government and begin his reign of terror.

We had the opportunity to actually meet Hackworth and were considerably unimpressed. He immediately struck us as a patronizing, vainglorious ink slinger who believes that when it comes to the military he is solely qualified to opine. When he walks into the room, all available oxygen is sucked into his head.

At the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans we found him surrounded by a small crowd, orating his bleeding heart out. I asked him, “If the draft is re-instated, should women be drafted for combat positions as well?” His response was a curt, “Of course!” This is oddly hypocritical, because on his own web site he regularly complains — rightly so — about the damage being done to military readiness and unit cohesion by soaring pregnancy rates and the inevitable personal relationships that develop between male and female troops. His review of The Kinder, Gentler Military is even more scathing:

What the British longbow did to the French army at Crecy in 1346, the failed military policy on gender integration has done to the U.S. armed forces at the end of the twentieth century: near total destruction.

The point here being that not unlike his fellow Vietnam Vet™ John Kerry, the effusive Colonel Hackworth seems to have a proclivity to prevaricate as he pontificates on the subject of all things military; i.e. his desire to “please the crowd” by softening his stance and telling them what he thinks they want to hear while writing his “real” opinions where he believes his fellow veterans will be more likely to read them — his website and his op-ed page column.

Popularity is a harsh taskmaster.

He closes:

Hopefully, too, these angry, troubled vets still haunted by the Vietnam War will eventually find closure. But one thing I know for sure – it won’t come from fratricide.

One can’t help but wonder if Hackworth doesn’t consider the protests by fellow Vietnam veterans — himself and John Kerry included — “fratricide” against those who were still held in North Vietnamese prisons. By portraying those depicted in the Swift Vet ads, including a POW held and tortured for seven years, as “liars”, he comes perilously close to echoing the sentiments of Jane Fonda when she called the Vietnam POWs “hypocrites and pawns,” insisting that, “Tortured men do not march smartly off planes, salute the flag, and kiss their wives. They are liars. I also want to say that these men are not heroes.”

Colonel Hackworth and Jane Fonda both call the same men “liars.” Our question to Colonel Hackworth is: Do you really want to be associated with a person as deplorable as Jane Fonda?

Maybe Colonel Hackworth should consider the impact of his words before he next puts pen to paper. After all, his words are read by the same veterans who were betrayed by Fonda — and if not the veterans, their next of kin.