My new Special Forces friend had a problem. The VA said the wars he fought in never happened. His other Special Forces Indian buddies were growing marijuana he said and there would be a raid next week but not where the Special Forces that never fought wars were. Even the drug warriors knew better than to take them on outside of spraying them from the air.
It was much the same with a childhood friend of my son. The pains were all in his head as were his wars. That he spent months in a wheelchair with doctors declaring he would never walk again was probably his own damn fault as was the conviction of convenience that cost him his freedom and loss of all pay for doing some real hurt to a South Korean officer who had put a pistol to his ear to enforce an illegal order. The penalties in that case were shortly overturned and pay and rank were all restored after the diplomatic problem blew over but not before his lovely family declared they knew he was no good and would never amount to anything. I finally understood the chip on Steve’s shoulder when he was young.
I didn’t really fight in one of those non-wars but I was blown up on a bus. One buddy somehow made it to the Wall in D.C. though he was another peacetime veteran of a war that wasn’t happening then. When I got out of the non-war, Jack F. Kennedy was promising a real non-war with assassination squads which would really fix those dang commies if he got elected. JFK also promised to close that horrid Eisenhower missile gap that was pure imagination. I foolishly told a very large bar fighter that his hero JFK would get us deeper into a war that we would lose. The sucker punch I never saw coming did more damage than the Viet Cong bomb had.
Some of us idiots never learn.
Oh yeah, Hagel. At least he was in a recognized war and no doubt he was a hero. And he has shown some ability to learn despite being a Republican.
The sickening effort to defame Chuck Hagel as anti-Semitic and anti-Israel has been comprehensively debunked, in detail, while its neoconservative authors – notably the convicted liar Eliot Abrams – have once more disgraced themselves…
http://www.nationalmemo.com/ha…
Ridiculous. No neocon was ever even embarrassed, let alone disgraced, for being shown to be an unconscionable liar. That is the definition of neocon.
I like Vietnam vets, official or non-official, because [blush] I am one. And Hagel has some admirable qualities, like that strange rudimentary ability to learn despite being a Republican. And maybe particularly because he is no general.
But his statements as a right-to-lifer are a match for those of Akins and Mourdock. I am delighted to learn Rachel Maddow has caught on. Bright lady though a bit late on that.
Do we really need such a hero as Defense Secretary? Will women now love him, so to speak?
Beats me.
Best, Terry