DANGEROUS HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF

I’m a military retiree, and also a Vietnam veteran. At the so-called “end” of the Vietnam War, I was a forty year old father of six serving as the commander of a radar site (call sign “Peacock Control”) at Pleiku, in the central highlands of that war torn corner of Southeast Asia. Our military faced determined North Vietnamese and Viet Cong enemies. Vietnam was a very dangerous place. Well, that’s to be expected in a war. Combat is dangerous. People get killed. As the saying goes, “we knew the risk when we joined up.”

But the enemy combatant in Vietnam wasn’t our only danger. We also had peaceniks and politicians back home who did their best, knowingly or unknowingly, to destroy the morale of American servicemen in Vietnam. This danger to our troops is now repeating itself in Iraq, and it’s just as deadly.

In 2003, I organized a “Support our Troops Rally” and gave a speech, on the capitol steps in Juneau. A copy of that speech can be read in my March 8, 2003 blog. That speech can also speak to the demoralizing effects the 2005 current crop of peaceniks, and politicians with an agenda, to our American military in Iraq. A quote from my speech at the 2003 rally follows,

“If there’s one thing I learned in Vietnam, it’s this: there’s only one thing more important, than bombs and bullets to winning a war, whether it’s in Vietnam or Iraq – and that’s morale. It’s a direct attack on a soldier’s morale, when the terminally naïve and worse, America-haters – protest against a war a soldier is trying to win and trying to survive. When a fighting man loses his morale - he can lose his life. I’m here to tell you that it’s disheartening, and just plain dangerous, to be in a war, and not have support from the folks back home.”

A soldier - whatever his or her link in the chain-of-command - must trust their military leaders, and the top leader of the military is the president, as commander-in-chief. It’s politically disingenuous, or at the least silly, to claim to support our troops, but not their commander-in-chief, the President of the United States when we are in the middle of a war.

And yes, we are in the middle of a war. Just because the enemy doesn’t commit a 9/11 attack every other day on America soil, it is no less a war. Unfortunately, the terrorist enemy apparently has more patience in planning attacks, than some of us do in patiently sustaining the War against Terror.

Put yourself in the shoes of an American soldier in Iraq. You face unimaginable terror everyday from suicide murderers and roadside bombs hidden by cowards, and every other hardship of military duty – and peaceniks and politicians in comfort and safely back home broadcast to the enemy that you’re losing the war, your commander is a “liar” who can’t be trusted, and you shouldn’t have been in Iraq in the first place. As I said, such attacks on a soldier’s morale can kill. Shame!

It’s irresponsible and shameful to destroy the morale of our soldiers. As Winston Churchill said, “The problem is not winning the war, it’s the public letting us do it.”