Hovig

It beggars belief that after thirty years of damning Vietnam vets and their leaderhip from all sides and angles, the enlightened view has suddenly become that Vietnam was a “defensive” war (not to mention the now-universal pride [as opposed to reluctant acceptance] in electing a Vietnam War participant to office).

Thank you!

I’m having trouble figuring out what it is I’m trying to say about John Kerry, and why I find his promoting of his service-to-his-country so offensive. Your post is a big help.

All of a sudden, in the John Kerry narrative, Vietnam is a defensive war.

How did that happen?

I think this is why the liberals I’ve seen so far found the Kerry-at-War movie so off-putting.

A liberal who still believes Vietnam was–what did Hitchens call it? a “filthy and immoral war”? something along those lines?–doesn’t then see Kerry as a hero for having “served.”

And it seems to me that liberals who’ve changed their views over time may be reacting negatively for much the same reason, though this is the thing I’m having trouble either understanding or expressing.

I think liberals everywhere, both pro- and con-, are having an “I didn’t get the memo” moment.

The sudden redefinition of Vietnam hasn’t gone completely unnoticed by liberal writers. Michael Wolff had a piece in the last VANITY FAIR that would aggravate everyone here no end (it was pretty hard to take), but that is probably worth reading because he grapples with the fact that, as he says, Vietnam is now becoming “our war”–”our” meaning liberals. Thanks to the Kerry campaign, Vietnam is becoming (or is being restored to) the liberal’s war.

I think Hovig is right, here: we’re experiencing an unintended consequence that is all to the good. Vietnam is being redefined as a good war.

That’s going to leave its mark.

A decent example of a (pro-Iraq-war) liberal reacting negatively to Kerry’s “I served in Vietnam” stance is this:

Apocalypse Kerry by Lawrence F. Kaplan

In some ways Kaplan’s essay is as confused as I feel, but he makes some good individual points:

There were, in fact, three Vietnams haunting the convention hall last night. One was on the stage, which, with its “band of brothers” and “greatest generation” tributes, somehow attached World War II nostalgia to our national tragedy in Vietnam. The second was in the audience, where nine out of ten delegates view the war in Iraq through the prism of their views of that earlier conflict–that is, they would just as soon bolt–and where Kerry’s Vietnam service seems to be regarded as some sort of anthropological (and heaven-sent) oddity. The final Vietnam was in John Kerry’s words, which blended the stage and audience versions into some approximation of the candidate’s own views about the war. None of it furthered the cause of rational discourse.