Roger,

Thanks for a very moving tribute to your father.

My sentiments are similar to many of the early commenters’. I was born in 1963, on the cusp of the baby-boom generation. My parents were old-school, sane liberals who supported civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and our right to a secular public education. They both opposed Vietnam.

I didn’t have a perfect relationship with my parents, but we almost never disagreed about politics. Dad didn’t live to see 9/11, but Mom – who had become increasingly disenchanted with the Democrats under Clinton – came around to the same views you and I share about Iraq and Afghanistan. She died around the time of the liberation of Baghdad, but if she were alive today I’m sure she would break with tradition and vote Republican in the upcoming election.

Vietnam? The whole thing was over by the time I got to high school, so I was too young to form an independent opinion on it. Today, I don’t know. I do know that my parents were intelligent people of good conscience and judgment, and I am certain they made the best decision they could on the information that was available to them. But knowing what I now know of the Left, I must question how much of that information was distorted or simply false.

Among his personal papers, my father left behind a very moving poem he composed during the Vietnam era, describing his feelings at hearing an unnamed “young man” telling of atrocities committed by American troops in Vietnam. I have little doubt that that young man was John Kerry.