I recently blogged about keeping your daughters away from military recruiters lest they end up as killers. The article I linked to featured natural born killer Kim Campbell. An LRC reader, who happens to live in the town where her father is the mayor, sends along these comments:
8:31 pm on May 1, 2013I’ve just read the GQ article on our female killers. Or tried too: I confess to being overcome by a sense of revulsion, the likes of which I can’t recall, and did not finish it. I would like to add something to the profile of one of the proud female killers, USAF Lt. Col. Kim Campbell.
I live in San Jose, California. The current mayor, Chuck Reed, is Lt. Col. Kim Campbell’s father (Campbell is married to another USAF killer). Recently, the San Jose Mercury News made much of Campbell and her exploits as an A-10 pilot, in lauding Pentagram chief Leon Panetta’s “long overdue” decision to give women the “equal right” to kill people and break things in countries that never attacked or threatened the U.S.
That was the second editorial on the page that day. The editorial above the fold? The paper’s ritual (now weekly, at least) denunciation of private firearm ownership: too many innocent people being killed, don’t you know.
Reed and Campbell are the first father and daughter to graduate from the Air Force Academy. Both achieved the highest rank of Cadet Wing Commander. Reed served (somebody) in Thailand during the Vietnam War. He must bear some responsibility for death and destruction in that episode of criminal aggression, including the destruction of a civilization on the Plain of Jars by USAF bombers casually ditching their bombs over Laos when weather forced them to return to their bases in Thailand without striking their targets in North Vietnam.
In his first mayoral campaign, Reed pointed with pride to his and his daughter’s service records. He invoked the Academy’s storied intolerance of “lies and those who tell them,” which left me wondering why he let his daughter join the military.
