Lost in the current brouhaha over the Kerry-Swift Boat vets conflict are some larger questions about military service in general, and Kerry's military service in particular. But somehow this is not surprising. Phony elections are bound to get caught up in phony debates; there is so little real disagreement between the incumbent warfare/welfare party and the wannabe party of the same ilk that they're more likely to argue over 35-year-old events as anything even remotely connected to what might be termed an election "issue."
The larger truth about Kerry's military service is as apparent as it is deeply disturbing: it was voluntarily undertaken as a self-consciously political calculation, a nearly psychotic hunt for military honors and decorations as future political currency.
Kerry wasn't likely to get any combat citations serving in the engineering department aboard the guided missile cruiser USS GRIDLEY (CG-21), which didn't even have a main gun battery for shore bombardment and where the Navy initially assigned him, so he volunteered for swift boat duty, where he was sure to see some action.1 What can one say about a man who eagerly seeks the opportunity to engage in the use of lethal force against others, and to have others use lethal force against him? Is there a certain bravery there? Maybe. Mostly it is just insanity, though.
The doling out of medals and decorations is not usually a pure process. Here's an example: one of the recent flaps involved the "revelation" that Kerry had authored the text for his own citations. But anyone who has been in the Navy knows that writing yourself up for a medal is standard procedure: the recipient almost always writes his own ticket, so to speak, unless the award is posthumous. Now, there are practical reasons for this – after all, the recipient is the one with the best, and often the only, first hand knowledge of the events, and the superiors who have to approve the medal weren't there, of course – but it does lend a certain perspective to the phrase "decorated combat veteran." How meaningful are military "honors" which are largely self-generated?
In my own Navy experience, which included some time "on the gunline" off Beirut in 1983, one of the ships noticed a stray mortar round from shore, probably intended for the Marines camped out at the airport, drop harmlessly into the water. I heard they put in for, but were denied, a combat action ribbon, which requires having been taken under hostile fire. Most of us found that quite amusing.
Kerry's "Silver Star" apparently emanates from an incident in which he, probably in concert with others, chased down a nearly naked Vietcong teenager and shot him dead, as even the Kerry-sympathetic Boston Globe can't seem to conceal or refute. Such are the vagaries of many "combat decorations," though: was it an act of heroism, or a war crime? I guess it … depends. Maybe the guards at the Abu Ghraib prison could have been "decorated" were it not for the nasty pictures.
Now, I'm no fan of the Shrub, but if in the course of this phony debate it becomes unavoidable to do some sort of "Vietnam era service" comparison, I think this much can be said: nothing the Shrub did or didn't do calls his sanity into question, and I don't think he can be cited for being insufficiently brave, either: flying combat aircraft is fairly dangerous work, no matter where it takes place.
Nevertheless, the fact that Bush did not volunteer for combat duty in a strange and only vaguely human effort to secure his political future, like Kerry did, merely demonstrates that he is normal by comparison. Or at least closer to normal, a quality which can be found in modern presidential politics only in quite limited degrees, let's face it.
So far, the Bush operation is taking the position that Kerry dishonestly embellished his exploits. There is a more rational argument for Shrub and his handlers to make: Kerry's "war record" indicates that he is dangerous, unstable, and more than a little weird. But don't expect that argument to be made. The "war hero" credential is and must remain unassailable, the pinnacle of qualifications to "lead" the warfare/welfare apparatus.
So that's what we're left with: a smaller phony debate in which the real issue about Kerry's war service is untouched, within the larger phony debate that makes it a campaign "issue" to begin with. Otherwise, this laughable excuse for a political contest reminds me of nothing so much as G.K. Chesterton's trenchant observation (paraphrasing): two alternatives so much alike that the politically powerful would not mind choosing from them blindfolded – and for a great jest the unwashed masses are allowed to vote.
Note
- In a demonstration of how weirdly calculating he is, Kerry – according to the Boston Globe article cited elsewhere herein – has claimed at least once (in 1986) that his voluntary transfer to the swift boats from the GRIDLEY – which by the time he left her was back in the US after having completed an uneventful WESTPAC cruise – was not an effort to become more involved in "the war." The only motive for such an obviously ridiculous assertion is to deflect the anticipated criticism that he was quite self-consciously on a medal hunt, which subsequent events of course confirm beyond cavil.
August 24, 2004
