Last week, near the end of my bike ride to work, I spotted hundreds of small white crosses staked in the ground east of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in downtown D.C. Wondering what they were for, I saw a young woman carrying a makeshift sign saying "America in Iraq" that she was preparing to hang someplace.
I immediately swerved across the grass toward two men conversing with each other, obviously discussing the logistics of their display. I stopped my bike about five feet away from them, and they stopped talking and looked at me. One of the men had short gray hair, professional-looking glasses and a baseball hat that said "KENT STATE." The other guy had jeans and a black shirt, and looked like a roadie.
"Did you get permission of the families before you put these up?" I demanded.
Gray Guy started glaring at me and said nothing — since he seemed older and had an air of authority about him, I assumed he was in charge. Black Shirt said no, they didn't need to get permission.
"Are you sure that everybody you're representing here agrees with your point of view? Because I'm absolutely sure that's not true."
No, no, said Black Shirt. This wasn't about pressing a political agenda, it was for the troops. I didn't buy it. You don't put a thousand crosses next to the Vietnam Memorial and then say you have no polical agenda.
"Who's going to protect the innocent people in Iraq if we leave?" I continued. Now Gray Guy was looking like he wanted to kill me. (Clearly, I was wrong: he wasn't in charge at all. I never did figure out why he was there.) Both of them were confused by my question.
"You mean the people who died on 9/11?"
"No, that has nothing to do with this. I'm talking about the innocent Iraqis who get blown up by terrorists every day."
"Are you talking about the 100,000 Iraqi civilians who have died?"
We interrupt this blog entry for a special message to the anti-war crowd: if you're going to pull a number straight out of your nether regions, you should
1) make it sound real — try 104,000 or 117,000, anything but a round 100,000;
2) don't use the same freakin' number you used for the Gulf War (and mouthed by Gary Oldman in "Air Force One"); and
3) make the number increase as time goes by! In 2003, you people were already saying we killed 100,000 civilians. Well, surely we've killed at least 200,000 by now, right? I mean, give our boys some credit for diligence at least!
Back to the entry...
We went back and forth. Black Shirt, who introduced himself as Marcus, said he was a former Marine like me, and was "in during the Gulf War" (I'm not sure what he did). He kept insisting that his group was utterly apolitical, and that he didn't want Iraq veterans ending up like a lot of Vietnam veterans. Twenty-five percent of Iraq veterans were returning home with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, he told me. (Which is a funny statistic, because a much smaller percentage of veterans were in actual combat.) In my experience, I replied, the vast majority of Iraq veterans considered it a worthy mission and that I personally considered it an honor to have served.
Marcus asked me to help him put up an American flag while we talked. I asked if it would be displayed respectfully, and he assured me that it would. I said sure, since I was already late for work. Once it was up, I shook hands with him, he gave me a postcard describing their group ("Veterans for Peace L.A.") and I wished him luck with his event, even though we did not agree on many things.
Because Marcus was a cordial and likeable man, I will avoid making snide comments about his group's headquarters of Santa Monica, one of the wealthiest places on the planet (and most liberal). But to return to the reason I pulled over in the first place, I think he and his cohorts are being disingenuous when they claim they have no political agenda. To consider a war properly, you have to consider the objective and ask whether the costs are worth it. Erecting a thousand crosses, without any context, is a falsehood.
If a thousand men have died in order to make a more just peace in the Middle East, and have slain thousands of murderers and thugs bent on oppressing a nation of 25 million, and thus made the people of the United States more secure, then I would say the cost is terrible but worth it. Better to hunt down and kill al Qaeda and their allies in Iraq, humiliating and eliminating their leadership, than to let them attack us again.
Thirty years ago, North Vietnam launched an offensive into the South, despite a promise not to invade. There was no American response, because there were no Americans to respond, the last U.S. forces having been removed in 1973. Just as anti-Communists had predicted, it was a human disaster. Tens of thousands were executed, and hundreds of thousands more were herded into "re-education camps" (a.ka. "political prisons.") Many Vietnamese took to the seas in rickety boats, preferring to risk death rather than live under the Communist regime.
The Left, having engineered the U.S. pullout from Vietnam, was an accessory to these crimes. There was no lack of evidence for the North's ruthlessness, or its ideological commitment to dominating the South. Leftists didn't care, because their goal was to shame America for its "sins," not because they cared about the Vietnamese or even peace itself.
Today, the Left's goal is more or less identical, except instead of portraying American servicemen as bloodlusting animals, they show them as victims. Either way, they use tales of human suffering as commodities which they sell to the American public, hoping that they can be convinced to abandon another ally. Iraqis, like the South Vietnamese, would get slaughtered, and the region could disintegrate into war and mayhem, but "America the imperialist bully" would suffer a grave defeat. As for the innocent who would die — too bad for them.
Given that, putting those thousand crosses next to the Vietnam Memorial is actually quite appropriate. Marcus, if you read this, I'll still take you at your word that you're "all about supporting the troops." If that's true, you're running with a disreputable crowd that doesn't give a damn one way or another.
