Vietnam Revised

The Swift Boat controversy may be irritating and annoying and ultimately irrelevant, but it raises the spectre of historic revisionism. The points of contention seem to concern such high virtues as honesty, loyalty, honor, and courage which are assumed to be building blocks of heroism. This assumption may be flawed when one considers that these virtues are based on the intellectualizing of a society's history; that is to say, how we would collectively choose to remember an event. Furthermore, to be virtuous one needn't be intellectually honest. The effect of this national vetting of Vietnam-era memory is that we will revise the history of that time. Those were difficult times, nasty and brutal, and every American carries guilt for the destruction in Vietnam and at home. To apply a lexicon right or wrong, good or ill, during that time applies a moral relativity that never existed; there were only human beings and mistakes. Historical revisionism allows us to forget the lessons that we should have learned. In Vietnam, we learned that a war must have a clear mission and a clear exit strategy and must be executed unwaveringly and unbridled by domestic concerns. Mr. Bush failed to plan an appropriate exit strategy; Mr. Kerry has wavered in his support of the action and believes that domestic policy can co-exist with foreign interventions. Neither one of these assholes seems to have learned their fucking lesson. In the interest of a learned Ministry, Jack has dug up this posting of Mr. Kerry's book The New Soldier. It is primarily a collection of veteran remembrances of the war and was the basis of Mr. Kerry's infamous Senate testimony.