1 This Viet Nam vet is minimally interested in The Hee-row's exploits, whatever they really were, in Viet Nam. What interests me is how, after having run for office as a war hero, and lost, he gathered a bunch of 'veterans', many of whom never wore Uncle's suit at all, many others not having set foot in Southeast Asia and used their 'experiences' to go before a United States Senate Committee and slime every other man that served. Including the dead. I'm no more a hero than I am a war criminal. I'm just a guy who wore a uniform and did a job that most people wouldn't. My war had far more to do with lonliness, homesickness, exhaustion and fear than John Wayne shooting some big machine gun from the hip. Yet I served alongside some genuine heros. A whole lot of them traded their jungle ripstops in and came home wearing shiny aluminum boxes. John Kerry slimed the names of those men with lies. He deliberately, for political gain, harmed some 58,000 families. He may as well have gone to those 58,000 homes and pissed on every one of those neatly-folded flags. Now he's returned to those homes and is parading around wrapped in those same flags. I do not consider myself fit to speak for those men, there are others with far more right to do so. Some, not nearly enough, are. Compared to some of the men speaking out I can stand in the shade of a dime, comfortably, at high noon. There is, however, one man whom I consider myself infinately more qualified to speak of my comrades, John Kerry. Unlike him I've never slimed my comrades. He is not fit to speak of those men, much less speak for them.

2 Seems to me your disagreement with Kerry is no so much whether he served honourably in Vietnam or not but that he had different memories of it than you did. My father was a rear-gunner in a bomber in WWII, was shot-down over Germany and spent a year in StalagLuft I. He would never speak badly about the men he served with and admired but he does speak his mind that war was hell and the politicians and generals who are so quick to send others to war should have to walk a mile in those shoes first! He admires John Kerry for speaking out when he came home... not to slander the men he served with but to expose hell for what it is. It may sometimes be necessary but make no mistake its not a political game.

3 Look. Either John Kerry is a war criminal, or he is a liar. Discussing atrocities one has supposedly witnessed or taken part in--and saying these are known and approved from up the chain of command--is not a small matter. Our POWs were tortured more because of the things Kerry said. Things they themselves refused to say, even though they were tortured. 1) John Kerry wasn't there long, and he didn't see much action; 2) He was against the war before he even went, so it was not a matter of his mind being changed by that experience. He only went because he wanted to follow in the original JFK's footsteps as closely as possible.