Unfit – My Letter To The Swift Boat Organization

August 25, 2004
By John Cory

Dear Sirs,

In the face of fact after fact that exposes your lies, you continue to foul and slander John Kerry. Your words and deeds cast doubt on all the honorable men who served gallantly; question the competence of former military leadership; and hurl dispersions on fellow soldiers, while denigrating the dead.

And for what?

You choose to align yourselves with those who smeared an honorable Vietnam POW, calling into question his sanity and his survival of the Hanoi Hilton. You choose to serve those who disgracefully painted a Vietnam veteran triple amputee as unpatriotic and less than a true American.

Where were you then? John Kerry was there for his fellow veteran brothers, where were you?

You choose to support men who had other priorities than serving their country. Men, whose self-interest was more important than duty, honor, and country; and you prefer to serve a man who treated his military obligation like Alcoholics Anonymous; picking and choosing what meetings he would or would not attend.

You choose to aid those who have soiled themselves with the blood of others.

You choose to be finger-puppets of a media obsessed with ratings and tabloid sensationalism. A media that willfully avoids the truth and pain of the daily toll in Iraq: willing to set veteran against veteran in order to increase viewer share. A media, that happily promotes an old war as a means of avoiding responsibility for its promotion of the new war.

You choose to inflate your shriveled egos with the spotlight of hate and slander. You choose to deny both the truth and the lie that was Vietnam. Like the man you support, you choose to look away from the flag-draped reality of today, and instead, seek yesterday’s false reflection, in hope of revenge. But you cannot right a wrong war, whether then or now.

I crawled the mud paddies of Vietnam and stuck my fingers in the gaping wounds, trying to stop the oozing blood that drained the life from my fellow soldiers. I have walked the old paths of war and seen the children that even today lose limbs from the unexploded ordinance of yesterday's war. I have seen more honor and compassion in the eyes of the men who were once my enemy, than in the twisted piety of your vitriolic defamation.

You now seek to cover your previous words of endorsement with the stench of vomit and partisan bile. You speak of wanting honesty and openness, but your actions belie your lips.

You have chosen vanity over valor, hubris over honor, character assassination and fraud over fact. You have chosen to enfold yourself in the shadows of partisan politics while sniping at those who stand in the open light of their record. You have chosen to wear the uniform of shame.

No sirs, with all due respect, I submit that it is you, who are Unfit.