The Vietnam vet will win

[NNN0LHI]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1143402,00.html

No candidate has more relevant personal experience or better policies than John Kerry, the man who'll beat Bush

Will Hutton
Sunday February 8, 2004
The Observer

The two most harrowing parts of any trip to Vietnam, where the war against the United States - even 40 years on - still dominates, are the Cu Chi tunnels north of Saigon and the Mekong Delta. As you emerge from crouching in the warren of once deadly, booby-trapped foxholes and command centres, there are decaying photos, pinned on trees and walls, of Vietcong soldiers with their decorations for being effective 'American killers'. The war's savagery and brutality could hardly be more effectively conveyed.


But as terrifying and futile as trying to penetrate the Vietcong tunnel system was trying to prevent the Mekong Delta - Vietnam's rice basket - from falling entirely under Vietcong control. The maze of slow-moving interlocking rivers and canals with dense, overhanging foliage offered perfect cover for attacks on US patrol boats.

Time and again, as we navigated today's tourist attractions of floating markets and shrines, I thought how it must have felt in a different time to be stalked by an enemy who had such amazing cover so close to their targets. But it was in this delta that Senator John Kerry, then a lieutenant, turned his Swift boat to attack his tormentors directly, going ashore to kill the Vietcong soldiers who were armed with B40 rocket launchers that could sink a US boat.

Vietnam veterans now hold a particular place in US life. They may have fought in America's most controversial war before Iraq, but their physical and psychological wounds are testimony to the fact they served their country even in a futile cause. (Their war culminated in an ignominious scuttle but strategically it bought the rest of South-East Asia more than a decade in which to deliver the capitalist Asian miracle; the immediate war was lost but a bigger struggle for economic power was eventually won.)

more...be sure to read the last paragraph

[displacedtexan]

1. Wow! Even the Brits want Kerry!

Thanks for posting this! Very powerful!