Don's Tuesday Column

            THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   11/14/2017

                      Veterans’ voices are the best

While Memorial Day is dedicated to those who’ve lost their lives fighting America’s battles, Veterans Day includes all who have served. The oath taken to enter into our nation’s military service is a sobering one; it was part of a video tribute to our veterans circulated by Hillsdale College. In this video, a half dozen veterans list their years of service and say “I will always remember my oath.” They then recite that oath wherein they “solemnly swear” that they will “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic” and “bear true faith and allegiance to the same…and I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter, so help me God.” It is their duty to “obey,” as the oath states, the “orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me…” It’s noteworthy that neither Congress nor judges are so included.

While I hold no particular worth to comment on the subject, it is appropriate to defer to others, such as then-Lt. Gen. John Kelly, who took the occasion of the loss of his son in combat to describe the last six seconds in the lives of two Marines. They would have probably preferred to live on as veterans after their tours of duty in Iraq but, in split-second decisions, they became fallen heroes to those whose lives they saved.

“Cpl. Jonathan Yale and Lance Cpl. Jordan Haerter, 22 and 20 respectively, were assuming the watch at the entrance gate of an outpost that contained a makeshift barracks housing 50 Marines…They were from two completely different worlds (Yale a dirt-poor mixed race kid from Virginia and Haerter a middle-class white kid from Long Island).

“You can watch the last six seconds of their young lives (on security camera footage). I suppose it took about a second for the two Marines to separately come to the same conclusion about what was going on once the truck came into their view at the far end of the alley. It took maybe another two seconds for them to present their weapons, take aim, and open up. By this time, the truck was halfway through the barriers and gaining speed. Here the recording shows a number of Iraqi police, some of whom had fired their AKs, now scattering like the normal and rational men they were, some running right past the Marines, who had three seconds left to live.

“For about two seconds more, the recording shows the Marines firing their weapons nonstop. The truck’s windshield explodes into shards of glass as their rounds take it apart and tear into the body of the son of a bitch trying to get past them to kill their brothers—American and Iraqi—bedded down in the barracks, totally unaware that their lives at that moment depended entirely on two Marines standing their ground. Yale and Haerter never hesitated. By all reports and by the recording, they never stepped back. They never even shifted their weight. With their feet spread should-width apart, they leaned into the danger, firing as fast as they could. They had only one second left to live, and I think they knew.

“The truck explodes. The camera goes blank. Two young men go to their God. Six seconds. Not enough time to think about their families, their country, their flag, or about their lives or their deaths.”

In “Presidential Proclamation Commemorating the 50^th Anniversary of the Vietnam War” (look it up), President Trump paid tribute to sacrifices and efforts in that war, as part of a 13-year-long honoring of America’s fight to defend Vietnam. It states: “We salute our brave Vietnam veterans who, in service to our Nation and in defense of liberty, fought gallantly against the spread of communism and defended the freedom of the Vietnamese people.”

He noted the 500,000 American troops that served there in 1967, as well as 850,000 troops of our allies, the 58,000 whose names honor their deaths on the black granite wall in our capital, “the brave patriots who suffered as prisoners of war, and the 1,253 heroes who have not yet returned to American soil…To ensure the sacrifices of the 9 million heroes who served during this difficult chapter of our country’s history are remembered for generations to come, I signed into law the Vietnam War Veterans Recognition Act of 2017, designating March 29 of each year as National Vietnam War Veterans Day…We vow to never again confuse personal disapproval of war with prejudice against those who honorably wear the uniform of our Armed Forces.”

Concurrently, President Trump spoke in Vietnam alongside veterans of that war. Look it up at “thegatewaypundit.com/2017/11/amazing-video-vietnam-war-veteran-cries-president-trumps-shoulder-vietnam-speech/”. See and hear a moving moment that the media have had no use for. The emotions at the mention of “58,000 heroes that never made it home” by one vet prompted an unscripted embrace from Trump as the faces of other vets showed their feelings.

I will close with but the beginning of a much-justified-and-needed correction of the Vietnam War record as presented by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick on PBS and touted by liberal anti-warriors. Look up “Vietnam Veterans Set the Record Straight After PBS TV Series Whitewashes Communism,” by Tyler O’Neil. “This week Vietnam veterans sent a letter to PBS, Ken Burns and Bank of America setting the record straight about ‘The Vietnam War.’ (It) left out key aspects of the war, including the communist connections of North Vietnamese dictator Ho Chi Minh and the brutal repression after the war.”

“The whole cause of all this agony and bloodshed was the aggressive North Vietnamese invasion of the South. If it hadn’t been for that, non of this ever would have happened” (Lewis Sorley, Vietnam War veteran, historian, and director at Vietnam Veterans for Factual History).