Letters to SALON on:
A Vietnam vet warns Bush backers are "playing a dangerous, self-destructive game" by trashing John Kerry's Purple Heart.

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April 22, 2004 | [Read "John Kerry's First Purple Heart," by Douglas Brinkley.]

It is hard to believe what the right won't do to discredit veterans of foreign war. During 2000, there was the scurrilous whispering campaign against John McCain. Then they poked fun at Al Gore as a reporter in the Army, even though he got a lot closer to a Viet Cong bullet than Bush ever did. Then there was the 2002 trashing of Max Cleland (led most appallingly by Ann Coulter).

And now it's John Kerry's Purple Heart. Papa Bush ought to hang his head in shame at what these chickenhawks are doing in his son's name. Military women and men, listen up: Your lives, your sacrifice means nothing to the right. You're just chum!

-- Deedee Arnelle


Folks, three things:

1. I don't recall anyone putting himself in for a Purple Heart. Mine arrived via shopping cart while I was bed-bound at a Quang Tre MASH. I didn't know that guys could ask for them. I did turn down two additional PHs once I got back to the States. (Or maybe they tried to give me the first medal two more times.) That pissed people off; the brass like to give out medals. So on that score alone, Hibbard's got shit in his mouth. He would have been a mighty proud lifer to have one of his boys rack a PH.

2. Concerning fakes: If any fuckhead is stupid enough to claim ownership of a PH that does not belong to him, there's a big cottage industry of really nasty people who will take pleasure in making his life one definitive hell. These would be the folks who actually earned Purple Hearts. Fakers get confronted in public, in front of their families, their co-workers, their Boy Scout troops, wherever it's possible to inflict the most humiliation. There's no sympathy for these people. So if Kerry had worked some kind of game on a Purple Heart, he would have been hideously outed long before this. There's an army of war vets (and the widows of war vets) with nothing better to do than to hunt down fakes and frauds. Kerry would have been toast in the '70s, courtesy of his work with the VVAW.

3. Regardless of politics, those who have PHs tend to be clannish. They're not nearly as exclusive as the CMH [Congressional Medal of Honor] crowd but their ties go well beyond Bill Mauldin's club "of them what's been shot at." (Mauldin was actually sheepish about his PH.) So when a drug addicted coward like Limbaugh, or any of those other vermin, talks trash about a guy's Purple Heart, he's insulting the rest of us. It's like taking on a biker gang that graduated from grenades and machine guns to lawsuits, Web sites and political campaigns. Same attitude, different toys.

The assholes who talk trash about Kerry's Purple Hearts are playing a dangerous, self-destructive game.

-- Dave Dike

You have to wonder about the mind and heart of a man and former soldier (Grant Hibbard) who is so partisan that he whines about a man who actually saw action in Vietnam, and he says nothing about a man who weasled himself out of the war by joining the National Guard.

-- Katherine Weber



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