I believe that Roger Cohen intended his New
York Times column on Bob Kerrey to be somewhat complementary of Kerrey as a
man trying to make amends for his involvement in a wartime atrocity. However, the impression it made on me was of
his hatred for military veterans in general, and Vietnam veterans in
particular. In Cohen’s column Kerrey
comes across as one of the most evil, depraved men on the face of the
earth. Nowhere does he mention that
Kerrey was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. The implication is that America awarded the
medal to a vile monster, making America a vile, monstrous country. Cohen’s hatred of America drips like venom
from his column.
I presume that while visiting Vietnam recently, Cohen and
Kerrey had a deep, dark heart-to-heart discussion about the incident in which
Kerrey’s Seal unit killed a number of women and children. Cohen does not mention that one reason this
happened was because the Vietcong hid among women and children to protect
themselves. The VC have no remorse for
pushing women and children into the line of fire by hiding in their villages
and homes. Cohen sees the Vietcong freedom
fighters as wonderful exemplars of the nobility of mankind.
What particularly incensed me was Cohen’s last paragraph
comparing Mohammad Ali’s resistance to the Vietnam War to Kerrey’s
participation in it. Cohen’s view is
that Ali was the better of the two. Ali
beat people up for a living, often hurting his opponents, but he did it for lots
of money. Kerrey fought for his country;
he made much less money as a Seal than Ali did as a boxer, but Cohen sees
hurting people for money as a good thing, while killing people for your country
is monstrously evil. For Cohen, Ali made
the world a better place, but it would have been better of Kerrey had never
been born.
As a Vietnam veteran I am so outraged, I can hardly write
this. But Cohen is where the the rest of
the world is. People who fought in
Vietnam because they were drafted (as Ali almost was) or because they thought
they were patriotic, were fools. Their
country will forever hate and revile them, with Cohen in the forefront of the
haters.
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