What the Heck was I Thinking!?

I’ve been thinking about what John Kerry said the other day. I’ve also been listening to Hugh Hewitt’s podcasts from the beginning of the week.

One of the callers he had got me to thinking about what bothers me the most about Kerry’s freudian slip. The caller was urging Hewitt and others to avoid asking active military to make public political comments about Kerry. He indicated that was due to the injunction against involvement in politics while on active duty. The caller said this was a job to be left to the veterans.

That got me to thinking about an underlying theme that was eating at me when I heard Kerry’s comments, his bluster and his half-assed apology.

What I recalled was that about 5 years ago, just after 9-11 and since then, I felt sincere gratitude to the current members of the military. The reason I did was that I had focused on, or felt proud of my own brief and uneventful service in the Navy in the late 1960s and 1970s. As Kerry has so eloquently reminded us all, those years were not good years for being in the military, or for having served in the military. Nobody wanted to know if you were in service and nobody who’d been in service made much about it. Sure, I went to college on the G.I. Bill, but I didn’t brag about my service. I felt vaguely ashamed - as if I were one of the guilty ones that everybody in the press and many in the government felt anybody in military was.

I hadn’t done anything wrong during my service. Nobody I knew had done anything wrong. But having been in the military wasn’t considered a thing to tout to strangers - you were as likely to get a stinging comment or some snide remark in return.

Later, it just seemed to fade into the background. I have work in the government with military people for most of the time since I finished college (magna cum laude in graduate school by the way).

Then came 9-11. Military personnel, along with the equally courageous first responders, have been called upon and have done brave and dangerous things to protect us and our homeland. Many have made sacrifices large and small to support the mission. I was honored and proud to work with these people. And they gave me back something I had not intended to lose or let others take away from me - pride in my service to the country in uniform. It wasn’t much, but it was what I did. I wasn’t in harm’s way, but that was the luck of the draw in training and assignment. I was a small part of the family of service members, in which I include the families of all who serve (parents, spouses and children) who also sacrifice for our country. I could feel proud and talk about it with others without the wariness. I am eternally grateful for that gift to me from those who currently serve.

My niece was a naval reservist who was activated during 2002 and 2003. She asked us to display the service banner in our front window while she was on duty. I was proud to do that. I was deeply honored to help pin on her Chief Petty Officer’s anchors when she made that rank in the reserves. I was proud to be unashamedly in the military family again. 

And Kerry tried to take that away from me again!

We who are verterans and family of service members have our own duties to perform to support the service member we cherish - to defend their honor and declare their sacrifice to the rest of our country and the world while they do their jobs. I owe them all that for what they’ve given me back.

Veterans and families and loved ones of service members, we have a duty to those we love and who are serving for us now - never again to break faith with them. We ask they to serve, they obey, we are obligated to back them up.

Never Again! 

or at least the election surprise. His post, Repeats? raises some serious concerns for all of us. He’s writing about the despicable Seymour Hersh speech. If Hersh is telling the truth, and there is reason to wonder, then why hasn’t he come out with the allegations until now, just before the election? War crimes, as he, John Kerry and Dick Durbin claim are being committed regularly by our forces, are crimes and shouldn’t be covered up…even for good copy and publication timing reasons.

I think Hersh, who’s given away more national security secrets than any cold war spy, should be challenged both to produce and to explain his own behavior. As Shrinkwrapped notes, it was the same daring duo in the ’70s - Hersh and Kerry maligning all of our troops for the actions of a few.