The must-read of the day, a former special <$NoAd$> assistant to President Nixon and later a Reagan Pentagon appointee, Noel Koch on Dole on the Post oped page.
I quote the first and last grafs …
“They want me to head Veterans,” Bob Dole said. “They” meant the Bush White House. His tone said there were things he would rather do.
I asked him whether he was going to do it — take on the campaign role of going after the veterans’ vote. “Probably have to,” he said, although he added that he knew the Bush campaign would want him to attack John Kerry, and he didn’t intend to do that. He didn’t have anything against Kerry, he said.
…
Bob Dole knows as well as any person how capricious is the gleaning of medals. Some men deserve what they don’t get; some get what they don’t deserve. And who should know better than he that it is craven to belittle a man’s service because it didn’t extend over some arbitrary stretch of time?
Bob Dole spent little time in combat. But as a result of the time he did spend, he lay on his back for years, recovering, and helping others to recover.
I spent a year in Vietnam and came home without a scratch. My brother served two tours in Vietnam, earned three Purple Hearts (and was hospitalized, and does draw disability — weird yardsticks used to measure John Kerry’s alleged shortfall), and yet spent far less time than I did in-country. Indeed, his first “tour” lasted about 15 minutes, ending on the beach near Danang in the midst of the U.S. Marines’ first amphibious assault in Vietnam.
Time in-country, how often a man was wounded, how much blood he shed when he was wounded — it is hurtful that those who served in Vietnam are being split in so vile a fashion, and that the wounds of that war are reopened at the instigation of people who avoided serving at all. It is hurtful that a man of Bob Dole’s stature should lend himself to the effort to dishonor a fellow American veteran in the service of politics at its cheapest.
There was a time when he would have refused. I know. I was there.
Bush sullies everyone around him.
