To serve them all my days

An article in the February 10 issue of Time discussed questions regarding Bush's National Guard service (or lack thereof). This was the final paragraph:

Kerry aides told TIME last week that they were worried their candidate had already come close to crossing the line. "There were a lot of people cringing around here when John let himself get engaged in this thing," said one. "It could backfire, no matter what the truth is." Yet Kerry's war record seems to be working for him. In the latest TIME/CNN poll, 60% of voters say John Kerry did his duty for the country during the Vietnam War, while only 39% make that same assertion for President Bush.

The history of that immense monstrosity, the Vietnam War - a war that a majority of Americans came to regard as immoral; a war that gave us "free fire zones," My Lai, "we had to destroy the town in order to save it," "strategic hamlets," tiger cages, and Agent Orange; a war that killed 50,000 Americans and perhaps 20 times that many Indochinese; a war that saw us drop more tons of bombs on Indochina than we did in all the theaters of World War I, World War II, and Korea combined; a war that displayed our hubris, brutality, and ignorance in equal measures; a war that produced nothing but misery, disgrace, and disgust - continues to be rewritten to fit the garment of the egomaniacal vision of innocent purity in which we insist on wrapping ourselves no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary.

Now it seems that the Vietnam issue is whether John Kerry and George Bush "did their duty" - duty here being defined as being a willing participant in that madness and mayhem.

Well, I say this: During the Vietnam War I was an anti-war activist, a protester, an organizer, a letter-writing, petition-signing, street-marching, sign-waving, Congress-lobbying, draft-resisting, tax-resisting, loudmouth. And there were millions of us. When we're asked "What did you do during the war?" we can say with appropriate pride "We were trying to stop it." And in that we - every one of us - goddamned well "did our duty" as Americans and, more importantly, as human beings.

And anyone who wants to say otherwise can just pucker up and plant a big, fat, wet one on my middle-aged, left-wing butt.