Kerry standards

What was wrong with being a Navy Lieutenant in Vietnam? According to John Kerry violence and war and gross insensitivity. Read the whole thing. It's devasting.

Kerry had all the self-dramatization and absurdity of the young. Oh, the humanity!

This begs the question that General Sherman answered long ago.

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace.

War is hell. You can't make it compatible with the delicate sensibilities of a Boston preppie. It's about tearing people's bodies apart, turning their heads and limbs to bloody mush, before they do it to you. It's about understanding that it's an ugly nasty job, but it has to be done and you only make it worse by trying to soften it.

Sherman knew the horror of the battles where thousands of soldiers were slaughtered and maimed, and he knew the pretensions of gentility of the Southern populace. He wanted the cost of war to be brought home to them, to destroy their illusions of the glory and gallantry of war. That's why he undertook his march through Georgia.

By refusing to pursue the enemy outside of South Vietnam, LBJ made that war unwinnable. I'm sure there were a lot of our troops who wondered what the point was in fighting for ground that was immediately abandoned afterwards, and why the enemy could melt back into the populace, use children and women to kill Americans, transport weapons from the North through Cambodia with impunity, and why Russia and China could provide weapons to the North Vietnamese without Haiphong harbor being mined, or Hanoi bombed.

War is hard, dangerous and nasty, but it is the price we pay to do away with things like slavery, Fascism, Communism, warmongering and terrorism. Diplomacy and appeasement have been tried, but they don't always work. In fact, they often just prolong the misery and raise the ultimate costs.