Another Vietnam Blunder? Not Likely

Another Vietnam Blunder? Not Likely


As a Vietnam veteran, am I finally in fashion? All I had to do was wait 40 years and it's now a good thing to have served in that pointless fiasco?

How odd it was to wake up to the New York Times story that Dick Blumenthal had misspoken about this military service, saying he served in Vietnam when he was a homeland reservist.

It was strange because I have known Blumenthal for 35 years, and never known him to portray himself as a Vietnam vet. Indeed, I was the moderator of the Courant/FoxCT U.S. Senate debate on March 1 when he looked right at me and clearly said he didn't go to Vietnam.

And yet on a few occasions, he apparently said he did.<[br />
Here Blumenthal he joins an illustrious cadre of great pretenders — a noted historian, a Major League baseball manager, a former newspaper publisher, any number of national, state and local lawmakers, police chiefs, even two guys who ran a Vietnam Veterans Museum in Texas — who invented or enhanced their Vietnam resumes.

Appropriating any credential you didn't earn, from a college degree to attendance at Woodstock, is wrong. I'm mostly angry when someone fakes military service in Vietnam, but I also see it as an off-handed compliment. Isn't it, when someone wants to have done something you did?

Yet why Vietnam, then the leading contender for the country's least popular war?

Is it guilt or shame? Is there some inner Rambo-like wish to revise one's personal history and fight the war? Memory will do our public relations if we let it; there's something to the old sports joke, "The older I get, the better I was."

The people who didn't go — or who didn't go to jail, Canada or the Peace Corps — missed the crusade of their generation, right or wrong, and some may want to give themselves a belated mulligan.

And, despite the stereotypes that developed over the years, it's never been a bad thing to have been a Vietnam veteran. The Blumenthal flap revived the stories of vets being shunned, spit upon, etc. I remember reports of that, I just don't remember it happening to me, beyond one or two very minor incidents.

Yes, we weren't given a dinner and a key to the country, but most of us who were lucky enough to come back in one piece got out of the service, grew our hair and moved on, if sometimes haltingly. By the mid-1970s, people were quietly telling me they appreciated — or in a few cases envied — my service (I was an Army intelligence officer in 1969-70 in the Mekong Delta and did nothing valiant or memorable).

I'm glad I went. I believe the war to have been a vast mistake and deadly waste of time, but I didn't know that until I saw it, and later studied it. The real tragedy of Vietnam today isn't a few fantasy fibs, it's that the war has lost its power as a bad example, to keep us from blundering into needless conflicts in countries where we don't understand the language, culture or history.

Dick Blumenthal's few gaffes apparently were at veterans' events. He goes to a lot of them; perhaps he got carried away, obviously he shouldn't have. As a friend of mine put it, Blumenthal is the one guy in the state who didn't have to enhance his resume. But because of Blumenthal's own service and his frequent contacts with veterans, I don't think he would vote to put U.S. troops in harm's way without overwhelming cause.

That is why I still think he's the best candidate in the race.


http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/editorials/hc-plc-condon-blumenthal-vietna.artmay23,0,4964824.column