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And I Don't Care
Blackfive came to the same conclusion I did. You'll find we're both offended by an element of the Rather Forgeries that seems to have escaped many others notice: a deceased officer's honor has been called into question. Many civilians won't comprehend this issue, but to military people honor matters.
An illustration: Suppose my commander wants widgets made of a cheaper material than the current composite. He wants them from his brother's company, manufactured with plastic. I know these widgets are inferior and mission failure will result. I'm duty bound to tell him the problem. He listens and then tells me to mind my own damn business. It is now my duty to move up a level in the chain of command. Ultimately I will find someone who will act. Under no circumstances would it ever be okay for me to simply write a "CYA" memo and wash my hands of the issue. That would be a gutless move. (In fact, the very term "CYA" is repulsive. Even hearing it uttered in my presence will sound alarms in my head.)
Now say we're disagreeing about something less earth shattering. He wants the duty day to begin a half hour earlier and end a half hour later. Perhaps I don't see the need. I'll tell him what I think the impact on morale will be - and maybe that only if he asks. I'll try to anticipate conflicts that will arise. But ultimately, he's the commander and I'll support the decision. I'll pass it on to my junior troops without a hint of anything other than my total support for the program. Once again, the gutless move would be to write a memo detailing my reservations with the new duty hours.
I can imagine no scenario where the "CYA memo" would be a viable option.
That's one problem with whoever forged those memos - they imagined such things were done. They aren't - not by any military member with a sense of honor. The idea that someone would reach Squadron Command without that degree of sense of honor is beyond remote. The memos are self-defeating in that regard - why would the sort of low life slug who would write such a thing actually care enough to write such a thing? Get the logic?
Back to the point: The honor of an officer has been soiled. A man of honor, a man of undeniable courage has been depicted as a craven coward by these memos. An F-102 Fighter Squadron Commander without the guts to stand up for what he believed in? A man responsible for multiple millions of dollars in aircraft and equipment, the lives of his pilots, and the defense of a large sector of American air space was in reality a wimp who couldn't stand up to the slightest pressure from above?
Hopefully you get the point. Dan Rather's message to military folks everywhere was this: Lt Col Jerry Killlian, Texas Air National Guard, was a gutless wimp.
Can CBS's front man actually think that?
Armed Forces Network broadcasts one hour of Rush Limbaugh's radio program each afternoon here in Germany. I was surprised recently to hear Rush quoting directly from the book Stolen Valor : How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History, especially because it was a passage from the book I had just read and planned on discussing here. I still will:
"I think I was one of the highest trained, underpaid, eighteen-cent-an-hour assassins ever put together by a team of people who knew exactly what they were looking for," said Steve Southards, a Navy SEAL who told Rather he had escaped society to live in the forests of Washington state. Under Rather's gentle coaxing, Southards described slaughtering Vietnamese civilians, making his work appear to be that of the North Vietnamese."You're telling me that you went into the village, killed people, burned part of the village, then made it appear that the other side had done this?" Rather asked.
"Yeah," Steve replied. "It was kill VC, and I was good at what I did."
A description of an Interview Rather conducted for his special CBS Reports: The Wall Within, touted by CBS as telling the true story of Vietnam through the eyes of six of the men who fought there.
More:
Steve arrived home "in a straitjacket, addicted to alcohol and drugs" knowing that "combat had made him different," Rather intoned. "He asked for help; that's unusual, many vets don't. They hold back until they explode."Rivetting stuff - hard hitting investigative journalism, with just one problem - all lies.Rather then moved on to suicidal veteran named George Grule, who was stationed on the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga off the coast of Vietnam during a secret mission. Grule described the horror of watching a friend walk into the spinning propeller of a plane, which chopped him to pieces and sprayed Grule with his blood. The memory of this trauma left Grule, like Steve, unable to function in normal society.
Neither could Mikal Rice, who broke down as he described a grenade attack at Cam Ranh Bay, which blew in half the body of a buddy, "Sergeant Call." "He died in my arms," Rice tearfully recalled. Rice described how the sound of thunder and cars backfiring would regularly trigger his terrible memories.
Most horrific of all were the memories of Terry Bradley, a "fighting sergeant" who told Rather he had skinned alive 50 Vietnamese men, women, and children in one hour and stacked their bodies in piles. "Could you do this for one hour of your life, you stack up every way a body could be mangled, up into a body, an arm, a tit, an eyeball . . . Imagine us over there for a year and doing it intensely," Bradley said. "That is sick."
"You've got to be angry about it," Rather replied. "I'm suicidal about it," Bradley responded.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, drug abuse, alcoholism, joblessness, homelessness, suicidal thoughts: These tattered warriors suffered from them all.
"Sixteen -year-old Navy Seal" Steve Southards? An equipment repairman stationed far from combat who spent most of his time in the brig for repeatedly going AWOL. George Gruel was on the Ticonderoga when a propeller accident resulted in the death of a sailor, but Gruel wasn't a witness and the ship was on a training mission off California at the time.(Gruel receives $1,952 a month from the Veterans Administration for "psychological trauma" related to the event.) Mikal Rice spent his tour as a guard with an MP company at Cam Ranh Bay and never saw combat. Terry Bradley was an ammo handler in the 25th ID and spent nearly a year in the custody for being AWOL.
Team Rather's statement when confronted with the truth about their "victims"?
As angry Vietnam veterans began calling CBS to complain about the factual inaccuracies of The Wall Within, Perry Wolff, the executive producer who wrote the documentary, claimed that "No one has attacked us on the facts."Sound familiar? Here's honest Dan commenting on the latest forgeries he foisted on what he thought was an ignorant American public:
Those who have criticized aspects of our story have never criticized the major thrust of our report -- that George Bush received preferential treatment to get into the National Guard, and once accepted, failed to satisfy the requirements of his service. If we uncover any information to the contrary, that information will also be reported.That bird might not fly this time Dan-o.
The quotes on Limbaugh's show, by the way, were actually from Anne Morse's NRO story on Stolen Valor, which draws heavily from the text of the book. But she stops short of a crucial passage that could explain Rather's deep seated resentment of those who defend the country:
Rather certainly has experience with the military. During the Korean War, when men could be drafted out of college, Dan Irvin Rather joined the Army Reserves while attending San Houston University in Huntsville, Texas, thus avoiding the possibility of being drafted. On graduating in 1954, well after the Korean War was over and the killing had ended, Rather quit the reserves and enlisted in the Marine Corps. (This is the same national broadcaster who, night after night during the 1988 presidential campaign, hammered Republican vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle for avoiding Vietnam by joining the National Guard.) Although the press often refers to Rather as an "ex-Marine," he did not finish Marine recruit training. He joined the Marines on January 22, 1954, but was discharged less than four months later, on May 11 for being medically unfit.He never got over that early failure of his manhood; fifty years later and Danny Four Months still can't even stop for a second to verify the most outrageous forgeries ever presented, because they help him restore himself - they help him"prove" he's a better man than those who found him unfit all those years ago. Think Dan's petty bitterness is reserved to the institution of the military and doesn't exend to the rank and file? If so - he sure has a strange way of showing it - never hesitating to disparage and insult the veterans of so many generations.
That's where holding a grudge will get you, by the way. Rather has turned into Gollum, seeking to restore his precious, but ending up a consumed, a bitter twisted wretch, worthy of scorn and not pity, having missed an untold number of opportunities to turn away.
There's a lesson here kids. Remember it well.
Update: Hugh Hewitt wants LotR analogies for Rathergate - I made my Gollum comparison without knowing that.
