Let's Try and Glorify the Living

"If the shores of this country were threatened," says John Kerry, 27, a former Navy lieutenant junior grade, "I'd be the first to defend it." In Viet Nam, Kerry commanded a "swift boat" in the Mekong Delta. Before he went to Viet Nam he graduated from Yale, where he belonged to Skull and Bones; while in Viet Nam he won a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Kerry appeared on NBC's Meet the Press early last week and later before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Some of his rhetoric was exggerated and irrational, but there was no arguing with the conviction with which he spoke for the marchers.

WE will have marching with us mothers of prisoners of war, mothers of soldiers who have been killed, wives of soldiers who have been killed. We will have Marines coming here, men with no legs, with Navy Crosses, Silver Stars, Purple Hearts, 100% disabled. They are coming here to say to the people of this country, "We have lost our sons, we have lost our husbands. I lost my leg. But the important thing is not that this has happened. Let's not keep killing people to justify my loss. Let's not glorify the dead. Let's try and glorify the living." And they would say, therefore, don't let it happen to any more people when it doesn't have to. Don't let it happen to someone else.

The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal, which no one has yet grasped.

In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Viet Nam that threatens the United States of America. To attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Viet Nam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy. -

Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese. Each day, to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Viet Nam, someone has to give up his life so that the United States does not have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we don't have to say that we made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be--and these are his words--"the first President to lose a war."

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Viet Nam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

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