Wow, a truly impressive display of ignorance and gross disrespect for Viet Nam vets. And this guy is a supervisor at one of our larger newspapers? But we all know that the idea that antiwar/antimilitary bias exists in the media is just a bit of extreme right wing foolishness, don't we?
Modest Proposal
Apocalypse again -- call up the Vietnam vets
Where else can Bush get 21,500 trained soldiers for his 'surge'?
By Paul Whitefield; Paul Whitefield supervises the [LAT] editorial pages' copy desk.
LISTENING TO President Bush's speech on Iraq earlier this month, my first thought was: "Where the heck are we going to get 21,500 more soldiers to send to Iraq?" Our Reserves are depleted, our National Guard is worn out, our Army and Marine Corps are stretched to the limit.
Then it hit me: Re-up our Vietnam War veterans and send them.
They're trained. They're battle-hardened. Many already have post-traumatic stress disorder. Also, some have their own vehicles — Harleys mostly, which are cheap to run, make small targets and are highly mobile. I'll even bet that lots of these guys still have guns (you know, just in case).
[...]
Finally, these Vietnam War guys are hungry for revenge. After all, they fought in the only war the U.S. ever lost. And they didn't even get a parade. So this is their chance. We can throw them that big parade when they come marching home.
The guy is playing in the famous Jonathan Swift "Modest Proposal", but he's gone way over the line. Look at the last sentence, that's not part of the Swiftian approach, it's a deliberate slam at Vietvets and the common comment that we never got a welcome home. He could have written this very differently and not included actual disrespect for vets, but he didn't. Either he's a terrible writer and has no idea how he screwed this up, or (more likely) he has a significant anti-war and therefore anti-vet bias.
Below is my letter to the LA Times.
A long time ago Jonathan Swift used satire to focus attention on the plight of the Irish poor, by proposing their young be used as a food source. Mr. Whitefield apparently intended to ape Swift and use what he thinks of as satire in indirectly ridiculing the Bush drive to increase troop levels in Baghdad. However, in using the Vietnam veterans as the tool of his satire, he went well past the Swiftian approach, which subtly poked fun at the British arrogance towards the Irish, and instead wound up making fun of Vietnam vets in general. Characterizing them as owning Harleys and guns and having PTSD goes directly to the false and hurtful image of all Vietvets as maladjusted losers, and the final snide comment about a major sore point for vets- "they didn't even get a parade"- is clearly disrespectful and in incredibly poor taste. Whatever he may have meant to do in regard to the Iraq/Bush debate, he wound up providing a totally gratuitous and deeply offensive reference to living men who served their country, and an implied dismissal of the sacrifice of those who paid with their lives in that service. Shame on him.
R J Del Vecchio
Raleigh, NC 27603
USMC vet, Viet Nam 1968
