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From his April 22nd, speech:
I believed then, just as I believe now, that it is profoundly wrong to think that fighting for your country overseas and fighting for your country's ideals at home are contradictory or even separate duties. They are, in fact, two sides of the very same patriotic coin. And that's certainly what I felt when I came home from Vietnam convinced that our political leaders were waging war simply to avoid responsibility for the mistakes that doomed our mission in the first place. Indeed, one of the architects of the war, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, confessed in a recent book that he knew victory was no longer a possibility far earlier than 1971.
By then, it was clear to me that hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen-disproportionately poor and minority Americans-were being sent into the valley of the shadow of death for an illusion privately abandoned by the very men in Washington who kept sending them there. All the horrors of a jungle war against an invisible enemy indistinguishable from the people we were supposed to be protecting-all the questions associated with quietly sanctioned violence against entire villages and regions-all the confusion and frustration that came from defending a corrupt regime in Saigon that depended on Americans to do too much of the fighting-all that cried out for dissent, demanded truth, and could not be denied by easy slogans like "peace with honor"-or by the politics of fear and smear. It was time for the truth, and time for it all to end, and my only regret in joining the anti-war movement was that it took so long to succeed-for the truth to prevail, and for America to regain confidence in our own deepest values.
I have watched that speech a few times on tivo and the facial expression and emphasis on 'he knew' is amazing. It is obviously still an unbelievable outrage that our kids were still being sent into that valley of the sahdow of death for a lie. It is an outrage today to think that we are sending a different generation of kids into that valley as well, when you damn right and well know that there are behind the door deliberations going on to undercut them and make a palatable exit possible.
Everyold old is new again. I think Sen. Kerry knows this cold. You can see it in his eyes.
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