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Even when some make wrong decisions, ICE and CBP agents broadly deserve our honor and respect.
We have all seen the attacks against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota by people who claim to be just “protecting our neighbors.”These “neighbors” include murderers, rapists, sex traffickers, and thieves, all of whom are deemed more worthy of protection than the federal employees seeking to enforce the laws of the United States. They have been subjected to an escalating campaign of vilification, personalized hostility, abuse, and assaults. They are Nazis! Gestapo!
As I see and read of these attacks on line agents, I have a sense of deja vu — flashbacks to the abuse inflicted upon many members of our military who served in Vietnam in the ’60s and early ’70s.
Like the ICE agents today, the great majority were attempting to do two things that sometimes were at odds with each other: 1) discharge their duty under highly dangerous conditions and then 2) return home alive. I’ll never forget the abuse heaped upon those who returned after choosing to serve in Vietnam rather than dodge the draft, flee to Canada, or hide behind phony physical ailments. We have seen this act before, only it is much worse now.
A Flashback to the ’60s
Today, the “Thank you for your service” mantra addressed to military veterans is ubiquitous. But this is a change from the Vietnam era. Most people alive today have no personal memory of how returning combat veterans were treated then.
To understand why Vietnam veterans were treated so vilely, look no further than John Kerry’s 1971 statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a speech that launched his political career. In it, Kerry painted a grotesque picture of the American soldier. He claimed that those who served in Vietnam were “a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence.” He told Americans that their soldiers’ crimes were “what threaten[] this country.”
According to Kerry, these barbarisms were “accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam,” and they were “not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”
And what exactly did we soldiers do? Well, listen to him.
Kerry told everyone in America that we were monsters who …
…had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war…
When Kerry’s portrayal of such “monsters” was televised and widely circulated, is it any wonder Vietnam soldiers became the object of widespread derision, harassment, and prejudice?
Because of slanders spread by the likes of Kerry, a significant number of Americans adopted their disdain, even hatred, for soldiers. A small number of ill-disciplined soldiers committed atrocities at My Lai, so we all were branded as “baby killers” by many of our fellow citizens. Young men were frequently harassed or denied service at bars and restaurants because they had short hair that marked them as members of the military. Curses and insults were routinely thrown at servicemembers or their uniforms.
At the so-called “anti-war” rallies on college campuses, students the age of the average infantryman in Vietnam routinely waved enemy flags and chanted, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh. The NLF is doing to win.” You win a war when you kill the enemy soldiers. So these students — our chronological peers — were rooting for our deaths. They wanted our enemies to win.
And, yes, random people sometimes thought it was cool to spit on returning veterans. A cottage industry of sorts has grown up to deny that this ever happened, but my friends personally experienced it. Wikipedia characterizes this as a “persistent myth,” but the same page cites instances where it did happen, while speculating about possible reasons for the spitting. Most of the denials are based on the lack of police reports or criminal charges.
What utter nonsense. There is about a zero percent chance that a veteran walking through an airport after spending a year or more in Vietnam would delay his return home by searching for a cop to report an irritating but non-life-threatening incident and potentially getting involved in the judicial system over it.
Today’s War on the Troops Is Worse --->READ MORE HERE
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