Navy Times Editorial by James Webb
 

A Navy Times Editorial, by James Webb, who was Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and a Marine Platoon and company commander in Vietnam.

It should come as no surprise that an arch conservative website is questioning whether Rep. John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat, who has been critical of the war in Iraq, deserved the combat awards he received in Vietnam.

After all, in recent years extremist Republican operatives have inverted a long-standing principle: that our combat veterans be accorded a place of honor in political circles. This trend began with the ugly insinuations leveled at Sen. John McCain during the Republican primaries and continued with the slurs against former Senator Max Cleland, current Senator John Kerry, and now Murtha.

Military people past and present have good reason to wonder whether the current administration truly values their service beyond its immediate effect on its battlefield of choice. The casting of suspicion and about the actions of veterans who have run against a President, or opposed his policies, has been a constant theme of his career. This pattern of denigrating the service of those with whom they disagree risks cheapening the public’s appreciation of what is means to serve, and in the long term may hurt Republicans themselves.

Not unlike Clinton's "triangulation" strategy, the approach has been to attack an opponent's greatest perceived strength to diminish his overall credibility. Surrogates carry out the attacks leaving President Bush and other Republican leaders to benefit from the results while publicly distancing themselves from the actual remarks.

During the 2000 primary season, Sen. John McCain’s life-defining experiences as a prisoner of war in Vietnam were diminished though whispers that he was too scarred by those years to handle the emotional burdens of the presidency. The wide admiration that Sen. Max Cleland gained from building a career despite losing three limbs in Vietnam brought on the smug non sequitur from critics that he had been injured in an accident and not by enemy fire. Sen. John Kerry’s voluntary combat duty was systematically diminished by the well financed Boat Veterans for Truth in a highly successful effort to insulate a president who avoided have to go to war.

And now comes John Murtha. The administration tried a number of times to derail the congressman’s criticism of the Iraq war, including a largely ineffective effort to get senior military officials to publicly rebuke him. Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joints Chiefs was the only one to do the administration's bidding there.

Now, the Cybercast News Service, a supposedly independent organization with deep ties to the Republican Party, has dusted off the Swift Boat Veterans’ playbook, questioning whether Murtha deserved his two Purple Hearts. The article also implied that Murtha did not deserve the Bronze Star he received and that the combat distinguishing V on it was questionable. It then called for Murtha to open up his military records.

The accusations against Murtha were old news, principally coming from defeated political rivals. Aligned against their charges are official letters from Marine Corps Headquarters written nearly 40 years ago affirming Murtha’s eligibility for his Purple Hearts—"you are entitled to the Purple Heart and a Gold Star in lieu of a second Purple Heart for wounds received in action"—and the strict tradition of Marine Corps regarding awards. While other service's lower-level commanders have frequently had authority to issue prestigious awards, in the Marines, Murtha’s Vietnam Bronze Star would have required the approval of four awards boards.