Other Columns by Oliver North
Oliver North Bio

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In my line of work -- documenting the fortitude and perseverance of American soldiers, sailors, airmen, Guardsmen and Marines for FOX News -- we often interrupt a story to inject a relevant earlier chronological event through the use of a device called a "flashback." Such historical references often provide a context for later events. The 2006 political campaign season has been a long flashback to the 1970s.

During the so-called "Vietnam Era" it was commonplace for critics of the long war in Southeast Asia to denigrate those serving in the armed forces. Campus protesters, politicians and the media routinely depicted the young Americans fighting in the rice paddies, hamlets and triple-canopied jungles of Vietnam as baby killers, murderers and war criminals. Our South Vietnamese allies were venal cowards or worse.

The current campaign and the long war we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced similar rhetoric from the potentates of the press and leftwing politicos. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) likened our troops to the armies of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Cambodia's Pol Pot. Without a shred of evidence to back up his claim, Congressman Jack Murtha (D-Pa.) accused U.S. Marines of "kill(ing) innocent civilians in cold blood." Newsweek magazine invented a story about U.S. military guards flushing a Qur'an down a toilet at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and Chris Hedges of the New York Times described U.S. troops as "poor kids from Mississippi or Alabama or Texas who could not get a decent job or health insurance." But it doesn't stop there.

This week, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) told college students in California, "you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq." In other words, those serving in harm's way are stupid.

When presidential spokesman Tony Snow pointed out that our present military is the brightest and best educated in history, Kerry belatedly apologized -- after attacking Snow as a "stuffed-suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium" and then claiming his insult to our troops was a "botched joke" aimed at President Bush.

This week's affront to the U.S. military is but the most recent in Kerry's long history of attacking American troops instead of our nation's enemies. In 1971 he testified under oath before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that U.S. troops had "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." And last December, in an interview on CBS's "Face the Nation," he said that there was no reason "that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children." Unfortunately, Kerry is not alone in his party when it comes to slandering U.S. troops.

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