War record vs. war chest

A few gathered around, picking out individuals from the two even columns of 14 names each. Mike Connolly of Skillman Avenue, Paul Devers, also of Skillman, Aniello Nunziato of 52nd Street, Artie Riegel, Tommy Noonan, and others.
Bernie McNellis, who was 19 when he was drafted, said he was close friends with seven of the men. Some, like Noonan, a posthumous winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, were a little older and he didn’t know them so well.
The 28 from N.Y. 11377, the CWV members said, constituted the largest number of Vietnam dead for any zip code in the nation.
McNellis arrived back from Vietnam on the same weekend of the Woodstock music festival. “I remember it was a Friday — Aug. 15, 1969,” he said. He’d served his year-long tour with the 4th infantry, 1st squadron, 10th cavalry.
“It was a patriotic neighborhood; nobody spat at me,” he said.
McNellis grew up on 53rd Street in what is today one of the most diverse neighborhoods in America but was then a melting pot in its own way. His block was known to be mainly German.
His parents, both from County Tyrone, were Roosevelt Democrats. “He was a god to them,” he said.
And they always voted the party ticket faithfully. “If the guy was complete moron, they’d vote for him,” he added, laughing. When he came home, he was just old enough to vote. He registered as a Republican.
In the old neighborhood, he and his wife raised two sons, who are today New York City police officers.
He doesn’t question the record of the favorite in next Tuesday’s New York Democratic primary, John Kerry. “I couldn’t shine his shoes. What he saw . . .,” he said, his voice trailing off. “But his views when he came back, I don’t know.”
A five-page anti-Kerry document, written by a conservative member of the CWV, was passed around. It quoted Oliver North, whom the senator investigated during the Iran-Contra affair, saying this year that Kerry “has the blood of our soldiers on his hands” because of his involvement in the anti-war movement and his association with “Hanoi Jane” Fonda.
McNellis put on his glasses, studied the document for a few minutes but didn’t comment on it.
He recalled how Vietnam looked from a helicopter. “Flying over just looking at it, it was beautiful, like a checker board,” he said. The country had less to commend it on the ground, but the Vietnamese were good people, he said.
McNellis was in combat but “nothing spectacular.” He was only sporadically in danger, when he was a helicopter gunner.
“The grunts, they were the heroes,” he said. “And Kerry’s a legitimate hero. Nobody can take that away from him. But people tend to forget that we are at war. I would never change the president in a time of crisis.”
This is a jihad, launched against a predominantly Christian country, by the most fanatical sections of the world’s Islamic population, McNellis argued. He believes President Bush has a great strength. “Bush is focused,” he said.
“We’re the infidels. I want a candidate who knows this,” he said. “He’s fighting a war on their soil, not ours.”
CWV 870 member Richard Tobiassen, who served in Vietnam with the 33rd ordinance company in 1966 and ’67, takes a different view of the administration. “They’re robber barons,” he said.
He had some problems with Clinton’s moral lapses when they were revealed. “But his sins were just venial; these guys now are committing mortal sins,” said Tobiassen, a former Republican whose family roots are in Norway and County Derry.
He was concerned, he said, about the environmental-protection rollbacks in recent times and the failure to sign onto the Kyoto treaty. Allowing increased levels of arsenic in water, for example, would alone cost thousands of American lives. And then there’s the $7 trillion debt, the highest it’s ever been.
He believes that Saddam Hussein posed no serious threat to the United States and that the government’s preemptive war has only strengthened conservative Islam, particularly in Iraq itself.
“As for Cheney, no company seems to be willing to bid against him in Iraq,” Tobiassen added, referring to Halliburton.

Weighing the records
If the CWV post in Woodside is any indication, the candidates’ military records are not a major concern in New York City at this point.
“Service shouldn’t be an issue,” McNellis said.
And rarely has it been a decisive factor in presidential campaigns. The question “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” has no equivalent in electoral politics, mainly because candidates have always been happy to tell, and even exaggerate, their wartime service.
Voters have generally taken such service on board as part of the more complex whole. So, for instance, Nixon’s solid if unspectacular war record was more than enough for GOP voters when he ran against war heroes John Kennedy and George McGovern.
But in 1992 the issue packed a punch when Democratic nominee Bill Clinton was labeled a “draft dodger” by some Republicans.
But Americans still have painful and ambivalent feelings about the Vietnam War. That was one reason why voters couldn’t fairly judge Clinton’s mettle, or lack of it, against that of his much older opponents in 1992 and ’96, George Bush Sr. and Bob Dole, who’d served with distinction in World War II.
But now the probable pair-off in November is something that could have been conjured up by a fiction writer. Kerry, a much-decorated Vietnam hero, who later campaigned to have the war ended, is facing an incumbent, Bush, who seemingly avoided action in a war he fully backed and who has brought the country into a new war, which the electorate is increasingly beginning to question.
“It’s a good thing that this country’s looking at the value of service,” said veteran and Republican party supporter Vincent McGowan in a telephone interview. “We’ve two veterans to choose from.”
McGowan, who was born to West of Ireland parents in Manhattan, where he now lives, fought with the Marine Corps in Vietnam from 1966-68. His son, a lieutenant in the Marines, is serving in Iraq.
“What is best for America right now?” he asked. “I shudder to think where we’d be if Gore had been elected president. The country would still be talking about going to war with Afghanistan.”
McGowan is less than enthralled with John Kerry’s war record. Some soldiers who fought on the front line in Vietnam, he said, did so in less comfortable circumstances than the presidential candidate.
“He wrote his own Silver Star citation,” McGowan said, adding that Kerry’s later activities with the anti-war movement did a “disservice” to his former comrades.
McGowan also made the general case for service. “If you served as a cook in a mess hall somewhere, would it make it less honorable?” he said.
John Rowan, the New York state president of Vietnam Veterans of America, who worked as a linguist and intelligence analyst for the Air Force on his Vietnam tour of duty in 1967, has a slightly different take.
“Back in 1968, the National Guard was the place to go hide,” he said. “There’s an interesting juxtaposition here. You would have thought that Bush, like his father, and Kerry, would have volunteered after he graduated from Yale. The arguments will go back and forth [in the election].”

Health issues
But many veterans are interested primarily in their own particular issues, like health care, and sometimes, he said, a veteran in the White House did not serve former soldiers well.
“Nixon didn’t do squat,” Rowan said. In that sense, he said, “we don’t care who the hell’s in there.”
Now the Vietnam veterans are, for the most part, in their late 50s to early 60s and facing increasing health problems. For example, Rowan is helping veterans file for benefits for illnesses such as diabetes and certain cancers.
Because of their exposure to dioxin in Agent Orange and other substances, the VVA claims, Vietnam veterans are getting diabetes at higher rates and more severely than the general population in the same age group.
“Some veterans aren’t aware that these are service-connected disabilities,” Rowan said. “And Gulf War veterans are having problems with a whole range of undiagnosed illnesses.”
Sean McGovern, a Belfast native who served in the air force in Vietnam in 1971-72, agreed that veterans’ issues have to be addressed. “The candidates need to be quizzed about what they’re going to do for veterans and the guys coming back now with physical and mental disability,” he said.
Arguably, though, the issues around military service remain abstract in much of the country at this early stage.
Kerry’s comeback, and former candidate Howard Dean’s implosion, happened in an up-close Iowa campaign, where the Massachusetts senator used television advertising to great effect.
It was then that Democrats began to feel that Kerry’s war record represented their best hope against Bush’s war chest.
“I think it [the military service issue] will be more positive than negative for Kerry in the long run,” Rowan said. “People like heroes, I guess.”