With our national referendum on the Iraq War and President George W. Bush's leadership only days away, I want to share some 1961 reportage from South Vietnam by the famous CBS-TV newsman, the late Charles Kuralt, that I find deeply moving. It is about South Vietnam, the South Vietnamese, and the moral imperative of freedom. It is from his excellent 1990 book, "A Life On the Road."

First, read this post by a 38-year-old Iraqi architectural engineer, Sarmad Faraj, at his blog Road Of A Nation. Heartfelt stuff, so brace yourself. He is talking to the terrorists battling Iraq's new provisional government and the many Iraqis who support it.

Yes, damn you, you sick pathetic people.....What are you trying to do? Killing and killing and murdering and kidnapping destroys families' lives, killing children, and for what?....What you did for us, for Iraqis, you killed more of us than the war did; and what did you win?....Iraq is mine, I will never leave it, we will never give up, we will stand against you, we will do anything we can, we will build, we will learn, we will live, we will dream........We will be the spotlight on your dark life and darkness....we will be the loud voice of reason and thought, we will win.....I will write and write and work and do, I am a new man, I am no longer a slave, I am a true human. That’s what I learned lately, and I will stay this way, am going nowhere, I am here forever, I am here for my country, for my people, for my children's hope, and their right to live and hope.

I am here: come and get me, I am not afraid of you, if I go there are thousands, millions like me, and more. Every day we do something good, you became weaker and weaker; we will chase you until we will get you, every day a rose or a flower opens you lose more and more, every day we go to our work you lose, every day we learn something new you lose....My people, keep on doing good work, you are, all together, the hope of this new land, the land of freedom and free people and peace. You are the hope of the next generations, you are the future, the future which we never dreamed of...

Whew! Can we get this guy on "60 Minutes" this Sunday? How about it, Danny-Boy?

Sarmad's cry is why we must not retreat in fear from an unstable Iraq, as John Kerry would if he defeats Bush. We already made that mistake once, in Vietnam, a withdrawal that the most famous Vietnam Veteran Against The War, Kerry, energetically supported, while he condemned American soldiers as war criminals and later offered counsel to the North Vietnamese Communists who robbed the South Vietnam of its independence.

And the South Vietnamese, so many of whom fled to America when we abondoned their country - to land in Orange County, New York, Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago and Seattle - still yearn for a free homeland, as many Iraqis in volatile post-Saddam Iraq do today. Kuralt captured a lot that's worth our attention right now, in the 7-page chapter titled "Lieutenant Son," from "A Life On The Road" (Putnam, 1990).

Kuralt writes: "I found Saigon the most seductive of cities. The war in the countryside had not yet had any effect on the capital. All the people I met, teachers, newspapermen, waiters and cabdrivers, were friendly and considerate. The women were beautiful, I thought, gliding along in their diaphonous constumes, and the spring weather was lovely, and the sidewalk cafes delightful. I walked along the tree-shaded avenues during the day and, lying in bed under the lazy ceiling fan in my room at the old Majestic Hotel, listened to the sounds of the river traffic at night...This is worth defending, I thought. If this sunny, beguiling city ever falls to the communists and becomes grey and regimented, there just isn't any hope for civilization."

Kuralt soon got his chance to accompany a South Vietnamese unit into battle, one led by "Lieutenant Son, a neatly turned out young Ranger officer...young as he was, Lieutenant Son turned out to be a veteran of warfare....'we want a free country,' he said. 'My family did not fight the French in order to be ruled by Ho Chi Minh. So now we fight on. You will find many like me in the Rangers.'"

The next day, deep in the countryside, Lieutenant Son's Ranger unit was ambushed by the Viet Cong. Kuralt writes, "Lieutenant Son had taken a bullet in the arm, but he was still in action, kneeling on the ground beside his radio operator, cranking the handle of the magneto-operated radio, trying to call battalion headquarters for reinforcements...But it was useless. No answer came. We were out of radio range.

"Then the radio operator, a kid no more than 17 or 18, performed the most astounding act of courage I have ever seen. Without a word, he reached into his pack, found a coil of wire and attached one end of it to the radio antenna. He ran to a tree, uncoiling the wire as he ran. Holding the other end of the wire in his mouth, he climbed the tree with bullets whizzing around him, tied the wire to a high branch, shinnied back down the tree and made it back to his radio unscratched. He cranked the handle furiously. Lieutenant Son, lying beside the radio, spoke into the microphone, reached battalion headquarters and started reading coordinates from a map....'Stay down,' he said...to me. 'It's okay. They send the paratroopers.'"

Several men in Son's unit had been killed, others wounded. Kuralt writes, "Son was up and walking around the clearing now, encouraging his surviving soldiers....a single shot was fired from the woods. It hit Son's helmet in the back center and exited the front. He pitched forward into me and fell to the ground....I was never able to get Son out of my mind. Through all the years of the Vietnam War, I thought of him. I returned to Vietnam several times, went out into the countryside with troops again - they were American troops by then - and was present when other good men were killed in jungle clearings.

"As the war dragged on inconclusively and American casualties mounted, it became the fashion in the United States to say that the American boys were dying for nothing. All my friends agreed it was an immoral war, imperialist America against 'the Vietnamese people.'

"I never thought so. The Vietnamese people I met wanted nothing to do with warfare. They wanted to be left alone to live peacefully. But they weren't being left alone. They were being invaded by an army from the North, sent by a government they hated. I thought of Son, who wanted so much for Vietnam to be free that he was was willing to go on fighting for the idea long after his fighting days should have been over...The (South Vietnamese) who lived through it - not many of the Rangers did - have presumably been 're-educated' now. Lovely, languid Saigon has become Ho Chi Minh City...In America, most people don't remember the war very well or take into account any longer the wishes of the 'Vietnamese people.'"

Would that there had been the Internet then, and blogs by the South Vietnamese. Would that Bush I and Powell had had the nerve to finish off Saddam in Gulf War I, or Clinton the political courage to act on his stated - and ostensibly grave - worries about Saddam.

Thanks, Mr. Kuralt. And God Bless our troops, The Iraqi people, and President Bush.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at October 28, 2004 10:05 AM

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