Ron Kovic: Surging Past the Tipping Point (Truthdig)

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Ron Kovic: Surging Past the Tipping Point

By Joshua Scheer

In an interview with Truthdig research editor Joshua Scheer, Ron Kovic, author of “Born on the Fourth of July,” argues that Americans this week have a patriotic and generation-defining duty to speak out against Bush’s proposal to escalate the war in Iraq with more U.S. troops.

Truthdig: I understand you’re very incensed by Bush’s intention to escalate the Iraq war with a troop surge.

Kovic: Absolutely. This week is a very crucial turning point in the war. We’re being led in a very reckless and dangerous direction. I don’t want to see more men and women come home like me—in wheelchairs for the rest of their lives. How many more have to die in a war that makes no sense? I feel like I’m seeing the mirror image of another Vietnam unfolding all over again, and I think we have never needed to break that silence and begin to speak more than we do now.

Truthdig: Has this war surpassed the Vietnam War in any way?

Kovic: I think President Bush plans to provoke an even wider war in the Middle East in the coming months. That’s my prediction. He is going to escalate the war by sending more troops to Iraq in a war that we cannot win—a war that is only going to cause more violence, make us even bigger targets of terrorist attacks.

Like many veterans of the Vietnam War, I’ve been in this wheelchair for almost 40 years. I’ve lived with the wounds of American foreign policy for almost four decades now. I saw American foreign policy firsthand, as did many others of my generation. And we learned the lessons of that war. I have serious doubts whether President Bush or the architects of this particular policy in the Middle East right now learned those lessons. And how many of those who are making the decision this week—how many of those talking heads, those so-called experts, who made the decision to have a troop surge, to escalate this war, to put more young men and women’s lives in harm’s way, to put more Iraqi civilians at risk—how many of them really served in a war, how many really understand the human cost of a war? How many really understand what it means to be wounded—whether you’re American or Iraqi? How many understand what it means to come home wounded? What it means to lose a son or daughter in a war? How many of them have been directly affected by this war?

Truthdig: We hear so much about “support the troops” while they’re in war. But what does it mean to support the troops when so many of them are coming back home wounded?

Kovic: I don’t see how this administration is supporting the troops when they’re clearly cutting back the budgets of the veterans hospitals around the country. That is outrageous. That is unacceptable. How can you spend billions of dollars fighting a war in Iraq and not care for those who are wounded when they come back home?

I have opposed this war from the very beginning. I was speaking out against it before it began. I sensed we were being deceived just as we were deceived during the Vietnam War. I wasn’t going to let it happen again. I made one promise to myself in 1968 after I was shot and paralyzed in Vietnam. (During those years that I was involved with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, so I was speaking not only for myself, but for many, many other Vietnam veterans like myself who opposed that war, who went to jail with me.) We said back then, “We’re never going to allow what happened to our generation to ever happen again.” And to watch this nightmare unfold all over again.... (more)

The rest of the interview is at: http://www.truthdig.com/interview/item/20070109_ron_kovic_tipping_point/