Marines return after nearly four decades
Gunnery Sgt. Kent Flora

MARINE BARRACKS WASHINGTON, D.C. - The families of 11 Marines, their long wait finally over, said a final goodbye to loved ones not forgotten after nearly four decades.

Arlington National Cemetery, the final resting place for America’s honored heroes, was the rain-laden backdrop to the history-making event that saw hundreds of friends, service members and families pay tribute to the men who gave the ultimate sacrifice so many years before.

The Corps’ motto “Semper Fidelis” - always faithful - rings true when speaking about never leaving any Marine behind and the ceremony marks the second time at ANC this year that Marines have returned home for proper burial. The first interment was in May when three Marines and a Navy corpsman of Company A, 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion, were honored after returning from the Quang Tri Province of South Vietnam.

It pains me to hear these stories when John Kerry did his best to turn his back on any of his brothers at arms dead or alive remaining in Vietnam, heading up a committee –the sole purpose of which was to “normalize” relations with Vietnam at the expense of all of the POWs left there.

The old adage is “no man left behind”. But Kerry betrayed everything he learned at officers training school. He sucked up to the communists then, he’s sucking up to them today.

As chairman of the Select Senate Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, created in 1991 to investigate reports that U.S. prisoners of war and soldiers designated missing in action were still alive in Vietnam, Kerry badgered the panel into voting that no American servicemen remained in Vietnam.

“[N]o one in the United States Senate pushed harder to bury the POW/MIA issue, the last obstacle preventing normalization of relations with Hanoi, than John Forbes Kerry,” noted U.S. Veteran Dispatch.

“But Kerry’s participation in the Committee became controversial in December 1992,” reported the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, “when Hanoi announced that it had awarded Colliers International, a Boston-based real estate company, an exclusive deal to develop its commercial real estate potentially worth billions. Stuart Forbes, the CEO of Colliers, is Kerry’s cousin.”

The “odd coincidence,” according to FrontPageMagazine.com, involved a deal worth $905 million.

Jeff Jacoby, the token conservative columnist at the Boston Globe, notes that Kerry continues his apologia for Vietnam’s never-ending atrocities. “Far from taking the lead on the Vietnam Human Rights Bill, he has prevented it from coming to a vote. He claims that making an issue of Hanoi’s repression would be counterproductive.”

Counterproductive for his cousin, maybe. $905 million clams. This would be embarrassing to a principled decent man, but to John F’n Kerry, this is just another day of doing business. Kerry himself could probably care little about the money, being that he’s a poodle to Teresa Heinz Kerry, but what of the men that were left behind? And what of their families who still fly MIA POW flags and are still waiting for word?

Take a look at Persecution.com and take a look at what people suffer at the hands of communists–or read a little of the following.

COMMUNIST EXPLOITATION OF RELIGION

In solitary confinement I was the first 2 , nearly 3 years. It was in the most beautiful building of Bucharest in the building of the Secretariat of State for Internal Affairs. It is a building before which all foreigners stand and admire it. I can tell you that your White House is a very little building in comparison with ours. And there beneath the earth 10 meters beneath the earth are the cells. There are no windows in the cells. Air enters through a tube. And there were a few desks with a mattress, with a straw mattress. You had but three steps for to walk. Never were we taken out from these cells except for interrogations when prisoners were beaten and tortured.

For years I have never seen sun, moon, flowers, snow, stars, no man except the interrogator who beat, but I can say I have seen heaven open, I have seen Jesus Christ, I have seen the angles and we were very happy there.

But the treatment was very bad. The purpose was to make us mad. You didn’t hear a noise. A whisper you didn’t hear in this cell. The guard had felt shoes. For years, not to hear anything. In all these years of prison we never had a book, we never had a but of paper, we never had a newspaper, nothing to distract our mind except that from time to time tape recorders were put on the corridor. I didn’t know what a tape recorder is. I had not seen such a thing. But at once we heard beautiful Rumanian music, and then we enjoyed it. We didn’t know what has happened with the Communists that they make us enjoy, and after 10 or 15 minutes at once you heard, “Ha, ha, ha don’t beat,” the torturing of a woman. This lasted for half an hour the torturing of a woman. And of 100 prisoners who had been in that cell, in that corridor, everybody recognized that it is his wife or that it is his girl. I myself thought also that it is my wife.

This is still happening…in China, in Vietnam, in communist and totalitarian regimes like the Sudan–all over the world. John Kerry supports and adores regimes like communist China and the communists in Nicaragua.

Here’s the testimony of a Vietnam POW:

One-time Navy pilot Paul Galanti was shot down over North Vietnam in 1966 and spent seven years in the infamous Hanoi Hilton.

He told the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday that he learned of Kerry’s April 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while being tortured by his Hanoi Hilton guards.

According to the Times, “during torture sessions, [Galanti] said, his captors cited the antiwar speeches as ‘an example of why we should cross over to [their] side.’”

In his account to the Senate, Kerry accused U.S. soldiers of routinely committing rapes, beheadings, mutilations and all manner of atrocities against the Vietnamese people.

Galanti told the Times that Kerry’s decision to publicly allege that U.S. soldiers were war criminals “jeopardize[d] those still in battle or in the hands of the enemy.”

Because he did, Galanti said, “John Kerry was a traitor to the men he served with.”

“The Viet Cong didn’t think they had to win the war on the battlefield,” the ex-POW said, “because thanks to these protesters they were going to win it on the streets of San Francisco and Washington.”

John Kerry betrayed his brothers at arms who were still in Vietnam. Alive or dead, they deserved to come home.

John Kerry must release his records and let us know the truth…and what is in those 100 or so missing pages.

Image: LindaSog.com

Join the blogbursts to help FREE Kerry’s 180 every Tuesday!

We’ve formed a blogburst group and here are the bloggers who are contributing so far. If you want to join the blogroll for Free Kerry’s 180, click here to email me, include the url for your blog. The blogburst is every Tuesday, so don’t forget to blog about it. All you have to do is encourage Kerry to set his 180 FREE, I’ll send you the code for the blogroll.

The more people we have, the merrier!

NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.