We have all seen the attacks against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota by people who claim to be just “protecting our neighbors.”
These “neighbors” include murderers, rapists, sex traffickers, and thieves, all of whom are deemed more worthy of protection than the federal employees seeking to enforce the laws of the United States. They have been subjected to an escalating campaign of vilification, personalized hostility, abuse, and assaults. They are Nazis! Gestapo!
As I see and read of these attacks on line agents, I have a sense of deja vu — flashbacks to the abuse inflicted upon many members of our military who served in Vietnam in the ’60s and early ’70s.
Like the ICE agents today, the great majority were attempting to do two things that sometimes were at odds with each other: 1) discharge their duty under highly dangerous conditions and then 2) return home alive. I’ll never forget the abuse heaped upon those who returned after choosing to serve in Vietnam rather than dodge the draft, flee to Canada, or hide behind phony physical ailments. We have seen this act before, only it is much worse now.
A Flashback to the ’60s
Today, the “Thank you for your service” mantra addressed to military veterans is ubiquitous. But this is a change from the Vietnam era. Most people alive today have no personal memory of how returning combat veterans were treated then.
To understand why Vietnam veterans were treated so vilely, look no further than John Kerry’s 1971 statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a speech that launched his political career. In it, Kerry painted a grotesque picture of the American soldier. He claimed that those who served in Vietnam were “a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence.” He told Americans that their soldiers’ crimes were “what threaten[] this country.”
According to Kerry, these barbarisms were “accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam,” and they were “not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”
And what exactly did we soldiers do? Well, listen to him.
Kerry told everyone in America that we were monsters who …
…had personally 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, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war…
When Kerry’s portrayal of such “monsters” was televised and widely circulated, is it any wonder Vietnam soldiers became the object of widespread derision, harassment, and prejudice?
Because of slanders spread by the likes of Kerry, a significant number of Americans adopted their disdain, even hatred, for soldiers. A small number of ill-disciplined soldiers committed atrocities at My Lai, so we all were branded as “baby killers” by many of our fellow citizens. Young men were frequently harassed or denied service at bars and restaurants because they had short hair that marked them as members of the military. Curses and insults were routinely thrown at servicemembers or their uniforms.
At the so-called “anti-war” rallies on college campuses, students the age of the average infantryman in Vietnam routinely waved enemy flags and chanted, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh. The NLF is doing to win.” You win a war when you kill the enemy soldiers. So these students — our chronological peers — were rooting for our deaths. They wanted our enemies to win.
And, yes, random people sometimes thought it was cool to spit on returning veterans. A cottage industry of sorts has grown up to deny that this ever happened, but my friends personally experienced it. Wikipedia characterizes this as a “persistent myth,” but the same page cites instances where it did happen, while speculating about possible reasons for the spitting. Most of the denials are based on the lack of police reports or criminal charges.
What utter nonsense. There is about a zero percent chance that a veteran walking through an airport after spending a year or more in Vietnam would delay his return home by searching for a cop to report an irritating but non-life-threatening incident and potentially getting involved in the judicial system over it.
Today’s War on the Troops Is Worse
Today, we see the same hatred spewed at the front-line law enforcement agents who are trying to do their duty under stressful and dangerous conditions. They are my focus here, not their higher-ups, some of whom have rushed out with demonstrably inaccurate descriptions of deadly events. That happened in Vietnam, too, from Robert McNamara on down.
Their opponents have doubled down on Kerry’s playbook. As during Vietnam, public figures unapologetically fan the flame. The governor, the state attorney general, the Minneapolis mayor, the local congressional representative, and numerous other politicians, movie stars, and left-wing media shills have encouraged attacks against ICE agents by slandering them as Nazis, Gestapo, and kidnappers of 5-year-olds. In the middle of these highly charged conditions, they have urged the “protesters” to take to the streets, confront the agents, and help build the promised criminal prosecutions against them. They and their supporters assure us that when they regain power, they will hold Nuremberg-type trials for agents who have given and obeyed orders. The agents will get all the due process afforded to Derek Chauvin.
A direct result of public figures promoting this insurrection has been widespread and highly organized “protests” — many of which are actually unlawful obstruction, harassment, assault, or vandalism — against not only senior leadership but all agents.
When agents try to apprehend someone who has damaged government property or assaulted agents, the demonstrators “put their bodies on the line” to interfere, as Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan instructed them to. Here is Flanagan rousing the troops by claiming “Donald Trump and his minions” are “stealing food off of the table from seniors and children” and “kidnapping” “our neighbors.”
Of course, Flanagan also tells demonstrators to be “nonviolent.” Riiiiiiiight. Fat chance. Here are some of her followers after absorbing her ersatz caution:
They storm hotels where they think agents might be sleeping. At night, they bang on drums and blast air horns to make sure the agents can’t sleep. If agents manage to get away for a meal in a restaurant, the network sends out alerts, and mobs assemble in minutes to drive out the agents amid shouting, whistle–blowing, assaults, and other disruptive behavior.
The mobs try to identify individual agents. When successful, they dox and threaten the agents and their families. Democrat politicians aid their doxing tactics by threatening to shut down the government if agents are allowed to try to protect themselves by concealing their faces and identities.
When ICE contacted local police to request protection, the latter refused to show up. Although there seems to have been some improvement in the past few days, for weeks there was zero effort by local authorities to protect agents, control chaos, or prevent riots.
In short, amid utter chaos and lawlessness, the mobs have displayed their hatred of agents for the “crime” of attempting to perform their assigned duties. In the ’60s and ’70s, we were all baby killers; now all the line agents are Nazis working for the Gestapo. And Democrats have aided and abetted it all.
‘The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Good’
This Voltairean aphorism is true of any complex military or law enforcement operation. The best generals make mistakes, as do sergeants and captains. No military campaign is conducted perfectly. For all the respect we now give Vietnam and especially World War II veterans, soldiers in all wars made plenty of mistakes. Some were the result of good-faith but imperfect decisions. Others stemmed from ill-discipline and emotional reactions to the stress of combat. We know the evil that U.S. troops did at My Lai, and any serious student of history knows that some members of the “Greatest Generation” did things that would see them court-martialled today.
Yet those imperfections do not cause us to slander and attack all veterans of any wars. We honor them despite the excesses or even crimes of some.
ICE and Customs and Border Protection, with tens of thousands of agents each, are no different. Are they perfect? No. But the great majority of both leaders and line agents are doing their best under trying and dangerous circumstances.
Even when some make wrong decisions, ICE and CBP agents broadly deserve our honor and respect. They do not deserve to be denigrated as Nazis.
So if you see any federal agents in your town or city, don’t get in their way, but thank them. Let them know they have support. A short “We appreciate what you do,” will go a long way to help tamp down tensions. Do your share.
This article was adapted from the author’s Substack, “Bravo Blue.”
