n'est pas

My dad says he doesn't like Kerry because the only reason he went to Vietnam was to win metals.
I replied with something along the lines of at least he went to Vietnam, unlike certain other candidates. I was going to ask my father (being a Vietnam vet) why he went, but it seemed like a tangent passing a little too close by home, so I veered the conversation closer to Cheney's thunderdome of insanity.
Strange, though, how he's never admitted just how upset my mother claims he became when recieved his draft notice. They were living in Boston, my mom was a telephone operator and my dad played the keyboard in a rock and roll band, and even if that's not entirely accurate that's the way I piece it together. And of course why would you want to leave that story, but they weren't hippies so they didn't go hide in Canada. I can't imagine some of it.
I imagine my trips overseas as landing on some beach in Spain and immediately becoming under the influence of something exotic. I cannot imagine flying overseas for the first time and having my first image be that of dead bodies being shipped back to the states- more dead bodies, my father recalls, than soldiers landing on the ground. Nothing I am doing with my life at the moment can be considered noteworthy or character-building. When my dad called Kerry a "waffler," I laughed because it sounded like something you would order at "IHOP."
It's hard to argue with a Vietnam vet, because I suppose if you've witnessed a massacre you understand the end of everything.