Winston-Salem Journal Op-Ed: Here's one veteran who knows about public service

Winston-Salem Journal Op-Ed
Scott Sexton
September 16, 2008

The crowd that turned out at VFW Post 1134 for a town-hall style political rally wasn’t half bad, considering that it was 10:30 on Saturday morning and the relative humidity surely had to have been hovering at 50 percent.

About 40 people — not counting aides or party officials — filed into the post’s main meeting room ostensibly to hear state Sen. Kay Hagan discuss veterans’ issues. Hagan is taking on U.S. Sen. Elizabeth “My Mama’s House Is in Salisbury” Dole, R-N.C.

But the real reason that most of them attended was a gentleman who turned up in an older, chauffeur-driven Cadillac with a disabled veteran, Georgia license plate, just a few minutes after the advertised starting time.

Former U.S. Sen. Max Cleland, a Georgia Democrat, triple amputee and Vietnam veteran, came to speak on Hagan’s behalf and the veterans in attendance came to show their support for a man whose service, pain and sacrifice was hideously ridiculed in 2002, two years before “swiftboating” became a verb.

“I don’t understand how anybody could do that, to have so little regard for a man’s service,” said Frank Flores, a fellow Vietnam and Army veteran who serves as the post’s commander. “Unless you were in, don’t say anything about anybody else’s service.”

Politics as therapy

Cleland’s story is as remarkable as it is poignant. He was a 25-year-old Army captain who was working as a communications officer when he went to help prepare a radio transmitter on a hill near Khe Sanh before an impending battle.

He picked up a wayward grenade that he thought he had dropped, thinking its pin was intact. It exploded, and cost him both legs and his right arm. He had won a Silver Star in the weeks before he was injured, a little detail often omitted in a smear campaign to come 34 years later.

When he returned to Georgia, Cleland threw himself into politics. In 1970, he was elected to the Georgia state Senate. Six years later, President Carter appointed him to run the Veterans Administration. After Carter lost in 1980, Cleland served four terms as Georgia’s secretary of state.

“Politics is therapy for me,” Cleland said before taking his turn at the podium in Winston-Salem on Saturday.

In 1996, he won one of Georgia’s seats in the U.S. Senate. When it came time to run for re-election in 2002, Cleland found himself at the wrong end of a vicious Republican attack ad in which his face was juxtaposed with those of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. (He had voted against a Republican-sponsored bill to create the Department of Homeland Security.)

Cleland lost to challenger Saxby Chambliss, a Republican lawyer who managed to miss out on military service yet stood by as the reputation of a decorated veteran was savaged for his political gain.

“After I lost, I went into a deep depression, a real black hole that took me a long time to get out of,” Cleland said.

‘Keeps me going’

Given that bitter experience, you might wonder why anybody would voluntarily agree to slip back into the cesspool that is American politics.

The first part of his answer was a predictable nod to Hagan and her bid to unseat Dole.

“Kay cares about people, particularly about veterans,” he said. “Her husband is a Vietnam vet who worked his way through school on the GI bill, so she knows what’s important to us.”

Cleland showed the second part of his answer far from a TV camera that lit up the other half of the room. He leaned in close as a fellow veteran whispered a few words, then turned to an aide to see that a photo was taken and that the man’s name and address were written down.

“This is important,” Cleland said. “Make sure you get this.”

The veterans in the room, particularly those who served in Vietnam, are his brothers and sisters. Staying involved in politics, he said, gives him access to candidates and allows him to continue speaking on behalf of veterans.

“Working with good people energizes me,” he said. “It keeps me going.”

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