Candidates Remember Fallen Warriors

Al Gore recalled his Army tour in Vietnam with nostalgia and some humility while George W. Bush looked ahead to the future without mentioning his own military service as presidential politics took a back seat to patriotism on Memorial Day.

Along the banks of the Monongahela River, cutting through western Pennsylvania’s old steel towns, Gore navigated a tangle of the official, the political and the personal--speaking in his capacity as vice president at Elizabeth’s traditional holiday commemoration and spotlighting his own little-known service in Vietnam.

“I know that my service doesn’t in any way match that of the heroes that we honor on this day,” Gore said in this town of 1,600, which lost six sons in Vietnam. He was introduced by Army buddy Bob Delabar.

Gore, who has said his five months in Vietnam as an Army journalist included brushes with enemy fire, rarely speaks of what he did there.

On Monday, when Americans paused to remember the war dead, the snapshot Gore chose to share with his audience of about 500, including many veterans, was, oddly, a lighthearted one.

“One time we borrowed, or commandeered, a Jeep and went over to Vung Tau,” a soldiers’ rest facility on the Vietnamese coast. “Anyway, we had many great times together,” Gore said with a gesture toward Delabar.

Bush, the Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate, stayed closer to home and told about 1,000 people in Killeen, Texas, next to Ft. Hood, that veterans’ sacrifices must be honored always. The bulk of the U.S. peacekeeping force in Bosnia was drawn from the base about 130 miles south of Dallas.

“As we recall our fallen heroes, we’re privileged to be in the company of heroes,” he said in brief remarks in a flag-filled amphitheater on a steaming hot afternoon. “Thank you for serving our country. You make us all proud to be Americans.”

Bush, who did not mention his presidential campaign, his opponent or his own military service, said it was fitting on Memorial Day to remember the following biblical verse: “Greater love hath no man than this, than he laid down his life for his friends.”

Introduced as a former Texas Air National guardsman, where he served stateside during the Vietnam years, Bush said the challenge in coming years is to instill patriotism in future generations. He also said it is important to maintain a well-paid, well-equipped military.

“We must pass the story of American courage to the next generation to raise a monument in their hearts,” said Bush, who planned to discuss military readiness at a Veterans of Foreign Wars post today in Denver. “This is the greatest nation on the Earth.”

Gore chose to visit Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County because, said Lou Lignelli, district director for Democratic Rep. Frank R. Mascara, it has one of the nation’s highest concentrations of veterans per capita. It also happens to be in a crucial battleground state that Gore, the Democratic presidential candidate, has visited six times since mid-March.

He also said he wanted to make sure military personnel are “paid adequately and have adequate housing and health care.”

With former Veterans’ Affairs Secretary Jesse Brown in tow, Gore also used the trip to assail Bush’s proposals for Social Security in interviews with four TV stations from Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Today, he was to travel to Milwaukee to accept the endorsement of the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental group.

Gore plans appearances all week highlighting pieces of a biography that his campaign said voters do not yet know: on Monday, his enlistment in the Army; today, his decades of environmental advocacy; and on Wednesday, his wife’s long advocacy of mental health care. For Thursday and Friday, he plans speeches on cancer, which claimed his older sister in 1984, and on fatherhood.

Elizabeth homemaker and seamstress Margaret Hutchko, 78, unwittingly testified Monday to the ripeness of that strategy. “Is he a veteran? That helps. I didn’t know that,” the undecided Democrat said after Gore’s Riverfront Park appearance.

Army veteran Sal Mollise, also undecided, said Gore’s service tipped the scales a little. “It tells me he’s very patriotic and has character,” said Mollise, 57.