You can’t walk around the convention floor without bumping into a war hero. This election year, Democrats are trying to downplay their peace-and-love image and throw some men and women who know how to fire heavy weapons on camera. They include decorated soldiers from conflicts past, such as Max Cleland, the former senator from Georgia who lost three limbs in the Vietnam War. In a few hours Cleland will say some words about his fellow Vietnam Veteran, John Kerry, and present him to the convention’s assembled delegates for the first time.

Veterans, however, are a growing commodity, thanks to the ongoing hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. They include young men like Jeremy Broussard, a 27-year-old African American who served in southern Iraq as a captain in the U.S. Army, providing fire support to the Marines during the U.S.-led invasion of that country. Broussard, a native of New Orleans, is at the Fleet Center this week to show solidarity with the Democratic Party and its veteran nominee. “A big concern of mine is the [Bush] administration is not honest with the American people about what’s happening in Iraq,” he says. “… The main enemy on 9/11 was Al Qaeda. And Al Qaeda was in Afghanistan. We’re sending it all into Iraq, and what you’re seeing is Afghanistan is on the backburner.”

The Bush administration, Broussard says, has also failed to support the troops fully when they’ve come home, cutting pay and benefits for enlisted men and women: “They’re doing photo ops with vets, but in reality [veterans] are getting stabbed in the back.” Morale is at a low, he says: Before the Iraq War started, the worst assignment was in South Korea, guarding the no man’s land between that country and nuke-empowered North Korea. Nowadays, however, so many soldiers want to be transferred to South Korea that their requests are being denied. “They’ll go” to Iraq, Broussard says of his fellow soldiers. “They’ll do their service. But they don’t want to be there.”

Even pro-Kerry veterans like Broussard, however, are not necessarily enamored of the anti-war wing of the Democratic Party. Broussard says that he saw Michael Moore’s film, Fahrenheit 9/11, which includes interviews with soldiers serving in Iraq. But Broussard feels the depiction of soldiers in the film — for instance, a segment in which a G.I. speaks with relish of gunning down insurgents with heavy metal music ringing in his ears — was “two-dimensional.” “I want to make sure that people understand that soldiers are not mindless killing machines. No one enjoys it … But we’re there to do a job.”

It’s clear that Kerry needs to keep the anti-war faction of the party from breaking ranks while also not alienating veterans like Broussard, many of whom — in spite of the all the alleged deception and undisputed toll in human life in Iraq — do not wish the United States to pull out and leave a power vacuum in that Middle Eastern country. The abundance of veterans on the stage this week — including the former NATO commander, General Wesley Clark, tonight — seems to indicate that the Kerry team is leaning decisively in one direction.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen