THE KERRY SPECTATOR: The POWs Speak
Babbin, Jed
HE VIETNAM WAR brought out the best and the worst of America, but we've never really agreed which was which. That's a problem for John Kerry, who played a minor role on one side, then a major role...
...Everybody in my group...had feelings that ranged from disgust and contempt to anger to demoralization about what people like Jane Fonda and Kerry and, you know, everybody that was back here in our opinion helping the enemy cause," he said...
...Dick Vaughn said, "Kerry gave aid and comfort to the enemy by his actions after leaving the Navy...
...Ensch is careful not to disparage what Kerry did on the battlefield but is outraged by what Kerry did off it...
...But his actions after leaving the war did...
...In their eyes, what Kerry and the others did prolonged the war and made worse the abuses they suffered at the hands of the North Vietnamese...
...Not military information...
...The former POWs I spoke to render a judgment that is both harsh and heartfelt...
...He was held captive from December 18, 1971, to March 28, 1973...
...To put it mildly, the POWs disagree...
...44 Collins remembers his captors using speeches by Jane Fonda and Kerry's VVAW group in coercive interrogations as a "constant barrage...for the purpose of demoralizing me...
...The abuse, as many have told me, was intended by the Vietnamese to coerce confessions of war crimes which would feed their propaganda machine and galvanize such anti-Vietnam war protesters as Jane Fonda, Ramsey Clark, Tom Hayden, and John Kerry...
...He helped to cripple America's war effort as leader of the radical Vietnam Veterans Against the War...
...While she spoke, Clower looked out through a window, watching a friend being beaten severely by some North Vietnamese guards...
...Jed Babbin, a TAS contributing editor, was a deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration...
...No one questions Kerry's right to protest what he believed to be an unjust war, just the outrageous manner in which he did it...
...John Kerry served well during the Vietnam War...
...That's a problem for John Kerry, who played a minor role on one side, then a major role on the other, and now wants to take credit for both...
...That explanation doesn't wash with many Vietnam veterans...
...John Hurley, chairman of Vietnam Veterans for Kerry, recently told the Washington Times that Kerry's protesting "saved more lives than not...
...ICK VAUGHN was an Air Force D fighter pilot...
...Vaughn said, "[The North Vietnamese] told us we weren't POWs, we were war criminals....They would continually use people who came over there, people who protested to wear us down, make us believe we were in fact war criminals, puppets of the Nixon administration and we should help them by signing propaganda statements condemning the war...
...But what about former POWs...
...I T. COL...
...Of his 1971 Senate testimony Kerry said recently, "If you read what I said, it is very clearly an indictment of leadership...
...Kerry demands immunity from criticism for his post-Vietnam activism because, in his view, those who didn't fight that war have no right to criticize those who did, regardless of their later misconduct...
...According to Vaughn, "The [interrogators] would often say, 'we cannot beat you militarily...
...we will defeat you...
...Kerry's statement was a "blood libel," several Vietnam veterans told me...
...Even Kerry's closest adherents can't deny their right to judge Kerry...
...His actions didn't change the course of even a small part of the war...
...He and other POWs were forced tolisten to her speeches over the radio...
...TOM COLLINS was an Air Force pilot shot down in 1965 and held as a POW until 1973...
...It made me feel they wanted to apologize for our actions...
...He added, "There was the old line [the interrogators] often used: 'there are two ways.' You can confess your crimes and denounce your government as...your fellow Americans [the protesters] did and things will be `very good' for you or you can continue to 'have a bad anti-war protesters...
...Kerry was a traitor...
...In an e-mail he noted, "What disturbs me is his performance after the fact....Disgust for his disgraceful, despicable public behavior and contempt for being associated with the likes of Jane fonda (always lower case spelling, as befits her status as a human being)....Especially at a time when well meaning and dedicated members of the armed forces were still in harm's way....I lost all respect for Kerry at that point and nothing he has done since has done anything to restore it...
...Clower remembers listening to one broadcast in which Fonda told the world that the North Vietnamese were treating POWs very well...
...Is this judgment of Kerry too harsh...
...His North Vietnamese captors would say, "See...
...and] as a tool of coercion...
...And it's the leaders who are responsible, not the soldiers...
...Kerry came back from Vietnam driven by political ambition, but failed to gain any notoriety until April 1971 when he declared to a Senate committee that war crimes by American soldiers in Vietnam were "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command...
...Even before Vaughn was shot down, the protests "affected the way I felt about people such as John Kerry, Jane Fonda, Ramsey Clark, Joan Baez...
...Other than the POWs, perhaps the best judge of the protests' effect was Gen...
...They wanted the confessions...
...These men were tortured, beaten, and starved by their captors...
...However, with friends like Jane Fonda, Ramsey Clark, etc...
...In his article, "How We Won the War," Giap said: Politically, the Vietnamese always believed in the importance of the anti-war move-ment...They encouraged it as best they could, knowing that creating a climate of opinion hostile to the war would be one important way of ending it...
...Kerry's combat service in Vietnam was brave but insignificant...
...In the later years of his captivity, the VVAW "was thrown up to us on a routine basis," Collins said...
...Unfortunately for the POWs, he served the North Vietnamese better than he served those held in a brutal captivity...
...Collins said, "I was in the POW camp a year longer than I would have been but for this activity...
...Vo Nguyen Giap, the commander of the North Vietnamese armed forces...
...Your fellow veterans, your fellow fighting men, they've gone home and denounced their government...
...He said things that prolonged the war, caused more American servicemen to be killed, and in doing such he got POWs tortured even more than they were already....No contest in my mind...
...He was shot down after Kerry began his antiwar protests...
...Doug Clower, a Navy pilot shot down early in the war, was held captive for almost eight years...
...That refusal was a response to a climate of public opinion which the anti-war movement helped to forge...
...For the longest period of time, that's what they wanted more than anything else...
...In the end, their victory was accelerated by Congress' refusal to vote more aid...
...One of his most vivid memories is of Jane Fonda's radio broadcasts from Hanoi...
Vol. 37 • April 2004 • No. 3
