John Kerry, in His Own Words
John Kerry, in His Own Words At the beginning of last week, the online magazine Salon.com asked a "roundtable of experts," on the eve of the Republican convention, What can President Bush do to win...
...They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravages of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country...
...We call this investigation the "Winter Soldier Investigation...
...We watched pride allow the most unimportant of battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point...
...Thank you...
...How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake...
...And a young man comes out of high school and says, "That is fine...
...But believe me the helicopter crews fill the same body bags and they wreak the same kind of damage on the Vietnamese and Laotian countryside as anybody else, and the president is talking about allowing that to go on for many years to come...
...We know you have considered the seriousness of the aspects to the utmost level and I am not going to try to dwell on that, but I want to relate to you the feeling that many of the men who have returned to this country express because we are probably angriest about all that we were told about Vietnam and about the mystical war against communism...
...We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them...
...We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Viet Cong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong...
...Kerry is a tax-hiker...
...We saw firsthand how money from American taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime...
...He told me how as a boy on an Indian reservation he had watched television and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped in Vietnam and he said, "My God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people...
...A man recently died after he had a tracheotomy in California, not because of the operation but because there weren't enough personnel to clean the mucous out of his tube and he suffocated to death...
...And we cannot consider ourselves America's best men when we are ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia...
...We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy...
...Americans seem to have accepted the idea that the war is winding down, at least for Americans, and they have also allowed the bodies which were once used by a president for statistics to prove that we were winning that war, to be used as evidence against a man who followed orders and who interpreted those orders no differently than hundreds of other men in Vietnam...
...I apologize if my statement is general because I received notification yesterday you would hear me and I am afraid because of the injunction I was up most of the night and haven't had a great deal of chance to prepare...
...But the point is they are not a free people now under us...
...Where is the leadership...
...I am going to serve my country...
...We veterans can only look with amazement on the fact that this country has been unable to see there is absolutely no difference between ground troops and a helicopter crew, and yet people have accepted a differentiation fed them by the administration...
...The Army says they never leave their wounded...
...Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake...
...We learned the meaning of free-fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals...
...So perhaps it would be helpful simply to reproduce John Kerry's most famous—and perhaps most revealing—^public statement, his testimony as a 27-year-old leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on April 22, 1971...
...They are not a free people, and we cannot fight communism all over the world, and I think we should have learned that lesson by now...
...We could come back to this country...
...A friend of mine was lying in a bed two beds away and tried to help him, but he couldn't...
...I know that all of you talk about every possible alternative of getting out of Vietnam...
...They don't have the appropriations...
...It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did...
...Hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today...
...Finally, this administration has done us the ultimate dishonor...
...And then Bush needs simply to sit back and observe as others bring to light the character and import of Kerry's single most famous public statement—his April 22, 1971, testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the alleged war crimes committed daily by Americans in Vietnam...
...They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart...
...In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America...
...Kerry would fight a sensitive war on terror, allowing them to take the fight to us...
...We are asking here in Washington for some action, action from the Congress of the United States of America which has the power to raise and maintain armies, and which by the Constitution also has the power to declare war...
...It is not a question of not trying...
...I dutifully answered, as follows: Bush can run a competent campaign in which he points out the following truths: a) He is a tax-cutter...
...In 1970 at West Point, Vice President Agnew said "some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most of those misfits abuse" and this was used as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam...
...We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from...
...No ground troops are in Laos, so it is all right to kill Laotians by remote control...
...In their blindness and fear they have tried to deny that we are veterans or that we served in Nam...
...we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out...
...Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese...
...The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history...
...He rang a bell and there was nobody there to service that man and so he died of convulsions...
...And that is what we are trying to say, that we think this thing has to end...
...That is what we are trying to say...
...The term "Winter Soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough...
...These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and there is no more serious crime in the law of war...
...We watched the U.S...
...I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command...
...John Kerry, in His Own Words At the beginning of last week, the online magazine Salon.com asked a "roundtable of experts," on the eve of the Republican convention, What can President Bush do to win reelection in November...
...The Marines say they never leave even their dead...
...The hospitals across the country won't, or can't meet their demands...
...We are angry because we feel we have been used in the worst fashion by the administration of this country...
...One can only ask if we will really be satisfied only when the troops march into Hanoi...
...William Kristol MR...
...I am here as one member of the group of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table they would be here and have the same kind of testimony...
...KERRY: Thank you very much, Senator Ful-bright, Senator Javits, Senator Symington, Senator Pell...
...They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese, or American...
...We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break...
...But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbarous war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last 10 years and more, and so when, in 30 years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning...
...It is part and parcel of everything...
...They have attempted to disown us and the sacrifice we made for this country...
...They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do...
...WEEKLY STANDARD readers are by now surely familiar with items a, b, and c. President Bush will make his case for himself Thursday night in New York...
...We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us...
...I would simply like to speak in very general terms...
...We understand that...
...We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam...
...Suddenly we are faced with a very sickening situation in this country, because there is no moral indignation and, if there is, it comes from people who are almost exhausted by their past indignations, and I know that many of them are sitting in front of me...
...We have come here, not to the president, because we believe that this body can be responsive to the will of the people, and we believe that the will of the people says that we should be out of Vietnam now...
...But we are trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read carefully the president's last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says, and says clearly: "But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the Communists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people...
...And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart...
...Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first president to lose a war...
...Our own scars and stumps of limbs are witnesses enough for others and for ourselves...
...We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now...
...But for us, as boys in Asia, whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion...
...But we are here as veterans to say we think we are in the midst of the greatest disaster of all times now because they are still dying over there, and not just Americans, Vietnamese, and we are rationalizing leaving that country so that those people can go on killing each other for years to come...
...It is a distortion because we in no way consider ourselves the best men of this country, because those he calls misfits were standing up for us in a way that nobody else in this country dared to, because so many who have died would have returned to this country to join the misfits in their efforts to ask for an immediate withdrawal from South Vietnam, because so many of those best men have returned as quadriplegics and amputees, and they lie forgotten in Veterans' Administration hospitals in this country which fly the flag which so many have chosen as their own personal symbol...
...They have left the real stuff of their reputation bleaching behind them in the sun in this country...
...We fought using weapons against "Oriental human beings," with quotation marks around that...
...men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped...
...Another young man just died in a New York VA hospital the other day...
...Some 27 percent have tried, and they try because they come back to this country and they have to face what they did in Vietnam, and then they come back and find the indifference of a country that doesn't really care, that doesn't really care...
...We are here to ask where are McNamara, Ros-tow, Bundy, Gilpatric, and so many others...
...And he goes to Vietnam and he shoots and he kills and he does his job or maybe he doesn't kill, maybe he just goes and he comes back, and when he gets back to this country he finds that he isn't really wanted, because the largest unemployment figure in the country—it varies depending on who you get it from, the VA Administration 15 percent, various other sources 22 percent...
...We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties...
...And he stopped...
...But the largest corps of unemployed in this country are veterans of this war, and of those veterans 33 percent of the unemployed are black...
...I am not here as John Kerry...
...we could hold our silence...
...That means 1 out of every 10 of the nation's unemployed is a veteran of Vietnam...
...We are also here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country...
...c) He is fighting a tough-minded war on terror, taking the fight to the enemy...
...We do not need their testimony...
...An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation at Alcatraz put it to me very succinctly...
...I understand 57 percent of all those entering the VA hospitals talk about suicide...
...We are probably much more angry than that and I don't want to go into the foreign policy aspects because I am outclassed here...
...The country seems to have lain down and shrugged off something as serious as Laos, just as we calmly shrugged off the loss of 700,000 lives in Pakistan, the so-called greatest disaster of all times...
...b) He will fight to preserve traditional marriage...
...We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly at My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum...
...We are here in Washington also to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy...
...It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country, the question of racism, which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions also, the use of weapons, the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage in the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war, when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions, in the use of freefire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, the killing of prisoners, accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam...
...Kerry won't...
...I would like to say for the record, and also for the men behind me who are also wearing the uniforms and their medals, that my sitting here is really symbolic...
...I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam...
...we could be quiet...
...falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts...
...As a veteran and one who feels this anger, I would like to talk about it...
...And so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 881's and Fire Base 6's and so many others...
...Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned...
...But the problem of veterans goes beyond this personal problem, because you think about a poster in this country with a picture of Uncle Sam, and the picture says "I want you...
...These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude...
...We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater or let us say a non-Third-World-people theater, and so we watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese...
...We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies...
Vol. 9 • September 2004 • No. 48
