...

BK>> And yes, I do have standing to speak well of the service of
BK>> decorated combat veterans.

 JB> Kerry trashed most of the men who served in Vietnam with
 JB> his protest marches and testimony before Congress.  I don't
 JB> see you attacking him.

 That's because what you said is not true.

 Show that one word of this is not true.
 You can find the entire testimony on line, or I can post it if
 you want.

 **************************************************************************

 Decorated veteran John Kerry, testifying before the House
 Foreign Relations Committee, questions the War in Vietnam,
 Washington, D.C.,

 April 22, 1971.

 ...

 of testimony. I would simply like to speak in general terms. I
 apologize if my statement is general because I received
 notification [only] yesterday that 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.

 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. These were not isolated incidents, but crimes
 committed on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of
 officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe
 to you exactly what did happen in Detroit--the emotions in the
 room, and the feelings of the men who were reliving their
 experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what
 this country, in a sense, made them do.

 They told stories that, 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 fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and
 dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the
 countryside of South Vietnam,in addition to the normal ravage 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.
 The term "winter soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine's
 in 1776, when he spoke of the "sunshine patriots," and
 "summertime soldiers" who deserted at Valley Forge because the
 going was rough.

 ...

 As a veteran and one who felt this anger, I would like to talk
 about it. We are angry because we feel we have been used it the
 worst fashion by the administration of this country.

 ...

 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

 ...

 We found also that, all too often, American men were dying in
 those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We
 saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a
 corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this
 country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag,
 and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw
 Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and 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.

 We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We
 saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very
 coolly a My Lai,

 ...

 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.

 We watched the United States falsification of body counts, in
 fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while, month
 after month, we were told the back of the enemy was about to
 break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings"
 with quotation marks around that. 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. 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 watched pride allow the most
 unimportant 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,
 and so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 81s and
 Fire Base 6s, and so many others.

 ...

 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. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't
 be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a
 war."

 ...

 We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you
 ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask
 a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? We are here in

 ...

 the use of weapons: the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at 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
 free-fire zones; harassment-interdiction fire,
 search-and-destroy missions; the bombings; the torture of
 prisoners; all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam.
 That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of
 everything.

 ...

 We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where
 are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're
 here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and
 so many others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent
 off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have
 deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the
 laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The
 Marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have
 left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of
 public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their
 reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country....

 We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of
 that service as easily as this administration has wiped away
 their memories of us. 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 barbaric war; to pacify our
 own hearts; to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this
 country these last ten years and more. And more. And so, when,
 thirty 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 where America finally turned,
 and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

 **************************************************************************

BOB KLAHN bob.klahn{at}sev.org   http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn

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