Vietnam.....The sad truth

Salon's Todd Gitlin discusses the accuracy of John Kerry's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,

"As everyone must know by now, the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has run two commercials in the battleground states of Ohio, West Virginia and Wisconsin -- and thanks to the TV channels that offer themselves for hijacking to the most scurrilous bidder, the majority of Americans are at least dimly aware of them. They may or may not be aware that the charges against John Kerry in wartime are (1) unsupported by contemporaneous military documents; (2) put forward by veterans who have in more than one case changed their stories since 1969; and (3) in the case of the battles that resulted in Kerry's medals, rejected by the crewmen on Kerry's boat.

Then this week, the same smear artists opened up with their bigger -- as it were -- guns. The second SBVFT commercial includes clips from Kerry's April 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "They had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads ... randomly shot at civilians ... cut off limbs, blown up bodies ... razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan ... crimes committed on a day-to-day basis ... ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam."

What happens during those ellipses is SBVFT members talking about Kerry's accusations in these terms: "Just devastating." "It hurt me." "John Kerry gave the enemy for free what I and many of my comrades in the North Vietnamese prison camps took torture to avoid saying. It demoralized us." "Betrayed us." "Dishonored his country and more importantly the people he served with. He just sold them out."

Note well: These bait-and-switch artists don't dare say that Kerry's statements were false. The anti-Kerry crusaders issue classic non-denial denials. The subtext of their outrage against Kerry is simple: They are still averse to facing the awfulness of the Vietnam War. What they are really saying with their slanders is that the truth hurts.

Take a close look at what Kerry said to the Senate committee. He was summarizing testimony given publicly at the so-called Winter Soldier Investigation of Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 1971, presented by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, in Detroit. One hundred five Vietnam veterans testified there. Seventy-one of them said they were eyewitnesses to war crimes of the sort Kerry later mentioned. Thirteen said that they themselves had committed war crimes.

These veterans testified to rape; to torture and the killing of prisoners; to the torching of Vietnamese homes and whole villages. In sickening detail they filled in the blanks -- as the Pentagon was itself unwilling to do -- to put to work this sentence from a U.S. Army field manual: "Every violation of the law of war is a war crime."

It is to the Winter Soldier testimony specifically that Kerry was alluding. It was these chronicles of mayhem that he was summarizing. To judge the truth of Kerry's Senate testimony, read some excerpts from the Detroit testimony.

"The cutting off of heads -- on Operation Stone -- there was a Lt. Colonel there and two people had their heads cut off and put on stakes and stuck in the middle of the field. And we were notified that there was press covering the operation and that we couldn't do that anymore...

...People cut off ears and when they'd come back in off of an operation you'd make deals before you'd go out and like for every ear you cut off someone would buy you two beers, so people cut off ears. The torturing of prisoners was done with beatings and I saw one case where there were two prisoners. One prisoner was staked out on the ground and he was cut open while he was alive and part of his insides were cut out and they told the other prisoner if he didn't tell them what they wanted to know they would kill him. And I don't know what he said because he spoke in Vietnamese but then they killed him after that anyway...

...I iced a contingent of Vietnamese peasants chopping wood and I decided, well, if the Vietnamese can fire a round into my ship, then I can fire as many rounds into the Vietnamese as I want to. So I swung my machine gun onto this group of peasants and opened fire. Fortunately, the gun jammed after one or two rounds, which was pretty lucky, because this group of peasants turned out to be a work party hired by the government to clear the area and there was GIs guarding them about 50 meters away. But my mind was so psyched out into killing gooks that I never even paid attention to look around and see where I was. I just saw gooks and I wanted to kill them...

...Bravo Company, 5th of the 7th, when we were outside of Hue shortly after the Tet offensive, went into a village (and this happened repeatedly afterwards) and searched for enemy activity. We encountered a large amount of civilian population. The civilian population was brought out to one end of the village, and the women, who were guarded by a squad and a squad leader at that time, were separated. I might say the young women were separated from their children and the older women and the older men, the elderly men. They were told at gunpoint that if they did not submit to the sexual desires of any GI who was there guarding them, they would be shot for running away..."


Indeed. Decades later, reports of the horrors are still trickling out. The Toledo Blade won a Pulitzer Prize for its October 2003 series about killings committed by an elite U.S. Army "Tiger Force" unit in the course of a seven-month period in 1967. "Elderly farmers were shot as they toiled in the fields. Prisoners were tortured and executed -- their ears and scalps severed for souvenirs. One soldier kicked out the teeth of executed civilians for their gold fillings," the Blade reported. "Investigators concluded that 18 of these soldiers committed war crimes ranging from murder and assault to dereliction of duty. But no one was charged."

And in a passage that reads like an anticipatory rebuttal to the accusations by the SBVFT, Crandell added: "What relief we found as misled warriors came from confession rather than blaming. We never denied our individual responsibility for the acts we took part in. We were an army that was profoundly troubled by guilt for indefensible acts, and we admitted as much. Then we went further ... We invited America to come clean."

And as for the charge that Kerry "betrayed" his comrades, Crandell insists: "The whole point we made was that the war crimes came from above." Kerry said the same in Washington in 1971. He repeated it on "Meet the Press."

And as for the charge that Kerry "betrayed" his comrades, Crandell insists: "The whole point we made was that the war crimes came from above." Kerry said the same in Washington in 1971. He repeated it on "Meet the Press."

And yet on Aug. 23, as if nothing at all had been learned from decades of scholarship and journalism, CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked former presidential advisor David Gergen whether Kerry should apologize for what he said about the war. He didn't ask whether Robert S. McNamara should apologize. He didn't ask whether Henry Kissinger should apologize. He didn't ask whether Dick Cheney and George W. Bush should apologize for their support of a wrong war. (As recently as his interview with Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" on April 18, Bush repeated the right-wing stab-in-the-back demagogy that what had been wrong with the Vietnam War was that the civilians had run it.) Responsibility has never been George W. Bush's game. He represents the America that refuses to be sorry, and the unscrupulous John O'Neill does his dirty work as he did for that spiritual guide, Richard Nixon.

Some thought Kerry was overdoing his Vietnam credentials with his theatrics of "reporting for duty." But Kerry was on to an essential truth about the America that emerged from Vietnam: That duty begins when you open your eyes in the dark face of reality.

It is the same truth with which he closed his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee 33 years ago: "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 10 years and more. And more. And so, when, 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 where America finally turned, and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning. "

"One last mission": The turning is still in progress."