Unfit for Command - Chapter six
<font size=4>A TESTIMONY OF LIES
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“Lt. Kerry returned home from the war to make some outrageous statements and allegations. Numerous criminal acts in violations of the law of war were cited by Kerry, disparaging those who had fought with honor in that conflict.”<font color=black>
LT. COL. JAMES ZUMWALT, USMC (RETIRED)
Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Press Conference
Washington, D.C., May 4, 2004
The Fulbright Committee
Inside the committee room the television cameras were ready, lights glaring. A group of scraggly young men in a ragtag mixture of military uniforms accompanied by hippie-looking young women filled the front seats behind the witness chair. John Kerry’s supporters from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) were here to applaud their leader.
Kerry’s testimony to the Fulbright Committee was a carefully orchestrated piece of political theater. Fulbright wanted a presentable, young Kennedy-esque face to put on the antiwar effort, and Kerry wanted a national forum from which to launch his climb to political celebrity. Ted Kennedy helped arrange Kerry’s testimony with Senator Fulbright at a private fundraising event held at the home of Democratic senator Philip A. Hart of Michigan.
Kerry was late. The anticipation in the room was building as the audience looked around to see if the man of the moment was anywhere in the hall. Then Kerry, slightly out of breath, burst into the hall from the back door. He charged into the room and strode directly forward to Senator Fulbright. He extended his hand, his long jaw set firmly forward. There was a sense of adrenaline about him. He worked the front of the room, approaching each senator and extending his hand, speaking softly to them as if he had known them for years, commanding the attention of all in the room, the cameras already recording the action.
As Kerry settled into the witness chair, he folded his hands in front of him, his military fatigues open at the collar to reveal his T-shirt beneath, the bands of ribbons above his left pocket—there both to call attention to his service decorations and to signal to those in the know the insult communicated by the inappropriate wearing of service bars in anything but dress uniform. His mop of hair was stylishly swept across his forehead, and his mouth was firmly closed in a thin, determined line. Kerry was ready for his cue; his studied testimony, carefully practiced, was ready for delivery. He patiently waited his moment to burst onto the national scene.
Chairman Fulbright brought the committee to order:
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The committee is continuing this morning its hearings on proposals relating to the ending of the war in Southeast Asia. This morning the committee will hear testimony from Mr. John Kerry and, if he has any associates, we will be glad to hear from them. These are men who have fought in this unfortunate war in Vietnam. I believe they deserve to be heard and listened to by the Congress and by the officials in the executive branch and by the public generally. You have a perspective that those in the Government who make our Nation’s policy do not always have and I am sure that your testimony today will be helpful to the committee in its consideration of the proposals before us.<font color=black>
Senator Fulbright left no doubt that the committee had a political agenda and was decidedly antiwar. What were John Kerry’s credentials? He was a veteran who had been in Vietnam, and his perspective opposing the war was one that Senator Fulbright wanted heard. Next, Senator Fulbright apologized that the Supreme Court had issued an injunction forbidding the VVAW protesters from camping out on the National Mall.
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I would like to add simply on my own account that I regret very much the action of the Supreme Court in denying the veterans the right to use the Mall. [Applause]
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Senator Fulbright left no doubt where he stood on the issue of the Vietnam War:
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I have joined with some of my colleagues, specifically Senator Hart, in an effort to try to change the attitude of our Government toward your efforts in bringing to this committee and to the country your views about the war.
I personally don’t know of any group that would have both a greater justification for doing it and also a more accurate view of the effect of the war. As you know, there has grown up in this town a feeling that it is extremely difficult to get accurate information about the war and I don’t know a better source than you and your associates. So we are very pleased to have you and your associates, Mr. Kerry.
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John O’Neill, a Navy veteran who had also served in Vietnam in Coastal Division 11, had written to the committee asking for an opportunity to give his testimony. The committee’s written response indicated that the schedule was very full and that there would be no time available. John O’Neill supported the war in Vietnam.
John Kerry began his statement:
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Thank you very much, Senator Fulbright, Senator Javits, Senator Symington, Senator Pell. 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 am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of the group of one thousand, which is a small representation of a very much larger 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.
I would simply like to speak in very general terms. 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 time to prepare.
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What about the cocktail party at Senator Hart’s home days before? Once Kerry learned that he would have the chance to give testimony before the committee, he recruited the assistance of Adam Walinsky, a speechwriter noted for his work with Robert Kennedy. Walinsky drafted the speech and coached Kerry on its delivery. The only image Kerry wanted us to see was a myth: a young man with a burning passion for the truth, the leader forced to sleep on the ground, the man answering his country’s call to be where he was urgently needed, before a committee of the United States Senate where the senators and America were urgently waiting for his firsthand criticism of the war. He proceeded to level his charges:
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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.
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. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.
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 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.
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Kerry’s testimony was shocking and graphic, a slap in the face to the military personnel who were at that very moment fighting and dying in Vietnam. Yet he produced no documentation. Where were the specific incidents? Where were the affidavits? Kerry presented only unsubstantiated charges. As we will see, not only was the testimony given in Detroit at what was called the Winter Soldier Investigation unsubstantiated, but much of it was fraudulent. Kerry had the attention of the Senate; why didn’t he present proof? Possibly because he had none. The core of Kerry’s argument was that fighting in Vietnam was pointless:
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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. 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. . . is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.
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The contrast with John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address was clear: <font color=blue>“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”<font color=black> Kerry characterized the Vietnam War not as an effort to save the country from Communism but as a civil war or, possibly, a war waged in an effort to free the nation from colonialism, a war in which our allies, the South Vietnamese, were not defenders of freedom. He continued:
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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 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.
We found that most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. 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 Vietcong, North Vietnamese, or American.
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Kerry drew a moral equivalence between the military force that we were exerting to establish liberty and the violence used by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese to establish Communism. He suggested that we might be just another colonial force in that part of the world, ourselves morally wrong.
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We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw firsthand how money from American taxes was 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 our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Vietcong.
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Kerry then proceeded to a carefully crafted section, a string of <font color=blue>“we rationalized. . . we learned. . . we watched”<font color=black> statements indicting American warfare in Vietnam, emphasizing his view that American racism was responsible for military abuses. This was very polished rhetoric for a speech that supposedly was thrown together overnight. Why didn’t Kerry just tell the panel the truth—that he had been working on the speech for some time and that he had professional help putting it together?
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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 and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.
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 U.S. 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, or let us say a non-third-world people theater.
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Adam Walinsky later bragged that Kerry, the 1966 Yale class orator, was <font color=green>“pretty darn good”<font color=black> with words all by himself, but that the parts of Kerry’s speech that showed up on television were the product of his hand, not Kerry’s.1 Yet Kerry was well aware that his main goal was to create an impression before the cameras. The entire protest week in Washington, D.C., had been for Kerry an exercise in high political theater. While his VVAW comrades had slept on the Mall, camping out as part of their protest, Kerry and his girlfriend had slipped away to sleep in comfort, welcomed into the fancy Georgetown homes of politically sympathetic family friends.
Kerry built to his conclusion with a question that has become the most repeated part of the speech: <font color=blue>“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”<font color=black>
The argument presented by Kerry was based on viewing the Vietnam War as a mistake. If one saw the war as an important step in the Cold War determination to stop the spread of Communism (a view held by President Johnson and President Nixon), then asking men to die was consistent with President Kennedy’s pledge that we would pay such a precious price to preserve liberty in a free world.
Perhaps this is the question that needs to be asked by the American people and answered by John Kerry: Who was the last American POW to die languishing in a North Vietnamese prison, forced to listen to the recorded voice of John Kerry disgracing his service by dishonest testimony before the Senate?
Paul Galanti, a Navy pilot who was shot down over Vietnam in June 1966 and then spent seven years in Communist captivity as a POW, remembers Kerry’s antiwar rhetoric all too well. Galanti told the Los Angeles Times in February 2004 that during torture sessions his North Vietnamese captors had cited antiwar speeches as <font color=purple>“an example of why we should cross over to [their] side.”<font color=black> As far as Galanti was concerned, <font color=purple>“Kerry broke a covenant among servicemen never to make public criticisms that might jeopardize those still in battle or in the hands of the enemy.”<font color=black> Galanti’s criticism of Kerry was particularly biting: <font color=purple>“John Kerry was a traitor to the men he served with.”<font color=black> Now retired and in his sixties, Galanti refuses to abandon his anger at Kerry. <font color=purple>“I don’t plan to set it aside. I don’t know anyone who does,”<font color=black> he was quoted as saying. <font color=purple>“The Vietnam memorial has thousands of additional names due to John Kerry and others like him.”<font color=black>2
Still, Senator Kerry refuses to consider that his testimony caused more deaths and prolonged the war in Vietnam by undermining support at home and contributing directly to a Vietnamese Communist victory.
The Winter Soldier Investigation
Kerry’s testimony to the Fulbright Committee referenced the testimony given at the Winter Soldier Investigation as the basis of his conclusion that war crimes and atrocities were being committed in Vietnam. This <font color=blue>“investigation”<font color=black> was supposedly his entire foundation for the charges he had made. What was the Winter Soldier Investigation? How credible was the testimony given there?
The phrase <font color=blue>“winter soldier”<font color=black> was derived from pamphleteer Thomas Paine, whose American Crisis on December 23, 1776, contained the now-famous words referring to George Washington’s troops, who braved the depths of snow and cold at Valley Forge through the bitter winter of 1777–78: <font color=purple>“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in the crisis, shrink from the services of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of men and women.”<font color=black>
The VVAW adopted the term <font color=blue>“winter soldier”<font color=black> to symbolize their professed toughness, their dedication to expose what they considered the criminal behavior at the core of a war they say was immoral, the realities only a real soldier—a <font color=blue>“winter soldier”<font color=black>—would have the courage to profess.
The idea for the investigation was relatively simple. A VVAW panel would call veterans as witnesses and take testimony from them about atrocities they had witnessed or committed in Vietnam. In truth, this was not an investigation at all. There were no thorough background checks of those testifying, no independent corroboration of the testimony given, not even any sworn statements to hold those testifying to some sort of legal standard of veracity.
Why? There was a deeper political level to the agenda. More important than establishing beyond doubt that the testifying veterans had actually witnessed war crimes in Vietnam or had committed atrocities themselves, the Winter Soldier Investigation aimed to shock the public. Sensationalism, not honesty, was the operative standard.
The critical political goal was to demonstrate that the atrocities described were a direct result of U.S. military policy, not random acts of meaningless or unauthorized cruelty. This was consistent with the argument advanced by Kerry before the Fulbright Committee. The contention was that American military policy in Vietnam necessarily resulted in the commission of war crimes, that the atrocities committed were commonplace occurrences, and that military commanders condoned these war crimes as a necessary result of the orders they had issued. Otherwise, all that would be established was that the men testifying might well be just criminals. The VVAW had no intention of pointing the finger at the soldiers themselves; the goal was to indict the United States military, all the way up the chain of command to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, ultimately, to President Nixon. The government of the United States was the target. The soldiers in the field were only the pawns used to get there.
Noted extremists were involved in organizing the Winter Soldier Investigation. Jane Fonda was a key financial supporter and the honorary national coordinator of the event. This was Fonda’s Mao period, complete with Viet Cong flags, red star costumes, and frequently photographed expressions of her clenched fist raised in anger.
The second major financial sponsor was Mark Lane, whose 1966 book Rush to Judgment3 had played a key role in advancing the conspiracy theories rampant in the years following the JFK assassination. Lane had published a new book, Conversations with Americans,4 featuring interviews with Vietnam veterans who described war crimes and atrocities. To raise money for the Winter Soldier Investigation, Fonda and Lane planned a series of fundraising concerts and speaking appearances throughout the United States prior to the hearings, focusing largely on college campuses.
The VVAW was concerned that journalist Neil Sheehan had just published a scorching New York Times Book Review evaluation of Lane’s book, in which he established without doubt that the book was full of false tales of war horrors that never happened, based on interviews with supposed veterans who had never seen a day of military service in Vietnam.5
Still, the group’s only corrective was to require that <font color=blue>“witnesses”<font color=black> provide information about their military units and where the supposed atrocities had occurred. Witnesses were required to provide a DD-214 military discharge form as evidence of their military service.
The VVAW picked Detroit to host the Winter Soldier Investigation precisely because the city had a solid middle-America reputation. Detroit’s gray winter, its smokestacks, and its automobile manufacturing plants would serve as a perfect backdrop for what the leftists wanted to bill as the common man’s indictment of the war. Lane had met with Al Hubbard, an African American veteran who served as VVAW leader, in the group’s headquarters at 156 Fifth Avenue in New York City. But New York itself was too <font color=blue>“Eastern” (meaning, too “liberal”<font color=black>) to serve as a stage for the Winter Soldier Investigation. A much better environment was an everyman’s hotel, a Howard Johnson Motor Hotel, to be precise, located on a middle-class street adjacent to downtown Motown.
The room chosen for the event had no windows. Concrete support pillars peppered throughout the room’s interior created <font color=blue>“restricted view”<font color=black> spots around which chairs had to be positioned so viewers could observe. On a modest raised platform in front, the <font color=blue>“investigators”<font color=black> sat behind a simple wooden table resting on folding metal legs. While the event lacked television media coverage, a radical film crew had set up cameras and lights to shoot a <font color=blue>“documentary”<font color=black> intended for later distribution in leftist circles. A few hundred spectators showed up, and reporters from the Detroit Free Press were there to cover the event.
John Kerry was at attendance at the Winter Soldiers Investigation. He listened as witness after witness presented incredible horror stories of American soldiers in Vietnam—decapitations; torturing of prisoners; firing artillery on villages for fun; corpsmen killing wounded prisoners; napalm dropped on villages; women raped; innocents, including children, massacred; and tear-gassing people for fun.6
Each witness had at least one truly shocking bit of testimony that allowed him to be distinguished from other witnesses, a new level of <font color=blue>“Oh my God”<font color=black> horror that was his unique badge of honor. If the tale after tale of unspeakable horror actually happened, then the conclusion was inescapable that the U.S. military had become the natural home for our country’s misfits. Why would a psychopath or a sadist do anything but enlist? The opportunity for a target-rich environment for anyone’s neurosis was right here, plentifully available to U.S. soldiers serving in Vietnam. The witnesses seemed to recite a certain list of offenses that everyone just knew had happened—village burning, graphic sexual harm to women, the murder of helpless civilians often in unusually cruel manners, torturing prisoners (often in a sexual manner), killing children and babies. Reciting horrors became as an unofficial badge of courage, a required ritual for acceptance into the ranks of the antiwar activists.<font size=3>
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