Chapter six - continued
<font size=4>The debunking of the Winter Soldier testimony began almost instantly. The Detroit Free Press asked for and received from the VVAW ten days’ advance warning on some of the testimony that would be given. The Free Press, however, reported as the hearings began that much remained uncertain, that <font color=blue>“much of the testimony that will be heard during the three days could not be corroborated by the Free Press in the ten days it had to run down each account.”<font color=black> And, again, describing the many scattered and isolated stories that the anticipated testimony would present, <font color=blue>“Like a soldier jokingly pitching a smoke bomb into a crowd of peasants fighting over a can of discarded C-rations. Or a medic slashing his unit’s identification into the flesh of a dead Vietcong soldier. Or the torturing of a prisoner by hooking generator wires to his genitals. Or the rifleman who spread plastic explosives between crackers and handed it out to Vietnamese children as snacks. There are many who may choose not to believe these stories. The Pentagon may refuse or be unable to confirm them primarily because the accounts are so vague that they amount to a ‘bucket of steam.’”<font color=black>7
When the Free Press asked, those testifying had presented
no affidavits.
At the conclusion of the Winter Soldier Investigation, antiwar senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon was so impressed with the testimony that he insisted the transcript be inserted into the congressional record. <font color=green>Senator Hatfield also called for a military investigation into the charges that had been made. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) conducted the military inquiry.
In his 1980 book America in Vietnam, Guenter Lewy noted
that the NCIS questioned the identities of many of the
witnesses who had appeared before the Winter Soldier
Investigation. The most damaging finding “consisted of the
sworn statements of several veterans, corroborated by
witnesses, that they had in fact not attended the hearing
in Detroit. One of them had never been to Detroit in his
life. He did not know, he stated, who might have used his
name.” As Lewy concluded, “The VVAW’s use of fake
witnesses and the failure to cooperate with military
authorities and to provide crucial details of the
incidents further cast serious doubt on the professed
desire to serve the causes of justice and humanity. It is
more likely that this inquiry, like others earlier and
later, had primarily political motives and goals.”<font color=black>8
The 1998 book Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History, by B. G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley, provides a powerful debunking of supposed Vietnam War veterans falsifying or exaggerating their service records and inventing atrocity stories. Burkett served in Vietnam with the 199th Light Infantry Brigade and was awarded the Bronze Star Medal, Vietnamese Honor Medal, and Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with Palm. He never expected to be an author, nor did he expect to spend ten years researching Vietnam War stories. Still, the many phony stories he was hearing of Vietnam—veterans claiming acts of heroism that never happened, wildly exaggerated war records from supposed soldiers who never served, or, if they did serve, were never in Vietnam—simply stuck in his craw. Burkett characterized the Winter Soldier Investigation as <font color=purple>“a classic example of turning reality on its head.”<font color=black>9
At the Winter Soldier Investigation, more than one hundred <font color=blue>“veterans”<font color=black> and some sixteen civilians testified. Burkett reports, for example, that the National Archives can find no service records under the names of eleven of the individuals claiming to be veterans who testified at the Winter Soldier Investigation. This strongly suggests that the eleven were complete frauds, lying that they had Vietnam experience as well as lying about supposed atrocities they witnessed or committed. The likelihood is that these eleven were never in any branch of the United States military at all.
In 1970, joining the VVAW took little more effort than just showing up. Anyone with a beard, a scraggly uniform, and enough makedo information about the military and Vietnam—information readily available in a bar or a library—could become a full-fledged member. There was no credentials committee and no background search required for membership. If your story was good enough and your demeanor at least reasonably convincing, you might even be permitted to testify in a staged inquiry like the Winter Soldier Investigation. If you were lucky, your story could get into the press, and you would experience a limited form of celebrity, despite the fact that the whole charade was based on a lie.
Both the Winter Soldier Investigation and John Kerry’s testimony before the Fulbright Committee played against the national publicity given the My Lai massacre. A military court-martial had just convicted Lieutenant William Calley of murdering twenty-two unarmed civilians in the March 16, 1968, massacre. Rather than seeing this as an isolated incident of extreme violence that was duly punished, the opponents of the Vietnam War preferred to use the incident to support their favorite argument, namely, that all U.S. military personnel in Vietnam were committing atrocities in their normal course of duty.
When Senator Claiborne Pell of the Foreign Relations Committee questioned Kerry about Calley and My Lai, Kerry echoed the theme:
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My feeling, Senator, on Lieutenant Calley is what he did quite obviously was a horrible, horrible, horrible thing and I have no bone with the fact that he was prosecuted. But I think that in this question you have to separate guilt from responsibility, and I think clearly the responsibility for what has happened there lies elsewhere.
I think it lies with the men who designed free-fire zones. I think it lies with the men who encouraged body counts. I think it lies in large part with this country which allows a young child before he reaches the age of fourteen to see 12,500 deaths on television, which glorifies the John Wayne syndrome, which puts out fighting-man comic books on the stands, which allows us in training to do calisthenics to four counts, on the fourth count of which we stand up and shout “kill” in unison, which has posters in barracks in this country with a crucified Vietnamese, blood on him, and underneath it says “kill the gook,” and I think clearly the responsibility for all of this is what has produced this horrible aberration.
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Those who were then serving honorably in Vietnam or who had served honorably in Vietnam got John Kerry’s message loud and clear: He was painting them all as criminals.
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Yet if Kerry’s argument was correct and atrocities were the expected direct result of military orders, then Calley should never have been punished; instead, he should have been decorated. After all, Kerry and his VVAW associates were arguing that genocide was a natural consequence of official military policy in Vietnam.<font color=blue>
“Gooks” <font color=black>was a derisive term and bears closer scrutiny. A key charge in the antiwar movement’s indictment of the Vietnam War was that it was racist. Put in the simplest terms, antiwar activists were charging that America did not value the lives of Asians. As evidence for that argument, antiwar apologists argued that African Americans were disproportionately drafted into the military and put in combat because a racist America sought to wage the war to the disadvantage of our own country’s racial minorities.
By 1971, an alliance had formed between antiwar protesters and extremist groups supporting African American civil rights, including the Black Panthers. For a time, the VVAW sought to maintain a middle-of-the-road approach in the protest community, trying to distance itself from the clearly revolutionary and generally Communist groups such as Students for a Democratic Society or the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice. After all, the members of the VVAW were supposedly combat veterans. Still, VVAW members appeared comfortable with their more revolutionary brothers’ and sisters’ Marxism and Leninism, even if they themselves were not openly Communist.
Kerry and his activist friends also <font color=blue>“demonized”<font color=black> American soldiers fighting in Vietnam. As Kerry characterized the situation, the Vietnam veteran returning home was a <font color=blue>“misfit,”<font color=black> warped by his experiences, doomed to suffer. John Kerry in 1971 was the perfect spokesperson for the VVAW. The American public in 1971 was not ready to listen to yet another fist-clenched, loudmouthed, bearded youth with an angry cause. Kerry was different. He was nicely dressed and well groomed, even when he put on his military fatigues war-protester outfit. That is what was so disarming about John Kerry: One had to listen closely to him to realize he was advocating a very radical position. He invited one to look at him first, to see his mop of thick hair, his lanky frame, his jutting jaw of determination. But there was virtually no substantiation behind his rhetoric.
From virtually nowhere, John Kerry became a star of the antiwar movement. On the day of his Fulbright Committee testimony, the news media was already talking about John Kerry running for president. Kerry had demonstrated that he knew how best to utilize the value of a stage, even if the speech he gave on that stage was nothing but a lie.
Kerry’s false allegations had a profound and long-lasting effect on the American public’s view of the Vietnam-era military. Soldiers returning from Vietnam were treated with a degree of contempt that has no parallel in American history, and the image of Vietnam veterans as murderous, drug-addled psychotics persists in American culture to this day.
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“Skid Row”<font color=black>
Marine First Lieutenant Jim Warner had had a rough time, even for a POW in the gulag of North Vietnam in the spring of 1969. Having been interrogated and tortured for four months by the North Vietnamese, who threatened to hold him after the war for trial as a war criminal, Warner (once the proud backseat navigator of a Phantom jet) had just been transferred by the North Vietnamese to the <font color=blue>“place for punishment”<font color=black> outside Hanoi known by the prisoners as <font color=blue>“Skid Row.”<font color=black> Just as things didn’t seem that they could get much worse, they did.
An interrogator confronted Warner with testimony from his own mother and father asking for his return at John Kerry’s Winter Soldier Investigation hearings. He told Warner, <font color=blue>“Even your parents know you are a war criminal.”<font color=black>10 The interrogator showed Warner a large piece of cardboard with photographs of John Kerry and news clippings relating to Kerry’s Senate testimony and demonstrations and said that <font color=blue>“everyone knows you are a war criminal.”<font color=black> Warner had resisted beyond caring, but he hoped that the North Vietnamese had made it all up. Upon reviewing his mother’s testimony in The New Soldier, Warner asked: <font color=blue>“What kind of ghoul would exploit my mother and family to claim I was a war criminal while I was in a North Vietnamese prison? How could someone do something like this for political advantage?”<font color=black>
Lieutenant General John Flynn, distinguished as one of the three highest-ranking POWs in Vietnam, met John O’Neill at a 1977 party in San Antonio. Lieutenant General Flynn thanked O’Neill profusely for having debated John Kerry in 1971 on the Dick Cavett Show, while he had been in captivity in Vietnam. He said that he and his fellow POWs would never forget the lies of Kerry and the VVAW that the North Vietnamese had presented to them to break their spirits. He described the hollow feeling they shared when they saw pictures or read testimony of their fellow veterans in the United States betraying the bond that sustained them in the POW camps.
Admiral Jeremiah Denton and many other POWs never forgot the North Vietnamese attempt to use <font color=blue>“war crimes”<font color=black> claims from their own fellow veterans, led by Kerry, against them. Ron Bliss, a POW for five years, has spent thirty years trying to forget the small cells with a single speaker and his sense of betrayal and loneliness resulting from the claims of the North Vietnamese jailers that his military <font color=blue>“comrades”<font color=black> in the VVAW had testified to his alleged guilt. Navy Lieutenant Paul Galanti felt particularly betrayed that a fellow Navy lieutenant would sell him out with false war crimes charges, cited over and over by the North Vietnamese as proof that he had committed war crimes and should confess.
Words once spoken cannot be taken back. Kerry’s false words, so conducive to a quick bubble of popularity in 1971, caused untold grief, beginning first with the POWs languishing in North Vietnamese jails and then in camps from Laos to Cambodia to the Cau Mau peninsula of South Vietnam. Many of these POWs never made it home. John Kerry’s words, his book The New Soldier, and his organization, the VVAW, likewise gave birth to the now thirty-year-old caricature of U.S. soldiers as drug-sated criminals. No foreign enemy ever dealt so direct and devastating a blow to the morale of America’s armed forces and its veterans than John Kerry did. He struck directly—and falsely—at the honor of their service, the glue binding all units together.
Swift Boat Veterans for Truth React
The Swift Boat veterans who came to Washington, D.C., on May 4, 2004, to hold a press conference opposing John Kerry’s presidential bid were strongly opposed, even after some thirty-five years, to Kerry’s antiwar statements:
<font color=purple>
I served with these guys. I went on missions with them, and these men served honorably. Up and down the chain of command there was no acquiescence to atrocities. It was not condoned, it did not happen, and it was not reported to me verbally or in writing by any of these men including Lieutenant (jg) Kerry.
In 1971–72, for almost eighteen months, he stood before the television audiences and claimed that the five hundred thousand men and women in Vietnam, and in combat, were all villains— there were no heroes. In 2004, one hero from the Vietnam War has appeared, running for president of the United States and commander in chief. It just galls one to think about it.<font color=black>
—Captain George Elliott, USN (retired)
<font color=purple>
I was in An Thoi from June of ‘68 to June of ‘69, covering the whole period that John Kerry was there. I operated in every river, in every canal, and every off-shore patrol area in the 4th Corps area, from Cambodia all the way around to the Bo De River. I never saw, even heard of all these so-called atrocities and things that we were supposed to have done.
This is not true. We’re not standing for it. We want to set the record straight.
<font color=black>
—William Shumadine
<font color=purple>
In 1971, when John Kerry spoke out to America, labeling all Vietnam veterans as thugs and murderers, I was shocked and almost brought to my knees because even though I had served at the same time and in the same unit, I had never witnessed or participated in any of the events that the senator had accused us of. I strongly believe that the statements made by the senator were not only false and inaccurate, but extremely harmful to the United States’ efforts in Southeast Asia and the rest of the world. Tragically, some veterans, scorned by the antiwar movement and their allies, retreated to a life of despair and suicide. Two of my crew mates were among them. For that there is no forgiveness.
<font color=black>
—Richard O’Mara
<font color=purple>
I served in Vietnam as a boat officer from June of 1968 to July of 1969. My service was three months in Coastal Division 13 out of Cat Lo, and nine months with Coastal Division 11 based in An Thoi. John Kerry was in An Thoi the same time I was. I am here today to express the anger I have harbored for over thirtythree years, about being accused with my fellow shipmates of war atrocities.
All I can say is that when I leave here today, I’m going down to the Wall to tell my two crew members it’s not true, and that they and the other forty-nine Swiftees who are on the Wall were then and are still now the best.
<font color=black>
—Robert Brant
<font color=purple>
We look at Vietnam. After all these years, it is still languishing in isolated poverty and helplessness and tyranny. This is John Kerry’s legacy. I deeply resent John Kerry’s using his Swift Boat experience, and his betrayal of those who fought there, as a stepping- stone to his political ambitions.
<font color=black>
—Bernard Wolff
Back to 1971
In the question-and-answer exchange following his prepared statement to the Fulbright Committee, Senator George Aiken of Vermont asked John Kerry what would happen in South Vietnam if America withdrew from the war:
<font color=blue>
Mr. KERRY:. . . But I think, having done what we have done to that country, we have an obligation to offer sanctuary to the perhaps 2,000, 3,000 people who might face, and obviously they would, we understand that, might face political assassination or something else. But my feeling is that those 3,000 who may have to leave that country—
<font color=black>
Senator AIKEN: I think your 3,000 estimate might be a little low because we had to help 800,000 find sanctuary from North Vietnam after the French lost at Dien Bien Phu.
<font color=green>
In 1975, when North Vietnam took over the South, a mass exodus began. Those fearing political repression or fearing for their lives desperately sought to leave the country. An estimated 1.5 to 2 million people set out by sea on anything that would float, risking starvation or drowning. Over a quarter of a million were simply lost at sea. Others were murdered, raped, tortured by pirates. The refugees headed for Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. As late as 1997, thousands remained in refugee camps scattered across Asia, awaiting naturalization or, even worse, repatriation. If John Kerry and his antiwar associates were correct, if the Vietnamese comprehended no fundamental difference between freedom and Communism, why did so many risk death?
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After their victory, the Communists established a network of nearly one hundred <font color=blue>“reeducation camps,”<font color=black> political prisons in which they incarcerated indefinitely a wide range of former enemies—officials of the South Vietnamese government; bureaucrats and educators; intellectuals, including writers, reporters, and religious leaders; anyone whom the Vietnamese communists considered dangerous because they had supported or worked with the United States to stop the advance of Communism in Indochina. Estimates of the number of people put through these camps range from half a million to nearly one million.
Subsequent to establishing their hold on South Vietnam, the Vietnamese Communists turned their aggressive armies toward Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand, and ethnic minorities were not safe within Vietnam. In the years since 1975, the Vietnamese Communists have waged war on the Montagnards, the Christian mountain people who dared to fight with the United States against Ho Chi Minh.
Yet nowhere in the public record is there any evidence that John Kerry has ever admitted his estimate was wrong—that only three thousand people would have to be relocated to protect them in the event of a communist victory in Vietnam.
Toi Dang, a Vietnamese sailor who served with Kerry and O’Neill in Coastal Division 11 on An Thoi (and in its South Vietnamese successor) from January 1969 until April 1975, remembers the horror of the North Vietnamese takeover. Dang was able to escape to the United States, shorn of his family, heritage, and country. The nineteen people in his unit were all placed in reeducation camps and disappeared forever. His wife’s uncle was taken to a camp on the Chinese border where the only allowed tools were bomb fragments. Without food or medicine, almost everyone in the camp soon died. One naval officer from An Thoi was executed for shooing a chicken from his small garden. The Vietnamese sailors of An Thoi—Swift brothers to this day—have a special memory of John Kerry and his testimony. In Dang’s words: <font color=purple>“His testimony was all lies. He is a brother only to other liars—not to my Swift brothers.”<font color=black>11
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Copyright © 2004 by John E. O’Neill and Jerome L. Corsi |
