You lie to the thread saying Kerry "called his fellow soldiers" something. Totally untrue. Kerry never called his fellow soldiers anything but victims of a war gone nuts.
Smearvet liars like you take Kerry's testimony out of context, trying to give it the opposite meaning to brand Kerry a traitor. But the real traitors here are on the far rightwing liars. Men like O'Neill who has never told the truth about anything that went on in that war.
Kerry was the messenger for a large group of bona fide combat vets who had personally taken part in operations which we would never allow in our military now (though you saw the same mentality rear its ugly head back at Abu Graiab).
We are a great country, but we were at our worst there in many instances. Not the soldiers themselves (though there were plenty of bad apple Lt. Calley types), but the ultra-hawkish policy makers who ordered the troops to burn down hootches, bring in body counts of "gooks", encouraged extreme brutality, let our guys shoot anything that moved, dropped napalm and Agent Orange, etc. All of the above was wrong and proved the war had turned sick, insane and unwinnable.
So don't call the messenger a traitor, call him a hero. Kerry not only fought bravely, killed, saved lives and took shrapnel, but he helped save even more lies by helping to end the war. Blessed are the peace-makers, as Christ clearly said.
Plus there was the CIA's Phoenix Program which used SpecOps soldiers like Bob Kerrey as brutal assassins behind enemy lines to terrify villages. You saw them in APOCALYPSE NOW, the ones ordering the hit, those types. That was real. Not the movie, but Phoenix itself. Amongst Phoenix's favorite tactics were beheadings, as Buddhists believe no one can get to nirvana without a head. Some of Kerry's acquintances had been the ones carrying out those missions. They needed to confess and did.
This is the same mentality we saw at Abu Graiab but in the 60's it had gone amok, and there were no TV cameras around to report it. Just the soldiers themselves. And any smearvet who claimed it never happened is just a bald-faced liar. It was also no way to win a war. It made enemies of the very people we were claiming to be defending.
BTW, the VC also did horrendous things. It went both ways.
Kerry's own boat took part in an atrocity killing two innocent villagers. Steve Gardner was responsible for that. Gardner was the only smearvet ever to actually serve with Kerry on his boat. Though he wasn't there as a witness to back any of the smearvet claims. All those claims have been completely debunked. Not a single smearvet ever saw Kerry in action during those episodes, except from afar. |
