Friday, February 20th, 2004
John Kerry Then: Kerry's Historic 1971 Testimony Against the Vietnam War
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After returning from the Vietnam War, John Kerry became a prominent critic
of the war. He testified before the Senate in 1971 and told of atrocities
being committed by U.S. troops. He called for the immediate withdrawal of
U.S. troops. And he asked: "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 broadcast a rare recording of this historic address from the Pacifica
Radio Archives.
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On October 9, 2002, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry stood on the Senate
floor and spoke in favor of the invasion of Iraq. The next day he voted to
authorize President Bush to go to war.
Thirty years earlier, Kerry became a leading voice against the war in
Vietnam.
Kerry returned from Vietnam in April 1969, having won early transfer out of
the conflict because of his three Purple Hearts. He had also won a Silver
Star.
When Kerry returned home, over 540,000 U.S. troops were deployed in Vietnam.
Some 33,400 had been killed, and the number of protests in the U.S. was
surging.
Kerry gradually became active in the antiwar movement. After working behind
the scenes and making a few little-noticed appearances at rallies, he joined
a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
In January 1971, the organization held a series of hearings in Detroit
called the "Winter Soldier Investigation." Kerry did not speak at the event,
which received only modest press coverage. This is an excerpt of a veteran
testifying at the hearings. He describes what it was like in Vietnam.
Winter Soldier Investigation documentary
John Kerry declined to speak at the "Winter Soldier Investigation" hearings,
but a bigger stage awaited him.
Three months after the hearings, Kerry took his case to congress and spoke
before a jammed Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Television cameras lined
the walls, and veterans packed the seats.
Kerry was 27 years old and dressed in his green fatigues and Silver Star and
Purple Heart ribbons. On April 22, 1971, he sat at a witness table and
delivered the most famous speech of his life. It was to become the speech
that defined him and make possible his political career. Overnight, he
emerged as one of the most recognized veterans in America.
Pacifica Radio played his speech on the air. Today, we will play a rare
broadcast of that speech. From the Pacifica Radio Archives, this is John
Kerry in 1971.
John Kerry, testifying on April 22, 1971.
Pacifica Radio Archives
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PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT
JOHN KERRY: 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.
We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have
to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country, we could be
quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam,
but we feel, because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the
crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.
I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the
feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The
country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the
form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in
violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in
history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal
which no one has yet grasped.
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.
In 1970, at West Point, Vice President Agnew said, "some glamorize the
criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to
preserve the freedom which most of those misfits abuse," and this was used
as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam.
But for us, as boys in Asia whom the country was supposed to support, his
statement is a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep
sense of revulsion. Hence the anger of some of the men who are here in
Washington today. It is a distortion because we in no way consider ourselves
the best men of this country, because those he calls misfits were standing
up for us in a way that nobody else in this country dared to, because so
many who have died would have returned to this country to join the misfits
in their efforts to ask for an 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 own
personal symbol. And we cannot consider ourselves America's best men when we
are ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia.
In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam
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, which
those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy,
and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.
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, whom 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 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 Viet Cong, North
Vietnamese or American.
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, 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 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.
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while
American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of
"Vietnamizing" the Vietnamese.
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 Washington to say that the problem of
this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel
of everything that we are trying, as human beings, to communicate to people
in this country--the question of racism, which is rampant in the military,
and so many other questions, such as 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.
An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation of Alcatraz
put it to me very succinctly: He told me how, as a boy on an Indian
reservation, he had watched television, and he used to cheer the cowboys
when they came in and shot the Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped
in Vietnam and he said, "my God, I am doing to these people the very same
thing that was done to my people," and he stopped. And that is what we are
trying to say, that we think this thing has to end.
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.
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TODAY'S STORIES
Headlines for February 19, 2004
John Kerry Then: Kerry's Historic 1971 Testimony Against the Vietnam War
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