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Pissing in the cornflakes
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January 27, 2004, 8:25 a.m.
Vetting the Vet Record
Is Kerry a proud war hero or angry antiwar protester?
John Kerry, we know, is running against John Kerry: his own voting
record. But there is another record that John Kerry is running against,
and this has to do with his very emergence as a Democratic politician:
Kerry, the proud Vietnam veteran vs. Kerry, the antiwar activist who
accused his fellow Vietnam veterans of the most heinous atrocities
imaginable.
John Kerry not only served honorably in Vietnam, but also with
distinction, earning a Silver Star (America's third-highest award for
valor), a Bronze Star, and three awards of the Purple Heart for wounds
received in combat as a swift-boat commander. Kerry did not return from
Vietnam a radical antiwar activist. According to the indispensable
Stolen Valor, by H. G. "Jug" Burkett and Genna Whitley, "Friends said
that when Kerry first began talking about running for office, he was not
visibly agitated about the Vietnam War. 'I thought of him as a rather
normal vet,' a friend said to a reporter, 'glad to be out but not
terribly uptight about the war.' Another acquaintance who talked to
Kerry about his political ambitions called him a 'very charismatic
fellow looking for a good issue.'" Apparently, this good issue would be
Vietnam.
Kerry hooked up with an organization called Vietnam Veterans Against the
War (VVAW). Two events cooked up by this group went a long way toward
cementing in the public mind the image of Vietnam as one big atrocity.
The first of these was the January 31, 1971, "Winter Soldier
Investigation," organized by "the usual suspects" among antiwar
celebrities such as Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory, and Kennedy-assassination
conspiracy theorist, Mark Lane. Here, individuals purporting to be
Vietnam veterans told horrible stories of atrocities in Vietnam: using
prisoners for target practice, throwing them out of helicopters, cutting
off the ears of dead Viet Cong soldiers, burning villages, and
gang-raping women as a matter of course.
The second event was "Dewey Canyon III," or what VVAW called a "limited
incursion into the country of Congress" in April of 1971. It was during
this VVAW "operation" that John Kerry first came to public attention.
The group marched on Congress to deliver petitions to Congress and then
to the White House. The highlight of this event occurred when veterans
threw their medals and ribbons over a fence in front of the Capitol,
symbolizing a rebuke to the government that they claimed had betrayed
them. One of the veterans flinging medals back in the face of his
government was John Kerry, although it turns out they were not his
medals, but someone else's.
Several days later Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. His speech, touted as a spontaneous rhetorical endeavor, was
a tour de force, convincing many Americans that their country had indeed
waged a merciless and immoral war in Vietnam. It was particularly
powerful because Kerry did not fit the antiwar-protester mold — he was
no scruffy, wide-eyed hippie. He was instead the best that America had
to offer. He was, according to Burkett and Whitley, the "All-American
boy, mentally twisted by being asked to do terrible things, then
abandoned by his government."
Kerry began by referring to the Winter Soldiers Investigation in
Detroit. Here, he claimed, "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 their 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 fashion reminiscent of
Genghis 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.
This is quite a bill of particulars to lay at the feet of the U.S.
military. He said in essence that his fellow veterans had committed
unparalleled war crimes in Vietnam as a matter of course, indeed, that
it was American policy to commit such atrocities.
In fact, the entire Winter Soldiers Investigation was a lie. It was
inspired by Mark Lane's 1970 book entitled Conversations with Americans,
which claimed to recount atrocity stories by Vietnam veterans. This book
was panned by James Reston Jr. and Neil Sheehan, not exactly known as
supporters of the Vietnam War. Sheehan in particular demonstrated that
many of Lane's "eye witnesses" either had never served in Vietnam or had
not done so in the capacity they claimed.
Nonetheless, Sen. Mark Hatfield inserted the transcript of the Winter
Soldier testimonies into the Congressional Record and asked the
Commandant of the Marine Corps to investigate the war crimes allegedly
committed by Marines. When the Naval Investigative Service attempted to
interview the so-called witnesses, most refused to cooperate, even after
assurances that they would not be questioned about atrocities they may
have committed personally. Those that did cooperate never provided
details of actual crimes to investigators. The NIS also discovered that
some of the most grisly testimony was given by fake witnesses who had
appropriated the names of real Vietnam veterans. Guenter Lewy tells the
entire study in his book, America in Vietnam.
Kerry's 1971 testimony includes every left-wing cliché about Vietnam and
the men who served there. It is part of the reason that even today,
people who are too young to remember Vietnam are predisposed to believe
the worst about the Vietnam War and those who fought it. This
predisposition was driven home by the fraudulent "Tailwind" episode some
months ago.
The first cliché is that atrocities were widespread in Vietnam. But this
is nonsense. Atrocities did occur in Vietnam, but they were far from
widespread. Between 1965 and 1973, 201 soldiers and 77 Marines were
convicted of serious crimes against the Vietnamese. Of course, the fact
that many crimes, either in war or peace, go unreported, combined with
the particular difficulties encountered by Americans fighting in
Vietnam, suggest that more such acts were committed than reported or tried.
But even Daniel Ellsberg, a severe critic of U.S. policy in Vietnam,
rejected the argument that the biggest U.S. atrocity in Vietnam, My Lai,
was in any way a normal event: "My Lai was beyond the bounds of
permissible behavior, and that is recognizable by virtually every
soldier in Vietnam. They know it was wrong....The men who were at My Lai
knew there were aspects out of the ordinary. That is why they tried to
hide the event, talked about it to no one, discussed it very little even
among themselves."
My Lai was an extreme case, but anyone who has been in combat
understands the thin line between permissible acts and atrocity. The
first and potentially most powerful emotion in combat is fear arising
from the instinct of self-preservation. But in soldiers, fear is
overcome by what the Greeks called thumos, spiritedness and righteous
anger. In the Iliad, it is thumos, awakened by the death of his comrade
Patroclus that causes Achilles to leave sulking in his tent and wade
into the Trojans.
But unchecked, thumos can engender rage and frenzy. It is the role of
leadership, which provides strategic context for killing and enforces
discipline, to prevent this outcome. Such leadership was not in evidence
at My Lai.
But My Lai also must be placed within a larger context. The NVA and VC
frequently committed atrocities, not as a result of thumos run amok, but
as a matter of policy. While left-wing anti-war critics of U.S. policy
in Vietnam were always quick to invoke Auschwitz and the Nazis in
discussing alleged American atrocities, they were silent about Hue City,
where a month and a half before My Lai, the North Vietnamese and VC
systematically murdered 3,000 people. They were also willing to excuse
Pol Pot's mass murderer of upwards of a million Cambodians.
The second cliché is that is that Vietnam scarred an entire generation
of young men. But for years, many of us who served in Vietnam tried to
make the case that the popular image of the Vietnam vet as maladjusted
loser, dehumanized killer, or ticking "time bomb" was at odds with
reality. Indeed, it was our experience that those who had served in
Vietnam generally did so with honor, decency, and restraint; that
despite often being viewed with distrust or opprobrium at home, most had
asked for nothing but to be left alone to make the transition back to
civilian life; and that most had in fact made that transition if not
always smoothly, at least successfully.
But the press could always find the stereotypical, traumatized vet who
could be counted on to tell the most harrowing and gruesome stories of
combat in Vietnam, often involving atrocities, the sort of stories that
John Kerry gave credence to in his 1971 testimony. Many of the war
stories recounted by these individuals were wildly implausible to any
one who had been in Vietnam, but credulous journalists, most of whom had
no military experience, uncritically passed their reports along to the
public.
I had always agreed with the observation of the late Harry Summers, a
well-known military commentator who served as an infantryman in Korean
and Vietnam, that the story teller's distance from the battle zone was
directly proportional to the gruesomeness of his atrocity story. But
until the publication of the aforementioned Stolen Valor: How the
Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and its History, neither
Harry nor I any idea just how true his observation was.
In the course of trying to raise money for a Texas Vietnam Veterans
Memorial, Burkett discovered that reporters were only interested in
homeless veterans and drug abuse and that the corporate leaders he
approached had bought into the popular image of Vietnam veterans. They
were not honorable men who took pride in their service, but whining
welfare cases, bellyaching about what an immoral government did to them.
Fed up, Burkett did something that any reporter worth his or her salt
could have done: he used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to check
the actual records of the "image makers" used by reporters to flesh out
their stories on homelessness, Agent Orange, suicide, drug abuse,
criminality, or alcoholism. What he found was astounding. More often
than not, the showcase "veteran" who cried on camera about his dead
buddies, about committing or witnessing atrocities, or about some heroic
action in combat that led him to the current dead end in his life, was
an impostor.
Indeed, Burkett discovered that over the last decade, some 1,700
individuals, including some of the most prominent examples of the
Vietnam veteran as dysfunctional loser, had fabricated their war
stories. Many had never even been in the service. Others, had been, but
had never been in Vietnam.
Stolen Valor made it clear why John Kerry's testimony in 1971 slandered
an entire generation of soldiers. Kerry gave credence to the claim that
the war was fought primarily by reluctant draftees, predominantly
composed of the poor, the young, or racial minorities.
The record shows something different, indicating that 86 percent of
those who died during the war were white and 12.5 percent were black,
from an age group in which blacks comprised 13.1 percent of the
population. Two thirds of those who served in Vietnam were volunteers,
and volunteers accounted for 77 percent of combat deaths.
Kerry portrayed the Vietnam veteran as ashamed of his service:
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of
that service as easily as this administration has wiped 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
the fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more,
and so when in 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 the place where America finally turned and
where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.
But a comprehensive 1980 survey commissioned by Veterans' Administration
(VA) reported that 91 percent of those who had seen combat in Vietnam
were "glad they had served their country;" 80 percent disagreed with the
statement that "the US took advantage of me;" and nearly two out of
three would go to Vietnam again, even knowing how the war would end.
Today, Sen. Kerry appeals to veterans in his quest for the White House.
He invokes his Vietnam service at every turn. But an honest,
enterprising reporter should ask Sen. Kerry this: Were you lying in 1971
or are you lying now? We do know that his speech was not the
spontaneous, emotional, from-the-heart offering that he suggested it
was. Burkett and Whitley report that instead, "it had been carefully
crafted by a speech writer for Robert Kennedy named Adam Walinsky, who
also tutored him on how to present it."
But the issue goes far beyond theatrics. If he believes his 1971
indictment of his country and his fellow veterans was true, then he
couldn't possibly be proud of his Vietnam service. Who can be proud of
committing war crimes of the sort that Kerry recounted in his 1971
testimony? But if he is proud of his service today, perhaps it is
because he always knew that his indictment in 1971 was a piece of
political theater that he, an aspiring politician, exploited merely as a
"good issue." If the latter is true, he should apologize to every
veteran of that war for slandering them to advance his political fortunes.
— Mackubin Thomas Owens is an NRO contributing editor and a professor of
strategy and force planning at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He
led a Marine infantry platoon in Vietnam in 1968-1969.
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Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host
Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.
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