Vetting the Record

Just got this from Langston.......


I clipped this out for you to read bro. It’s pretty good

SF, Bill



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.