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Old 10-21-2003, 06:45 PM
Dan Campbell
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Default Lt. Col. Anthony Herbert


Bravo to Lt. Col. Anthony Herbert for speaking up about a U.S. military
gone hay-wire (hence the term "babykillers"). This highly
decorated soldier sacrificed his career, but kept his honor!

Posted by writer/researcher Joe Bageant on 6/6/03:
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Joe Bageant
102 Peyton St.
Winchester VA 22601
540-722-2834
"I have many many documents as a result of having done several national
stories on Herbert during the 1970s. I am also still in contact with
herbert." Joe Bageant 8/22/03
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Remembering “Herbert’s War”

His decade-long personal war against cover-ups by the U.S. Army made
Vietnam battalion commander Lt. Col. Anthony Herbert one of the most
controversial figures of the Vietnam War. By Joe Bageant

In 1947 U.S. Army recruitment got an apparent bargain when it signed up
a 17-year-old Lithuanian kid from Herminie, Pennsylvania named Anthony
B. Herbert. The self-described “big dumb kid from a coal-mining town”
In the bloody snows of Korea. Herbert earned a couple dozen
medals—including four Silver Stars out of Korea , three Bronze Stars
with a V, six battle stars, four Purple Hearts and the highest military
award Turkey has (because he was fighting alongside Turks at the time).
He was wounded 14 times—10 by bullets, 3 by bayonet, and once by white
phosphorus. Harry Truman’s America rewarded him with a goodwill tour of
Europe, a handshake from Eleanor Roosevelt and the bayonet they’d
pulled out of him and shined up. Two decades later, facing middle age
and another war, this time in Southeast Asia, he commanded one of the
most highly rated combat battalions in the war, leading its brigade in
contacts with the enemy, captured weapons and enemy prisoners taken, as
well as the highest reenlistment rate and fewest AWOLs. It was an
enviable record by any standard. Then in 1971 about 20 years into his
career, the marriage between Lt. Col. Anthony Herbert and the U.S. Army
turned bitter, and the subsequent conflict came to be dubbed “Herbert’s
War.” The issue was Herbert’s refusal to ignore atrocities he
encountered in Vietnam. Tony Herbert’s earlier assignment as inspector
general at An Khe in the Phu My province of Vietnam’s Central
Highlands, practically guaranteed him a degree of unpopularity at the
outset. But when he filed reports of American personnel administering
water torture to a VC prisoner, he had made himself some hard-core
enemies among fellow officers at brigade headquarters whose enmity
would linger for years. Altogether, Herbert had reported eight separate
war crimes, including incidents of torture, looting, execution and
murder. He recalled a particular episode involving some Vietnamese
girls: “The area was brilliantly lit by floodlights … Each of them [the
girls] was seated with their hands on a table, palms down.” Herbert
described the instruments used as a “long springy rod of bamboo split
into dozens of tight, thin flails on one end. It was a murderous
weapon,” he said. “I’d seen it take the hide off a buffalo. When it was
struck down hard, the flails splayed out like a fan, but an instant
after impact they returned to their order, pinching whatever was
beneath…” Herbert says “War crimes are infinitely easier to overlook
than to explain to an investigating committee. Nor do they do much for
promotion among the ‘West Point Protection Society’ of the Army’s
upper-echelon career men. So when I kept bringing up the matter, I kept
on making enemies and getting answers such as, “‘What the hell did you
expect, Herbert? Candy and flowers?’ I reported these things and
nothing happened.” Maybe nothing happened in terms of prosecution, but
Herbert himself was accused of exaggeration and outright lying in his
filed reports. The clincher came in April of 1969 when he was relieved
of his command of the Second Battalion, despite its outstanding record
under his leadership. Herbert said it took a whole year of dead-end
legal actions and $8,000 of his own money before even a few facts began
to emerge. “I know now it wasn’t just the Army,” he says. “It was
General Westmoreland in particular. He did everything he possibly could
to keep my case covered up because of the heat being placed on the Army
from the My Lai case.” Meanwhile, Army intelligence reports verified
every single crime and supported Herbert’s charges. From a Central
Intelligence Division (CID) report dated Aug. 23, 1971 reviewing
Herbert’s allegations comes the following: “…technique employed
included the transmission of electrical shock by means of a field
telephone [used to torture a Vietnamese girl] a water rag treatment
which impaired breathing, hitting with sticks and boards, and beating
of detainees with fists.” And from CID reports marked FOR OFFICIAL USE
ONLY: “Herbert’s S-3 [non-commissioned officer] witnessed a field
telephone in use during interrogation, but no objection was raised…” In
fact, the soldier involved in the electrical torture admitted to it in
the same report, and another soldier admitted witnessing the water rag
torture. Dozens of official CID documents substantiated Herbert’s
statements, but the Army, in conflict with its own documents, insisted
that Herbert had “a propensity to lie or exaggerate.” Among Herbert’s
biggest obstacles was that while he was reporting the crimes to his
superiors, one of his superiors, Lt. Gen. William Peers, also happened
to be supervising Army inquiry into the My Lai cover-up. Worse yet,
Peers’ right-hand man during the inquiry was J. Ross Franklin,
Herbert’s main adversary at An Khe, one of those who would be held
accountable for the crimes Herbert was reporting.Herbert felt that the
Army’s CID seemed paralyzed when it came to investigating his
complaints. So he helped them along by filing charges against his
former commanding general, John W. Barnes, for dereliction of duty in
failing to investigate the alleged atrocities. That same day, March 15,
1971, Herbert also dropped 14 separate charges into Franklin’s lap,
including corpse mutilation and the electrical torture of a Vietnamese
girl by Army intelligence. Herbert was shuttled off to a mediocre staff
position at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas where it was hoped he would settle
into obscurity. Fat chance. He popped up in Life Magazine, the New York
Times and on the Dick Cavett Show. He took voluntary polygraph tests
and passed. Herbert says, “Army harassment increased until at last, my
family began to show signs of stress from the ordeal.” So he chose the
warrior’s hemlock—retirement. “On Nov. 7, 1971,” he says, I set my own
retirement in motion.” As the Army watched him transformed into a
41-year-old civilian, it breathed a sigh of relief. Prematurely. A year
after his reluctant retirement Herbert teamed up with New York Times
correspondent James Wooten to write the best selling book Soldier
(Holt, Reinhart and Winston). It is an autobiographical account
documenting his efforts to expose both the incompetence and the
atrocities he’d seen in Vietnam. On another level Soldier illustrated
dilemmas and asked moral questions about individual rights in an
organized professional world—the man versus the self-serving system.
Soldier won Herbert a great many admirers both in the media and the
public at large. Then on Feb. 4, 1973, Herbert’s reputation was dealt a
shattering blow when CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a segment titled “The
Selling of Colonel Herbert.” CBS correspondent Mike Wallace and
producer Barry Lando challenged his credibility, implying that Soldier
was fictitious and, most surprising of all, that Herbert himself was
guilty of war crimes. Considering that the massive efforts of the
Pentagon had failed to discredit any of Herbert’s statements, this was
baffling indeed. Supporting the CBS allegations against Herbert on the
show was Herbert’s old nemesis, Lt. Col. J. Ross Franklin who had been
relieved of his command Franklin relieved from his command for throwing
a Vietnamese body out of chopper (and later went to prison in 1991 to
serve a five-year sentence for his role in a securities scam.)More
baffling was the fact that originally CBS producer Barry Lando had
originally proposed a pro-Herbert segment. But CBS vice-president for
news Bill Leonard shot it down. Lando, who said he totally believed in
Herbert, tried again and again was shot down. Then in August of 1972
Lando did an unexplainable about face, suddenly deciding that Herbert
had “gone off the deep end,” and that his story was now riddled with
inconsistencies. Herbert thinks Lando’s change of heart came when
Herbert turned down Lando’s offer to write a book together. Whatever
the case, Lando got approval for a CBS story challenging Herbert,
rather than supporting him. Herbert said, “Interestingly, at the time
CBS was under a lot of heat from the Nixon administration for an
earlier broadcast called The Selling of the Pentagon and CBS president
Frank Stanton was under subpoena. Around the same time Stanton paid a
visit to Nixon White House counsel Charles Colson, who later said in
the New York Times that Stanton volunteered to help Nixon and was
unusually accommodating. One of the accommodations he made was
decreased CBS examination of Nixon speeches.” Herbert suspected that he
was also discussed at that meeting, especially considering that he had
so actively supported George McGovern and had called Nixon a “war
criminal.”In January of 1974 Herbert retaliated with a suit against
CBS, Mike Wallace and Barry Lando to uncover just how they had decided
to run the story. Ultimately, a landmark decision by the Supreme Court
in Herbert v. Lando (1979) ruled in Herbert’s favor, and he won what
had come to be called the “state of mind case.” Every major news news
outlet in the world, joined CBS in an amica (spelling?) brief on the
grounds that it would have a chilling effect on journalism, an effect
that has so far failed to manifest itself. By that time Herbert had
earned a doctorate in psychology, and become a police and clinical
psychologist. He has since retired from that second career, but the
events of “Herbert’s War” nevertheless surface from time to time.
Writers still come to Herbert with screenplays, producers with movie
deals and other offers. “I turn them down,” he says. “And if the
subject of Vietnam or Korea comes up, I usually change the
conversation.”Asked to sum up the whole experience and its meaning,
Herbert, now 73 years old, paused, then said: “If you stick by your
guns, if you stand by the truth, you win. I feel good about my time in
Vietnam and my time in the Army. As my friend, Sgt. Maj. John Bittorie
once said, ‘There are two kinds of military reputations. One is
official and on paper in Washington DC. The other is the one that goes
from bar to bar from the mouths of those who served with you there.’
That is the only reputation I ever really cared about.”
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