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Old 10-22-2003, 12:34 PM
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Default Re: Lt. Col. Anthony Herbert

So...who is he ?

"Dan Campbell" wrote in message news:vpbo0aqdc4jt9c@corp.supernews.com...
>
> 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:
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 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
> -------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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