John Kerry ????

[SuperScout]

That works for me! Considering all the previous strange stuff coming out of Florida in the past, I think Ms. Parker's rather prophetic! Couple her comments (no pun intended) with Kerry's voting record, and the seeds of the Demo's destruction has been sown. Ah yes, be careful of what you sow, as that too shall ye reap! The old bromide of "...sowing wild oats, then praying for a crop failure..." will not prevail this Nov.

[Arrow]

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 clich? 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 clich? 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 clich? 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.

[SuperScout]

Hugs!! That article is beautiful!!

[39mto39g]

I think part of the problem is that when someone says something about VN Vet or anyone else for that matter, WE are just to lazy to do what Arrow did and what the guy did in her artical. Im just as guilty. It good to see that some of the records are being put straight, Except, Hardly anyone reads the rebut of some off the wall alligations, People want to belive that we all cut Vietnamiese heads off for some reason.
First thing a new guy asks me when he finds out I was in VN is , Did you kill anybody? What kind of question is that to ask anyone. I useually make them wax the truck at that point, and that ends the questions.

There should be a national registry that has all facts in it, everything from where man came from to life on Mars. This place should be not Repubican or Democrat, not funded by any special intrest and fully disclose the reserch in getting to the truth of any question.
So, you could ask a question and get a straight answer that was also TRUE.
Wouldn't that be nice.

Ron

[BLUEHAWK]

[Arrow]

Excerpts from the article by James Webb former Secretary of the Navy - Why We Fought and Why We Would Do It Again -

"Most importantly, Vietnam became an undeclared war fought against the background of a highly organized dissent movement at home. Few Americans who grew up after the war know that a large part of this dissent movement was already in place before the Vietnam War began. Many who wished for revolutionary changes in America had pushed for them through the vehicles of groups such as the ban-the-bomb movement in the 1950s and the civil-rights movement of the early and mid-1960s. In this regard, it is interesting to note that the infamous antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society was created at the University of Michigan through the Port Huron Statement in 1962 - three full years before American ground troops landed at Da Nang. The SDS hoped to bring revolution to America through the issue of race. They and other extremist groups soon found more fertile soil on the issue of the war.

Former communist colonel Bui Tin, a highly placed propaganda officer during the war, recently published a memoir in which he specifically admitted a truth that was assumed by American fighting men for years. The Hanoi government assumed from the beginning that the United States would never prevail in Vietnam so long as the dissent movement, which they called "the Rear Front," was successful at home. Many top leaders of this movement coordinated efforts directly with Vietnamese communist officials in Hanoi. Such coordination often included visiting the North Vietnamese capital - for instance, during the planning stages for the October 1967 march on the Pentagon - a few weeks before the siege of Khe Sanh kicked into high gear and a few months before the Tet Offensive."

James Webb served as a rifle platoon and company commander with the Fifth Marine Regiment in Vietnam. A former secretary of the Navy, he is the author of "Fields of Fire" and "Lost Soldiers." He also was the creator and executive producer of the film "Rules of Engagement." His website is at

www.jameswebb.com


(Thanks to all for your kind words)

Arrow (the uneducated and deceived)

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst3...nts/huron.html

(Very very long but the date of 1962 is verified and also it is interesting to note that it was provided by the office of Tom Hayden)

Bui Tin's Memoir can be found on Amazon.com

[BLUEHAWK]

What is also interesting, if I have my story straight, is that the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) was (I recently discovered) strongly associated at its founding with America's Central Intelligence Agency.

[Seascamp]

these revelations have been around for a couple of decades and now seem to be graduating from things only the kooks and un cool say, to things that are very relevant to the current decision making process.
Sure, the SDS, Weathermen and a host of others were operating as bargain basement fronts for forces that weren?t at all interested in the causes they espoused.
And Blue I would have no ideal about any SDS connects to the CIA. The CIA guys I knew of in VN seemed to like to play gulf all the time. Maybe the original name was ?Slackers for a Delightful Sport? and that is what they originally funded.

Entities like Fonda had zero interest in the welfare or fate of those she alleged to champion. I never figured the logic of her deal where she preferred and worked for supposedly oppressed people to be both Red and dead. And evidently, dead before Red was the preferred set of circumstances.

Then the situation at hand where Kerry-Fonda connects are alleged. Well, maybe he was a misguided Saturday afternoon activist, or maybe an empty headed-empty shelled opportunist, or maybe something else and gullible and stupid as all hell.

What is certain and opposite from what her apologists claim, is that Fonda was not an activist. She was a Partisan working for the other side. Whether Kerry got bamboozled or went along willingly with her crap or whatever, is what we will have to guess at and that is not at all comfortable guesswork.

Scamp

[BLUEHAWK]

Slackers for Delightful Sport... that's a good one Scampner

Seriously, I just read about it somewhere, maybe the New Yorker or something... some government high ranker for the past 40 years got recruited out of college to be SDS by CIA... hell, I dunno. Probably shoulda kept that article... anyhow, I found it interesting because WAYYYYYYYYY back then I do remember people going around writing/saying that SDS (and probably every other left movement org) had been either created by or was infiltrated (Hellllllllllloooooo!) either FBI or CIA, and what not.

The article made it seem credible that CIA might have been a logical place to establish such a thing, but it still seems odder'n hell. I have NEVER understood how CIA works, which I am sure is exacraly how they'd prefer things to be going

[SuperScout]

It seems hardly credible that the CIA sponsored, founded or had anything at all to do with the SDS, except to possibly and probably infiltrate this bunch of anarchists, marxists, and trouble-making wannabees. Their espousal of violence as a means to their warped ends automatically places them in my theoritical, ethical, and actual crosshairs. The loose, but discernible linkage between the SDS, Weathermen and other anti-war, anti-US groups had been well documented; Fonda and her ilk were knee-deep in all the activities, and to me, therefore Kerry is guilty,not just by association, but by activity as well.

I had a brief, and for him, a very uneventful encounter with one of these cretins while finishing my degree at The University of Texas at Austin, in the 1969-70 school year. When he tried to block my entrance into a class I needed in order to graduate, I gently remarked to him that it had been a mere seven months since I had knowingly killed anybody, and my trigger finger was getting rather itchy. And viola! the door became unblocked!! To this day, I have nothing but contempt for them. That's my strategery, and I'm sticking to it.