Villainous Company

Now this was an extremely interesting allegation for the dashing young officer to make. Did he personally witness such incidents? If they were "committed on a day-to-day basis", he must have.

And if he witnessed such acts, it was his duty under the UCMJ to report them. Yet he did nothing.

Is it then-Lt. Kerry's contention that the men under his command committed such acts? That makes him, as commanding officer, fully complicit. For by his own testimony these atrocious acts were performed "with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. What kinds of acts are we talking about, anyway? Surely not the dreaded Fruit-of-the-Loom underwear, placed on the heads of unwilling Viet Cong?

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.

Yet then-Lt. Kerry said nothing. And apparently, he felt no responsibility to stay and try to stop the carnage, for he fled the scene, landing himself a cushy admiral's aide's job in Washington DC.

I also searched in vain for any mention that the authenticity of the Winter Soldiers was ever questioned - that their shocking charges were ever looked into. An earlier Times review states:

This important 1972 documentary, which is reportedly well-researched and factual, was refused airing on the television networks of its day. It concerns reports of atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam and includes numerous interviews with Vietnam veterans who either saw or participated in them. The anguished testimony of these soldiers is difficult to refute. The film is based on the 1971 Detroit Winter Soldier Investigation, which interviewed over 200 G.I.s. The film weaves footage of their testimony with shots taken in Vietnam, and details how ordinary people can learn to become brutal in combat situations. Because of the challenge this film offered to the U.S. government at the time, the filmmakers, frightened, asked that their names remain anonymous.

How odd. According to Macubin Owens, after the Senate heard the Winter Soldier testimony, Senator Mark Hatfield asked the Commandant of the Marine Corps to conduct a full investigation. Now what are the chances that after 200-odd "highly decorated Vietnam vets" testified on the Congressional record to electrocuting genitals, raping and vivisecting innocent Vietnamese, the Senate would just turn around and say, "Well isn't that special... have a nice day."

The ensuing NIS investigation was revealing:

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.

But the Times continues to perpetrate John Kerry's lies about Vietnam Vets:

The relevance of this grainy, ancient documentary comes from descriptions of abuse that could have been ripped from contemporary headlines, notwithstanding the changes in today's professional soldiers and their evolved, high-tech methods of warfare.

Listen, for instance, to the former Army interrogator as he describes using "clubs, rifle butts, pistols, knives" to extract information - "always monitored" by superiors or military police, he says - and recounts his superiors' overriding directive: "Don't get caught."

Or hear the former Marine captain, speaking of "standard operating prtocedure," describe how easily individual transgressions, overlooked by superiors, became de facto policy: "The general attitude of the officers was - I was a lieutenant at the time - 'Well, there's somebody senior to me here, and I guess if this wasn't S.O.P., he'd be doing something to stop it.' And since nobody senior ever did anything to stop it, the policy was promulgated, and everybody assumed that this was right."

...it introduces us to the gentle-sounding, Jesus-like Scott Camil, a former Marine scout and forward artillery observer, who in a whispery voice relates his personal journey from rah-rah patriot to trained killer to medal-winner to self-preservationist Angel of Death. "If I had to go into a village and kill 150 people just to make sure there was no one there to kill me when we walked out, that's what I did," he says.

Like other veterans, Mr. Camil - whose testimony at the Winter Soldier Investigation inspired Graham Nash's song "Oh, Camil!" - conveys how desensitized they became, and how dehumanized the Vietnamese became in their eyes. "Whoever had the most ears, they would get the most beers," he says of his comrades' corporeal trophies. "It became like a game."

Owens comments:

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."

Why does this matter today? This all happened more than thirty years ago. Who really cares, anymore? Well first of all, the honor of some who served this nation with distinction has been impugned, notably by John Kerry. Where the Times goes to great lengths to imply that there was some sort of plot to suppress the Winter Soldier crockumentary, there was none. On the other hand, John Kerry's lawyers did sue to prevent American prisoners of war from airing their own documentary. Apparently Kerry's conception of freedom of speech did not extend to these men who sacrificed years of their lives in North Vietnamese prison camps. The Times, notably, refers to them only as Kerry's "enemies", as though they could have no other motivation for wanting to get their side of the story out.

Why does this matter now? Because in 1971, John Kerry told the Senate that the Vietnam War turned our servicemen into alienated and deranged psychopaths who were "committing war crimes on a daily basis" and would no doubt continue that behavior once they returned home:

Sixty to 80 percent is the figure used that try something, let's say, at one point. Of that I couldn't give you a figure of habitual smokers, let's say, of pot, and I certainly couldn't begin to say how many are hard drug addicts, but I do know that the problem for the returning veteran is, acute, because we have, let's say, a veteran picks up a $12 habit in Saigon. He comes back to this country and the moment he steps off an airplane that same habit costs him some $90 to support. With the state of the economy, he can't get a job. He doesn't earn money. He turns criminal or just finds his normal sources and in a sense drops out.

The alienation of the war, the emptiness of back and forth, all combined adds to this. There is no real drug rehabilitation program.

I understand 57 percent of all those entering the VA hospitals talk about suicide. Some 27 percent have tried, and they try because they come back to this country and they have to face what they did in Vietnam, and then they come back and find the indifference of a country that doesn't really care, that doesn't really care.

This type of shameless rhetoric is being recycled today in the sillier salons of the Left:

Thirty percent of United States troops returning home face mental health problems three to four months after their return, according to Army surgeon general Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley.

More frightening however is that “30 percent of the cases [of post traumatic stress disorder] don't manifest themselves until 10 years after the traumatic event, according to medical literature,” according to a UPI article, posted on Military.com. Clearly, this will then increases [sic] the overall number of 30 percent.

Actually, the only really frightening things about this article were the author's obvious struggles with subject/verb agreement, his inability to understand basic math (a delayed-onset rate of 30% out of 100% doesn't increase the total number of cases), and his obvious fear and loathing of the military. But is that so surprising? He's had over thirty years of liberal brainwashing. As Macubin Owens, an infantry commander in Vietnam comments:

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.

But what does Owens know? He, like the Swift Vets and the Stolen Honor crowd so derided by the NY Times and John Kerry, served his entire combat tour in Vietnam. His word is obviously not to be trusted.

It's deja vu, all over again. This is the kind of nonsense our troops are going to come home to: historical revisionism, slander, and paranoia.

The question is, are we going to let them get away with it this time?