When And If Kerry Is Elected

Agreed. It's like the humor of Ann Coulter. She's strident, sure, but funny, she ain't...

I don't think that cartoon was meant to be funny, it's just a message.

Doonesbury and the Winter Soldier[/u]
By:Scott Swett )
February 24, 2004

"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" reads a Doonesbury cartoon character aloud.

"Who said that?" asks the reader's roommate.

"John Kerry. To the Senate Foreign Relations Committee..."

"Too little, too late," replies the roommate; thinking the quote refers to Iraq.

"...in 1971," finishes the reader.

The message from Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau is obvious enough: America's military action in Iraq is a mistake, like our failed effort in Vietnam. Our soldiers there are dying for nothing. The decent thing to do is bring them home immediately. And John Kerry, a fellow Yale alumnus who happens to be the probable Democratic nominee for the Presidency, was a visionary, a man ahead of his time. It's just one more installment of Trudeau's daily political sales pitch.

But there is a story connected to this particular cartoon that will never appear in Doonesbury.

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In February of 1971, an event billed as "The Winter Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American War Crimes" was held in Detroit by the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War. More than one hundred veterans gave testimony about their experiences in Vietnam during the three-day meeting, as video cameras rolled. The men described being trained and ordered to murder civilians, to torture and kill prisoners, and gave eyewitness accounts of hundreds of atrocities, including group rapes and the burning of entire villages.

In early April, Senator Mark Hatfield asked for the Winter Soldier transcripts to be entered into the Congressional Record and called for an official investigation into American war crimes in Vietnam.

From April 18 - 23, more than a thousand VVAW members staged an "invasion" of Washington D.C. Members of the group held memorial ceremonies, met with sympathetic members of Congress, camped on the Mall, performed "guerilla theater" -- re-enactments of atrocities against civilians, complete with fake blood -- on the Capitol steps and in front of the Justice Department, and held a candlelight march around the White House carrying an upside-down American flag. A number of the veterans threw military medals and ribbons over a fence in front of the Capitol in a gesture of contempt. One of them was John Kerry.

On April 22, Kerry represented the VVAW protestors before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. It was there that he delivered the "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" quote used by Garry Trudeau in Doonesbury. That was not all John Kerry had to say to the Committee, however.

Echoing the talking points of the North Vietnamese leadership, Kerry labeled the Vietnam conflict "a civil war" and called the South Vietnamese government "a corrupt dictatorial regime." He said that the besieged South Vietnamese "only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages." Kerry called racism "rampant in the military," claimed that "blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties," and accused America of placing "a cheapness on the lives of Orientals."

Kerry described the Winter Soldier event in Detroit as "an investigation at which 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." The veterans, said Kerry, "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." He accused America of being "more guilty than any other body of violations of [the] Geneva Conventions; in the use of free-fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search-and-destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, the killing of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam." Kerry referred to war criminal Lt. William Calley as "a man who followed orders and who interpreted those orders no differently than hundreds of other men in Vietnam," and concluded by calling on his fellow veterans to "conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more."

Most of Kerry's remarks before the committee were published later in 1971 in the book "The New Soldier," credited to "John Kerry and Vietnam Veterans Against The War." The book also included a timeline and photographs of the march on D.C. and excerpts from the Winter Soldier testimony. A documentary of the Detroit event was later released as "Winter Soldier," winning awards at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals.

Whether in print, on film, before microphones or on the street, the efforts of Kerry and the VVAW focused on a single objective: to convince the public that America's military was committing vast numbers of atrocities in Vietnam; that they did so casually and routinely, as a matter of policy.

And they succeeded. Many American soldiers returned home from the war to find they were spat upon in the streets, reviled as baby-killers, and treated as pariahs by former friends. For decades the standard media image of a Vietnam veteran -- murderous, filthy, addicted, and too damaged psychologically to cope with civilian life -- was taken directly from the dark canvas painted by John Kerry and the VVAW in 1971.

But strangely, all those horrific accounts of rape, torture, arson and slaughter that the VVAW had recorded in Detroit seemed to evaporate once the real investigation demanded by Senator Hatfield began. As recounted in Guenter Lewy's 1978 book "America in Vietnam," few witnesses agreed to talk with military investigators, even after being assured that they would not be asked about their own crimes. Many of those who did permit interviews turned out never to have been in combat. Some of the most gruesome claims came from men who were imposters using the names of real Vietnam veterans. One Marine who had been in combat eventually told investigators that a member of the Nation of Islam had helped prepare his statement, and admitted that he had never witnessed any of the atrocities he had testified to in Detroit. In the end, the Navy was unable to verify any of the hundreds of war crimes alleged by the Winter Soldier Investigation. Neither has anyone else during the 33 years since, including journalists, historians, and military and Congressional investigators.

In fact, the entire Winter Soldier Investigation that John Kerry represented so memorably before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a fraud; a propaganda effort designed to horrify America into abandoning the war in Vietnam by poisoning public opinion against a generation of American soldiers.

The anti-war movement intensified rapidly during the months following the VVAW march on Washington. By January 1973, Congress had voted to eliminate funding for military operations in Indochina. The Nixon Administration signed the Treaty of Paris a few days later, and the first American prisoners of war were released by North Vietnam in February. They had been starved, beaten and tortured by their captors, in an effort to make them sign documents in which they admitted to committing war crimes and atrocities.

All American military personnel left Vietnam by April 1973. North Vietnam initiated minor probing attacks into South Vietnam during the fall of 1974, in violation of the Paris treaty. There was no military response by the United States. In early 1975, North Vietnam launched a massive invasion of South Vietnam. Saigon fell on April 30. The victorious communist regimes, which did in fact commit atrocities and mass murder as a matter of policy, celebrated with a killing spree throughout Southeast Asia. Over the next several years, an estimated two million Cambodians were slaughtered, as were tens of thousands of South Vietnamese. One million South Vietnamese were imprisoned in "re-education camps," and two million more fled the country.

There is no record that John Kerry spoke out, then or ever, against these war crimes.

In his 1998 book "Stolen Valor," which documented in detail the results of 10 years of research, B.G. Burkett finally laid the false stereotype to rest. He discovered that Vietnam veterans were actually more successful and psychologically healthy than their civilian contemporaries, and showed that black and white soldiers suffered casualties in about the same proportion as their relative populations in America. Burkett has also used service records from the National Archives to expose thousands of phony Vietnam vets. One was Al Hubbard, executive secretary of the VVAW in 1971 and a primary organizer of the Winter Soldier event who had claimed a heroic combat record as an Air Force pilot wounded in Vietnam. Burkett found that Hubbard was neither a pilot nor an officer, was never wounded, and was in fact never assigned to Vietnam at all.

Court martial records show that American war crimes did occur in Vietnam but were quite rare. The U.S. Army convicted 201 soldiers of serious offenses against Vietnamese, 95 of them homicides. Seventy-seven Marines were convicted, 27 for homicide. About one quarter of the total homicides occurred during combat operations. From 1965 through 1973 about 2,600,000 Americans troops served in Vietnam. In 1971, the year of the Winter Soldier Investigation, there were 690 homicides in Detroit, Michigan, population 1,500,000.

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Today America faces a familiar choice: to continue our military operations overseas, or give up and bring the troops home. Does this country have the will to fight a protracted war against the terrorist networks and regimes that planned the mass murder of our citizens, even at the cost of ongoing casualties? Around the world, many people await the answer to that question with keen interest. Not all of them are our friends.

Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury tells us that John Kerry's words from 1971 are more relevant now than ever; that the War on Terror, like our struggle in Vietnam more than 30 years ago, is immoral and doomed to fail. But history does not always repeat itself, as Saddam Hussein has discovered. It's not nearly as easy to smear America's military with false atrocity charges - or to hide a politician's ugly past -- in the Age of the Internet.

This time, let's make our choice from the facts.

Not from bloodstained lies.

How many arabs are in america, killing Americans?

And how many Americans are in the Middle East, killing arabs?

So, who is committing terrorism, real terrorism, on whom?

Who are the terrorists?

WTF?

McTag, jsut remember the Christian Republican mantra: the terrorists are always the other guys!

American soldiers:
1) Wear uniforms so they can be distinguished from civilians.
2) Avoid causing civilian casualties.
3) Follow the Rules of War.
4) Wish to neutralize enemy combatants.

The 'other guys':
1) Wear civilian clothes to hide among the populous and thus endanger civilian lives
2) Do not care how many civilian casualties they cause. (Some prefer to attack civilians over military)
3) Seem to follow no rules or laws except that of killing and hate.
4) Wish to kill and terrorize as many civilians as possible to inflict maximum terror on their targets.


Yup Hobit, I can see how someone like you might get confused so I stated this as simply as I could ... hope this helps you.

-Break into homes in the middle of the night.
-Fire into crowds of civillians.
-Bomb villages and houses killing civillians on anonymous "tips" that the "terrorists" might be there.
-Hold prisoners in the sun, hodded and bound.
-Beat prisoners, sometimes to death.
-Threaten prisoners with death during interrogations.
These sound like terrorism to me.


Again, I don't see much real difference.

Well, that's the problem isn't it? Some can see the difference and others can't.

And some are so blind in their "patriotism" that they don't care to see anything.

When you break into homes to capture terrorists, there are less chances of causing a fire fight in amongst the civilians that the terrorist is hiding among when you do it at night.



Show me documented proof that this has happened please. American soldiers have gone out of their way (sometimes at risk of their own lives) to avoid civilian casualties.



Bombs are never dropped into civilian areas on 'anonymous tips' they are dropped upon confirmation by reliable intelligence assets to ensure striking of the target with minimal collateral damage.



Thats what happens when you get captured, you are restrained (so you can't hurt yourself or others.)



Show me proof that this has happened please.



This did happen, the person interrogated was unharmed (unlike many of OUR prisoners in their 'care') And due to this the individual was disciplined.



I am sure in your sad little world there is no difference between an American soldier patrolling the streets of Baghdad until trained Iraqi policemen can take his place and a terrorist who straps on 40 pounds of Semtex and blows up himself and 50+ civilians.

I feel so badly for you Hobit.

Fedral if you feel so badly for hobitbob then I'm John Ashcroft. You are I believe, happy to feel like you can do the superior dance.

Nice try Captain Transparent.

Don't feel bad for me, Fedral, feel bad for yourself and your once great nation.
Iraqi prisoners beaten to death
US Troops fire into crowds
Photos of children injured/killed in US bombing

Note in here that the matter is under investigation and no one has been proven guilty of anything yet.



Keeping in mind Aljazera's known bias for distorting the truth, even they reported that soldiers fired INTO THE AIR. They did this to prevent themselves from being overwhelmed by a mob and there were no accusations of mass death.

One more thing, both the above actions were taken by British soldiers, not American so I don't understand how they apply to American conduct.



As to the last, war is a terrible thing, but since there seems to be no data on whether or not any of the individuals pictured there were wounded by American fire or not, you and I will never know. I could take dozens of pictures from any American hospital and claim that the wounds were from terrorist bombs, but that doesn't make it true.

On the whole, you seem to love making false accusations against American conduct, but you don't seem to give any real proof that it is happening.

US and UK actions may be considered as one given their positions as the prtimary aggressors in this conflict. As for your other comments, how is it living life with blinders on?

They obviously injured themselves. So US bombs only blow up buildings. Oh please, give me a f@cking break.

Interesting story Fedral, lot of details (the one about VVAW).

So you think Kerry really was, like, the rare exception among all those VVAW? I mean, he was a bona fide veteran and war hero, after all. Why wouldn't there have been more?

I got one bone to pick, in any case. About where the story goes, the US left, and then, "over the next several years, an estimated two million Cambodians were slaughtered, as were tens of thousands of South Vietnamese".

You cant just bunch those two regimes together and act like they were both the result of the American retreat from Vietnam. Someone more knowledgeable help me out here, but weren't the Vietnamese communists and the Cambodian communists bitter rivals, if not enemies? Didn't they have rival sponsors (Soviet Union vs China), which used them as pawns against each other? Didn't the Vietnamese communists in the end even invade Cambodia in order to drive Pol Pot out of power? Didnt the US actually side with Pol Pot and his allies when they made their claim to the Cambodian UN seat - on a "the enemy (Pol Pot c.s.) of my enemy (Red Vietnam) is my friend" kinda basis? How does any of that square up with saying that Pol Pot came to power because America left Vietnam to the Vietcong?

Furthermore, the proposition bunches two separate regimes together that, as it already indicates itself, represent wholly different dimensions: the Vietnamese communists murdered "tens of thousands" - Pol Pot "two million" - half of his population, I believe. To make anyone who can somehow be construed as helping the (North-)Vietnamese also guilty-by-association of a regime multiple times as evil as Vietnam's - just by kinda loosely sneaking the former's two million victims in there as if its about the same thing - is not right.

Still, thats just one point that caught my eye.

Oh yeh, where was that story from?

So now Americans are being held responsible for the actions of their allies? I think not. And even your own link as per the Firing 'into' a crowd, admitted that the British soldiers fired ABOVE the crowds head. Why can't you see the difference between that and your biased and misleading tag line of U.S. troops fire into crowds. If you cant see that as being both false and misleading, I fear your touch on reality.

As per your last, I don't live life with blinders, but neither do I live it looking at America through hate colored lenses. I don't go out of my way to slander and denigrate a country just because the Liberal establishment says I should.

Oh, and Wilso, I didn't claim that those people injured themselves, only that there was no prof given that American bombs had done so ... If you find proof, please post it.

I think I've disagreed with the main thrust of pretty much every single post Fedral has made here - but I think I like him. He's thorough. You give him some random links, and he actually reads all of them, and comes back to take you up on whatever was in there. I like that.

That on an aside.

Thanks nimh for that backhanded compliment,
I think it is more important to read thoroughly the postings and articles that you disagree with more than the ones you agree with because thats the only way you expand your views.

Debate Society in High School taught me to argue either side of an issue with equal enthusiasm. I think it is important, as most people on this board do, to maintain an attitude of civility and courtesy towards each other even if we disagree violently with each other.

I love this forum and the people in it no matter what their political affiliations and world view, because I know that there will always be something interesting to read and reply to and make an otherwise dreary day SO much brighter.