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Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement by John Kerry to the Senate Committee
of Foreign Relations April 23, 1971 I would like to talk on behalf of all those
veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at
which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans
testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were 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 and the feelings of the
men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute
horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. They told stories that 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 Ghengis 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. We call this investigation the Winter
Soldier Investigation. The term Winter Soldier is a play on words of Thomas
Paine's in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriots and summertime soldiers
who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough. We who have come here
to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now.
We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our
silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what
threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing
that threaten it, that we have to speak out.... In our opinion and from our
experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that
realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify
the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss
to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us
the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel
has torn this country apart. We found that not only was it a civil war, an
effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any
colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had
enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight
against the threat we were supposedly saving them from. We found most people
didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only
wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with
napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted
everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the
United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the
art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a
particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American. We found also
that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of
support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were
used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country
had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the
highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American
bombs and search and destroy missions, as well as by Viet Cong terrorism - and
yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet
Cong. We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America
lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to
give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing
gum. We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves,
and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals. We
watched the United States falsification of body counts, in fact the
glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told
the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against
"oriental human beings." We fought using weapons against those people
which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the
European theater. We watched while men charged up hills because a general said
that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons they
marched away to leave the hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese. We
watched pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas,
because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter
how many American bodies were lost to prove that point, and so there were
Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 81s and Fire Base 6s, and so many others.
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American
lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing
the Vietnamese. Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States
washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United
States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so
that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that
President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to
lose a war." We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you
ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the
last man to die for a mistake?....We are here in Washington to say that the
problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and
parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people
in this country - the question of racism which is rampant in the military, and
so many other questions such as the use of weapons; the hypocrisy in our taking
umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a
continuation of this war when we are more guilty than any other body of
violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free fire zones,
harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the
torture of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That
is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything. An American
Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation of Alcatraz put it to me
very succinctly. He told me how as a boy on an Indian reservation he had watched
television and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the
Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped in Vietnam and he said, "my
God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my
people," and he stopped. And that is what we are trying to say, that we
think this thing has to end. We are here to ask, and we are here to ask
vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're
here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and so many others?
Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These
are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious
crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The
marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the
casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left
the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this
country.... We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that
service as easily as this administration has wiped away 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 fear that have driven this country these last
ten years and more. And more. And so when thirty 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 where America finally turned and where
soldiers like us helped it in the turning. ]]>
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