Religions > Atheism > Hanoi John Kerry Sells Out US Troops "May 18 1971" LIBERALS HATE AMERICA!!!!!!!!!!!
| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Michael Marxist Moore" |
| Date: |
17 Aug 2004 11:17:24 AM |
| Object: |
Hanoi John Kerry Sells Out US Troops "May 18 1971" LIBERALS HATE AMERICA!!!!!!!!!!! |
Hanoi John Kerry Sells Out US Troops "May 18 1971" LIBERALS HATE
AMERICA!!!!!!!!!!!
April 22, 1971 -- John Kerry testifies on behalf of the VVAW before
the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs. He claims that American
soldiers 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..."
A Vietnam Veteran:
You couldn't really call it a village. I'm not really sure what you
would call it. It was just a collection
of lean-to's...tents and just plain 'any-spot-in-the-storm-will-do'
types of shelters. It was as if the old people and the young people
had walked as far as they could...and it was just the spot that they
stopped and tried to
put together a reasonable image of their lives. It had water and was
somewhat close to a road. And...it was as far as they could go to get
away from the war....and the soldiers of the NVA(North Vietnamese).
The same NVA that had driven them away from the highlands of Vietnam.
From their homes....from their lives.
That little spot in the road had around 25 people living
there...mostly the old but a few young. One of them was pregnant.
Luckily,for awhile anyway, a Medical Mission was nearby. We used to
patrol that area around every 3-4 days. Nothing major..just a
platoon. The LT. liked to call that patrol his 'breaking-in' for
newbies...for those who had just arrived 'in country'. It gave you a
feel for the landscape...and it reminded the newbies that altho we
were Air Cav....we also were expected to walk to earn our money. On
one patrol..we found out that the Medical Mission had left the
area...and the pregnant woman was about to give birth. Being the only
person on the patrol to even remotely have Medical training...( I
served as a Medic)...I was volunteered by the LT. to help with the
birth. One of the really old (ancient comes to mind) women knew about
child-birth but was physically unable to help. Since we had a
ARVN(South Vietnamese) interpreter along...I became her hands...as
long as the ARVN interpreter could keep up. The child was born into
the world on May 15,1971. A little girl...all healthy as could be. We
left her in the arms of her proud mother...and finished on with the
patrol. (and I got the ribbing of my life about the whole thing...good
natured...but it lasted for days). The NVA activity started to pick up
in the area. It seemed as if they
thought we wouldn't fight back if we saw them...or came under fire.
They started to get a little bolder....as they were sending out lots
of patrols into the area around Pleiku..and further south. On our next
patrol into that area...we ran into a NVA patrol. Had a small
firefight. Had to only work on a few minor wounds.
Then we came upon the small little spot...where the old and young had
stopped to try and live. The lean-to's were burned....the tents torn.
Fire was still burning some of the bigger shacks. The old and young
people had been lined up and made to kneel...where they had had a gun
pressed to the back of their heads. I know this is what happened...as
each of them had a hole in the backs of their head...one made by a
bullet.
The boot marks on the ground (that red dirt that seemed to exist
everywhere in Vietnam)...were of standard issue NVA. So...the people
who had done this were probably NVA. I checked all that I could
....looking for even a glimmer of life. There was none. Then I
remembered the young mother....and the baby that I helped to deliver.
I searched the area..(with my back being watched by my Platoon
Sgt.)...and came across them a few yards into the bush. The young
mother lay on the ground...and bullet hole in her head and laying in
her arms was her baby daughter. With a bullet hole in her head.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Evil exists.
I came face-to-face with it on that day in Vietnam. This is the 3rd
time I've talked about that day in 30 plus years. I'm not sure if I
can talk about it again ever. But the same evil that I found in the
highlands of Vietnam...exists today. 30 plus years ago...a
self-serving ex-sailor sat before Congress and lied to them about the
behaviour of American Soldiers. Lied to them in order to make himself
look good. Lied to them in order to further his own ambitions. Lied to
them to facilitate the Evil. And now...that same liar ...that same
self-serving arrogant ***** is running for President. I cannot prove
it...but I have always believed that the actions of people like
Kerry...facilitated the death of that young mother and her baby. I
would hate to think of a world...were someone like Kerry had as much
power as a President of the United States has.
What would be the consequences????
.
|
|
| User: "Jordan Lund" |
|
| Title: Re: Hanoi John Kerry Sells Out US Troops "May 18 1971" LIBERALS HATE AMERICA!!!!!!!!!!! |
17 Aug 2004 08:30:07 PM |
|
|
Michael Marxist Moore <mmmoore@N0TSPAM.0RG> wrote in message news:<2rb4i0d8veqa6hclr6bfns17gddhp0qf6a@4ax.com>...
April 22, 1971 -- John Kerry testifies on behalf of the VVAW before
the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs. He claims that American
soldiers 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..."
Hmm... You left out part of the time-line... Like the part where he
personally met with hundreds of vets regarding what they saw in
Vietnam... It was called "The Winter Soldier Investigation", do a
Google search, I think you'll be surprised at what you suddenly learn.
In the mean time here's the actual text of Kerry's testimony:
"Statement of Mr. John Kerry
....I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of the group
of 1,000 which is a small representation of a very much larger group
of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to
sit at this table they would be here and have the same kind of
testimony....
WINTER SOLDIER INVESTIGATION
I would like to talk, representing 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, not isolated
incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full
awareness of officers at all levels of command....
They told the 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.
We call this investigation the "Winter Soldier Investigation." The
term "Winter Soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when
he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot 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, the
fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the
crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak
out.
FEELINGS OF MEN COMING BACK FROM VIETNAM
....In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South
Vietnam, nothing 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....
WHAT WAS FOUND AND LEARNED IN VIETNAM
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 on peace, and they practiced the art of
survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a
particular time, be it Vietcong, 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
money from American taxes was 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 our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage
of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as
well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong
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 U.S. 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," with quotation marks around
that. 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 or let us say a non-third-world people theater, and
so 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 high for the reoccupation by the North
Vietnamese because we watched pride allow the most unimportant of
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 881's and Fire Base 6's and so many
others.
VIETNAMIZATION
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 doen'st have to admit something that the entire world
already knows, so that we can't say they 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? But we are trying to do that, and
we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read
carefully the President's last speech to the people of this country,
you can see that he says and says clearly:
But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is
whether or not we will leave that country to the Communists or whether
or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people.
But the point is they are not a free people now under us. They are not
a free people, and we cannot fight communism all over the world, and I
think we should have learned that lesson by now....
REQUEST FOR ACTION BY CONGRESS
We are asking here in Washington for some action, action from the
Congress of the United States of America which as the power to raise
and maintain armies, and which by the Constitution also has the power
to declare war.
We have come here, not to the President, because we believe that this
body can be responsive to the will of the people, and we believe that
the will of the people says that we should be out of Vietnam now....
WHERE IS THE LEADERSHIP?
We are also here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are
the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We are here to
ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatric, and so many others.
Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have
returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and
there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they
never leave their wounded.
The Marines say they never leave even their dead. These men have left
all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public
rectitude. They have left the real stuff of their reputations
bleaching begin them in the sun in this country....
....It is my opinion that the United States is still reacting in very
much the 1945 mood and postwar cold-war period when we reacted to the
forces which were at work in World War II and came out of it with this
paranoia about the Russians and how the world was going to be divided
up between the super powers, and the foreign policy of John Foster
Dulles which was responsible for the created of the SEATO treaty,
which was, in fact, a direct reaction to this so-called Communist
monolith. And I think we are reacting under cold-war precepts which
are no longer applicable.
I say that because so long as we have the kind of strike force we
have, and I am not party to the secret statistics which you gentlemen
have here, but as long as we have the ones which we of the public know
we have, I think we have a strike force of such capability and I think
we have a strike force simply in our Polaris submarines, in the 62 or
some Polaris submarines, which are constantly roaming around under the
sea. And I know as a Navy man that underwater detection is the hardest
kind in the world, and they have not perfected it, that we have the
ability to destroy the human race. Why do we have to, therefore,
consider and keep considering threats?
At any time that an actual threat is posed to this country or to the
security and freedom I will be one of the first people to pick up a
gun and defend it, but right now we are reacting with paranoia t this
question of peace and the people taking over the world. I think if
were are ever going to get down to the question of dropping those
bombs most of us in my generation simply don't want to be alive
afterwards because of the kind of world that it would be with
mutations and the genetic probabilities of freaks and everything else.
Therefore, I think it is ridiculous to assume we have to play this
power game based on total warfare. I think there will be guerrilla
wars and I think we must have a capability to fight those. And we may
have to fight them somewhere based on legitimate threats, but we must
learn, in this country, how to define those threats and that is what I
would say to the question of world peace. I think it is bogus, totally
artificial. There is no threat. The Communists are not about to take
over our McDonald hamburger stands. [Laughter.]...
...I don't want to get into the game of saying I represent everybody
over there, but let me try to say as straightforwardly as I can, we
had an advertisement, ran full page, to show you what the troops read.
It ran in Playboy and the response to it within two and a half weeks
from Vietnam was 1,200 members. We received initially about 50 to 80
letters a day from troops arriving at our New York office. Some of
these letters -- and I wanted to bring some down, I didn't know we
were going to be testifying here and I can make them available to you
-- are very, very moving, some of them written by hospital corpsmen on
things, on casualty report sheets which say, you know, "Get us out of
here." "You are the only hope he have got." "You have got to get us
back; it is crazy." We received recently 80 members of the 101st
Airborne signed up in one letter. Forty members from a helicopter
assault squadron, crash and rescue mission signed up in another one.
I think they are expressing, some of these troops, solidarity with us,
right now by wearing black arm bands and Vietnam Veterans Against the
War buttons. They want to come out and I think they are looking at the
people who want to try to get them out as a help.
However, I do recognize there are some men who are in the military for
life. The job in the military is to fight wars. When they have a war
to fight, they are just as happy in a sense, and I am sure that these
men feel they are being stabbed in the back. But, at the same time, I
think to most of them the realization of the emptiness, the
hollowness, the absurdity of Vietnam has finally hit home, and I feel
is they did come home the recrimination would certainly not come from
the right, from the military. I don't think there would be that
problem....
...You see the mind is changing over there and a search and destroy
mission is a search and avoid mission, and troops don't -- you know,
like that revolt that took place that was mentioned in the New York
Times when they refused to go in after a piece of dead machinery,
because it doesn't have any value. They are making their own
judgments.
There is a GI movement in this country now as well as over there, and
soon these people, these men, who are prescribing wars for these young
men to fight are going to find out they are going to have to find some
other men to fight them because we are going to change prescriptions.
They are going to have to change doctors, because we are not going to
fight for them. that is what they are going to realize. There is now a
more militant attitude even within the military itself....
.
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| User: "Jordan Lund" |
|
| Title: Re: Hanoi John Kerry Sells Out US Troops "May 18 1971" LIBERALS HATE AMERICA!!!!!!!!!!! |
17 Aug 2004 08:30:13 PM |
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Michael Marxist Moore <mmmoore@N0TSPAM.0RG> wrote in message news:<2rb4i0d8veqa6hclr6bfns17gddhp0qf6a@4ax.com>...
April 22, 1971 -- John Kerry testifies on behalf of the VVAW before
the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs. He claims that American
soldiers 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..."
Hmm... You left out part of the time-line... Like the part where he
personally met with hundreds of vets regarding what they saw in
Vietnam... It was called "The Winter Soldier Investigation", do a
Google search, I think you'll be surprised at what you suddenly learn.
In the mean time here's the actual text of Kerry's testimony:
"Statement of Mr. John Kerry
....I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of the group
of 1,000 which is a small representation of a very much larger group
of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to
sit at this table they would be here and have the same kind of
testimony....
WINTER SOLDIER INVESTIGATION
I would like to talk, representing 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, not isolated
incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full
awareness of officers at all levels of command....
They told the 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.
We call this investigation the "Winter Soldier Investigation." The
term "Winter Soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when
he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot 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, the
fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the
crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak
out.
FEELINGS OF MEN COMING BACK FROM VIETNAM
....In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South
Vietnam, nothing 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....
WHAT WAS FOUND AND LEARNED IN VIETNAM
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 on peace, and they practiced the art of
survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a
particular time, be it Vietcong, 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
money from American taxes was 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 our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage
of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as
well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong
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 U.S. 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," with quotation marks around
that. 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 or let us say a non-third-world people theater, and
so 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 high for the reoccupation by the North
Vietnamese because we watched pride allow the most unimportant of
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 881's and Fire Base 6's and so many
others.
VIETNAMIZATION
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 doen'st have to admit something that the entire world
already knows, so that we can't say they 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? But we are trying to do that, and
we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read
carefully the President's last speech to the people of this country,
you can see that he says and says clearly:
But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is
whether or not we will leave that country to the Communists or whether
or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people.
But the point is they are not a free people now under us. They are not
a free people, and we cannot fight communism all over the world, and I
think we should have learned that lesson by now....
REQUEST FOR ACTION BY CONGRESS
We are asking here in Washington for some action, action from the
Congress of the United States of America which as the power to raise
and maintain armies, and which by the Constitution also has the power
to declare war.
We have come here, not to the President, because we believe that this
body can be responsive to the will of the people, and we believe that
the will of the people says that we should be out of Vietnam now....
WHERE IS THE LEADERSHIP?
We are also here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are
the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We are here to
ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatric, and so many others.
Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have
returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and
there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they
never leave their wounded.
The Marines say they never leave even their dead. These men have left
all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public
rectitude. They have left the real stuff of their reputations
bleaching begin them in the sun in this country....
....It is my opinion that the United States is still reacting in very
much the 1945 mood and postwar cold-war period when we reacted to the
forces which were at work in World War II and came out of it with this
paranoia about the Russians and how the world was going to be divided
up between the super powers, and the foreign policy of John Foster
Dulles which was responsible for the created of the SEATO treaty,
which was, in fact, a direct reaction to this so-called Communist
monolith. And I think we are reacting under cold-war precepts which
are no longer applicable.
I say that because so long as we have the kind of strike force we
have, and I am not party to the secret statistics which you gentlemen
have here, but as long as we have the ones which we of the public know
we have, I think we have a strike force of such capability and I think
we have a strike force simply in our Polaris submarines, in the 62 or
some Polaris submarines, which are constantly roaming around under the
sea. And I know as a Navy man that underwater detection is the hardest
kind in the world, and they have not perfected it, that we have the
ability to destroy the human race. Why do we have to, therefore,
consider and keep considering threats?
At any time that an actual threat is posed to this country or to the
security and freedom I will be one of the first people to pick up a
gun and defend it, but right now we are reacting with paranoia t this
question of peace and the people taking over the world. I think if
were are ever going to get down to the question of dropping those
bombs most of us in my generation simply don't want to be alive
afterwards because of the kind of world that it would be with
mutations and the genetic probabilities of freaks and everything else.
Therefore, I think it is ridiculous to assume we have to play this
power game based on total warfare. I think there will be guerrilla
wars and I think we must have a capability to fight those. And we may
have to fight them somewhere based on legitimate threats, but we must
learn, in this country, how to define those threats and that is what I
would say to the question of world peace. I think it is bogus, totally
artificial. There is no threat. The Communists are not about to take
over our McDonald hamburger stands. [Laughter.]...
...I don't want to get into the game of saying I represent everybody
over there, but let me try to say as straightforwardly as I can, we
had an advertisement, ran full page, to show you what the troops read.
It ran in Playboy and the response to it within two and a half weeks
from Vietnam was 1,200 members. We received initially about 50 to 80
letters a day from troops arriving at our New York office. Some of
these letters -- and I wanted to bring some down, I didn't know we
were going to be testifying here and I can make them available to you
-- are very, very moving, some of them written by hospital corpsmen on
things, on casualty report sheets which say, you know, "Get us out of
here." "You are the only hope he have got." "You have got to get us
back; it is crazy." We received recently 80 members of the 101st
Airborne signed up in one letter. Forty members from a helicopter
assault squadron, crash and rescue mission signed up in another one.
I think they are expressing, some of these troops, solidarity with us,
right now by wearing black arm bands and Vietnam Veterans Against the
War buttons. They want to come out and I think they are looking at the
people who want to try to get them out as a help.
However, I do recognize there are some men who are in the military for
life. The job in the military is to fight wars. When they have a war
to fight, they are just as happy in a sense, and I am sure that these
men feel they are being stabbed in the back. But, at the same time, I
think to most of them the realization of the emptiness, the
hollowness, the absurdity of Vietnam has finally hit home, and I feel
is they did come home the recrimination would certainly not come from
the right, from the military. I don't think there would be that
problem....
...You see the mind is changing over there and a search and destroy
mission is a search and avoid mission, and troops don't -- you know,
like that revolt that took place that was mentioned in the New York
Times when they refused to go in after a piece of dead machinery,
because it doesn't have any value. They are making their own
judgments.
There is a GI movement in this country now as well as over there, and
soon these people, these men, who are prescribing wars for these young
men to fight are going to find out they are going to have to find some
other men to fight them because we are going to change prescriptions.
They are going to have to change doctors, because we are not going to
fight for them. that is what they are going to realize. There is now a
more militant attitude even within the military itself....
.
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| User: "Jordan Lund" |
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| Title: Re: Hanoi John Kerry Sells Out US Troops "May 18 1971" LIBERALS HATE AMERICA!!!!!!!!!!! |
17 Aug 2004 09:10:04 PM |
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Michael Marxist Moore <mmmoore@N0TSPAM.0RG> wrote in message news:<2rb4i0d8veqa6hclr6bfns17gddhp0qf6a@4ax.com>...
April 22, 1971 -- John Kerry testifies on behalf of the VVAW before
the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs. He claims that American
soldiers 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..."
Hmm... You left out part of the time-line... Like the part where he
personally met with hundreds of vets regarding what they saw in
Vietnam... It was called "The Winter Soldier Investigation", do a
Google search, I think you'll be surprised at what you suddenly learn.
In the mean time here's the actual text of Kerry's testimony:
"Statement of Mr. John Kerry
....I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of the group
of 1,000 which is a small representation of a very much larger group
of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to
sit at this table they would be here and have the same kind of
testimony....
WINTER SOLDIER INVESTIGATION
I would like to talk, representing 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, not isolated
incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full
awareness of officers at all levels of command....
They told the 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.
We call this investigation the "Winter Soldier Investigation." The
term "Winter Soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when
he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot 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, the
fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the
crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak
out.
FEELINGS OF MEN COMING BACK FROM VIETNAM
....In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South
Vietnam, nothing 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....
WHAT WAS FOUND AND LEARNED IN VIETNAM
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 on peace, and they practiced the art of
survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a
particular time, be it Vietcong, 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
money from American taxes was 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 our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage
of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as
well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong
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 U.S. 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," with quotation marks around
that. 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 or let us say a non-third-world people theater, and
so 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 high for the reoccupation by the North
Vietnamese because we watched pride allow the most unimportant of
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 881's and Fire Base 6's and so many
others.
VIETNAMIZATION
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 doen'st have to admit something that the entire world
already knows, so that we can't say they 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? But we are trying to do that, and
we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read
carefully the President's last speech to the people of this country,
you can see that he says and says clearly:
But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is
whether or not we will leave that country to the Communists or whether
or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people.
But the point is they are not a free people now under us. They are not
a free people, and we cannot fight communism all over the world, and I
think we should have learned that lesson by now....
REQUEST FOR ACTION BY CONGRESS
We are asking here in Washington for some action, action from the
Congress of the United States of America which as the power to raise
and maintain armies, and which by the Constitution also has the power
to declare war.
We have come here, not to the President, because we believe that this
body can be responsive to the will of the people, and we believe that
the will of the people says that we should be out of Vietnam now....
WHERE IS THE LEADERSHIP?
We are also here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are
the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We are here to
ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatric, and so many others.
Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have
returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and
there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they
never leave their wounded.
The Marines say they never leave even their dead. These men have left
all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public
rectitude. They have left the real stuff of their reputations
bleaching begin them in the sun in this country....
....It is my opinion that the United States is still reacting in very
much the 1945 mood and postwar cold-war period when we reacted to the
forces which were at work in World War II and came out of it with this
paranoia about the Russians and how the world was going to be divided
up between the super powers, and the foreign policy of John Foster
Dulles which was responsible for the created of the SEATO treaty,
which was, in fact, a direct reaction to this so-called Communist
monolith. And I think we are reacting under cold-war precepts which
are no longer applicable.
I say that because so long as we have the kind of strike force we
have, and I am not party to the secret statistics which you gentlemen
have here, but as long as we have the ones which we of the public know
we have, I think we have a strike force of such capability and I think
we have a strike force simply in our Polaris submarines, in the 62 or
some Polaris submarines, which are constantly roaming around under the
sea. And I know as a Navy man that underwater detection is the hardest
kind in the world, and they have not perfected it, that we have the
ability to destroy the human race. Why do we have to, therefore,
consider and keep considering threats?
At any time that an actual threat is posed to this country or to the
security and freedom I will be one of the first people to pick up a
gun and defend it, but right now we are reacting with paranoia t this
question of peace and the people taking over the world. I think if
were are ever going to get down to the question of dropping those
bombs most of us in my generation simply don't want to be alive
afterwards because of the kind of world that it would be with
mutations and the genetic probabilities of freaks and everything else.
Therefore, I think it is ridiculous to assume we have to play this
power game based on total warfare. I think there will be guerrilla
wars and I think we must have a capability to fight those. And we may
have to fight them somewhere based on legitimate threats, but we must
learn, in this country, how to define those threats and that is what I
would say to the question of world peace. I think it is bogus, totally
artificial. There is no threat. The Communists are not about to take
over our McDonald hamburger stands. [Laughter.]...
...I don't want to get into the game of saying I represent everybody
over there, but let me try to say as straightforwardly as I can, we
had an advertisement, ran full page, to show you what the troops read.
It ran in Playboy and the response to it within two and a half weeks
from Vietnam was 1,200 members. We received initially about 50 to 80
letters a day from troops arriving at our New York office. Some of
these letters -- and I wanted to bring some down, I didn't know we
were going to be testifying here and I can make them available to you
-- are very, very moving, some of them written by hospital corpsmen on
things, on casualty report sheets which say, you know, "Get us out of
here." "You are the only hope he have got." "You have got to get us
back; it is crazy." We received recently 80 members of the 101st
Airborne signed up in one letter. Forty members from a helicopter
assault squadron, crash and rescue mission signed up in another one.
I think they are expressing, some of these troops, solidarity with us,
right now by wearing black arm bands and Vietnam Veterans Against the
War buttons. They want to come out and I think they are looking at the
people who want to try to get them out as a help.
However, I do recognize there are some men who are in the military for
life. The job in the military is to fight wars. When they have a war
to fight, they are just as happy in a sense, and I am sure that these
men feel they are being stabbed in the back. But, at the same time, I
think to most of them the realization of the emptiness, the
hollowness, the absurdity of Vietnam has finally hit home, and I feel
is they did come home the recrimination would certainly not come from
the right, from the military. I don't think there would be that
problem....
...You see the mind is changing over there and a search and destroy
mission is a search and avoid mission, and troops don't -- you know,
like that revolt that took place that was mentioned in the New York
Times when they refused to go in after a piece of dead machinery,
because it doesn't have any value. They are making their own
judgments.
There is a GI movement in this country now as well as over there, and
soon these people, these men, who are prescribing wars for these young
men to fight are going to find out they are going to have to find some
other men to fight them because we are going to change prescriptions.
They are going to have to change doctors, because we are not going to
fight for them. that is what they are going to realize. There is now a
more militant attitude even within the military itself....
.
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| User: "A. Dulcimer" |
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| Title: Re: Hanoi John Kerry Sells Out US Troops "May 18 1971" LIBERALS HATE AMERICA!!!!!!!!!!! |
17 Aug 2004 11:28:25 AM |
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On Tue, 17 Aug 2004 12:17:24 -0400, Michael Marxist Moore
<mmmoore@N0TSPAM.0RG> wrote:
Hanoi John Kerry Sells Out US Troops "May 18 1971" LIBERALS HATE
AMERICA!!!!!!!!!!!
Do you have a point? Vietnam was a shameful chapter in our history.
Atrocities were committed frequently. Kerry fought toned these
atrocities. This honorable and just.
April 22, 1971 -- John Kerry testifies on behalf of the VVAW before
the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs. He claims that American
soldiers 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..."
A Vietnam Veteran:
You couldn't really call it a village. I'm not really sure what you
would call it. It was just a collection
of lean-to's...tents and just plain 'any-spot-in-the-storm-will-do'
types of shelters. It was as if the old people and the young people
had walked as far as they could...and it was just the spot that they
stopped and tried to
put together a reasonable image of their lives. It had water and was
somewhat close to a road. And...it was as far as they could go to get
away from the war....and the soldiers of the NVA(North Vietnamese).
The same NVA that had driven them away from the highlands of Vietnam.
From their homes....from their lives.
That little spot in the road had around 25 people living
there...mostly the old but a few young. One of them was pregnant.
Luckily,for awhile anyway, a Medical Mission was nearby. We used to
patrol that area around every 3-4 days. Nothing major..just a
platoon. The LT. liked to call that patrol his 'breaking-in' for
newbies...for those who had just arrived 'in country'. It gave you a
feel for the landscape...and it reminded the newbies that altho we
were Air Cav....we also were expected to walk to earn our money. On
one patrol..we found out that the Medical Mission had left the
area...and the pregnant woman was about to give birth. Being the only
person on the patrol to even remotely have Medical training...( I
served as a Medic)...I was volunteered by the LT. to help with the
birth. One of the really old (ancient comes to mind) women knew about
child-birth but was physically unable to help. Since we had a
ARVN(South Vietnamese) interpreter along...I became her hands...as
long as the ARVN interpreter could keep up. The child was born into
the world on May 15,1971. A little girl...all healthy as could be. We
left her in the arms of her proud mother...and finished on with the
patrol. (and I got the ribbing of my life about the whole thing...good
natured...but it lasted for days). The NVA activity started to pick up
in the area. It seemed as if they
thought we wouldn't fight back if we saw them...or came under fire.
They started to get a little bolder....as they were sending out lots
of patrols into the area around Pleiku..and further south. On our next
patrol into that area...we ran into a NVA patrol. Had a small
firefight. Had to only work on a few minor wounds.
Then we came upon the small little spot...where the old and young had
stopped to try and live. The lean-to's were burned....the tents torn.
Fire was still burning some of the bigger shacks. The old and young
people had been lined up and made to kneel...where they had had a gun
pressed to the back of their heads. I know this is what happened...as
each of them had a hole in the backs of their head...one made by a
bullet.
The boot marks on the ground (that red dirt that seemed to exist
everywhere in Vietnam)...were of standard issue NVA. So...the people
who had done this were probably NVA. I checked all that I could
...looking for even a glimmer of life. There was none. Then I
remembered the young mother....and the baby that I helped to deliver.
I searched the area..(with my back being watched by my Platoon
Sgt.)...and came across them a few yards into the bush. The young
mother lay on the ground...and bullet hole in her head and laying in
her arms was her baby daughter. With a bullet hole in her head.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Evil exists.
I came face-to-face with it on that day in Vietnam. This is the 3rd
time I've talked about that day in 30 plus years. I'm not sure if I
can talk about it again ever. But the same evil that I found in the
highlands of Vietnam...exists today. 30 plus years ago...a
self-serving ex-sailor sat before Congress and lied to them about the
behaviour of American Soldiers. Lied to them in order to make himself
look good. Lied to them in order to further his own ambitions. Lied to
them to facilitate the Evil. And now...that same liar ...that same
self-serving arrogant ***** is running for President. I cannot prove
it...but I have always believed that the actions of people like
Kerry...facilitated the death of that young mother and her baby. I
would hate to think of a world...were someone like Kerry had as much
power as a President of the United States has.
What would be the consequences????
-----
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
Emerson
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