John Kerry and the Vietnam Veteran

How did he feel about those who came home?

I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn’t know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped. - John Kerry

How did he feel about those who had been made prisoners of war?

Kerry publicly supported Hanoi’s position to use our POWs as a bargaining chip in negotiations for a peace agreement. - Terry Garlock

How did he feel about those who were left behind in the prison camps?

The Kerry committee’s final report, issued in January 1993, delivered the ultimate insult to history. The 1,223-page document said there was “no compelling evidence that proves” there is anyone still in captivity. As for the primary investigative question —what happened to the men left behind in 1973—the report conceded only that there is “evidence … that indicates the possibility of survival, at least for a small number” of prisoners 31 years ago, after Hanoi released the 591 P.O.W.’s it had admitted to. With these word games, the committee report buried the issue—and the men. - Sydney H. Schanberg

Why was he the leading figure in restoring diplomatic ties with Vietnam?

Shortly after Kerry declared to the world, “President Bush should reward Vietnam within a month for its increased cooperation in accounting for American MIAs,” Vietnam announced it had granted Colliers International, based in Boston, a contract worth millions. Designating Colliers International as the exclusive real estate agent representing Vietnam, the communist regime positioned the company to rake in tens of millions of dollars in future contracts to upgrade Vietnam’s ports, railroads and other infrastructure. C. Stewart Forbes, chief executive officer of Colliers International, is John Forbes Kerry’s cousin. - Dave Eberhart

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Comments

Dear Third Superpower,

Great work on your site. It is simple and concise. The "F" in Kerry's name stands for "fraud." He has slandered and libeled the VN Vets name, sold out our POW/MIA's and betrayed the Vietnamese people twice, the second time being his burying a House Resolution condemning the communists civil rights violation which passed 410-1! Kerry is exactly like Benedict Arnold who he loves to refer to on the job outsourcing issue. But remember our history. Benedict Arnold was a huge heroe of our Revolutionary War before he sold us out to the enemy and that's exactly what Kerry did with his lying propaganda and consorting with the NLF (National Liberation Movement VC) and the VCP (Vietnamese Communist Party). Kerry has neither the character or the guts to be our next President. Dave Hadly

John Kerry - Veteran ...

Thirty-three years ago today, a young, unknown political activist named John F. Kerry sat down before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and unleashed a bitter verbal broadside against the war in Vietnam - and, with particularly harsh invective, against the young Americans who were fighting it.
Kerry charged that U.S. soldiers routinely committed the most gruesome of atrocities - "not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."
The allegations electrified Washington - and made Kerry a national celebrity.
But the charges were slanderous lies.
"John Kerry's 1971 testimony slandered an entire generation of soldiers," writes military historian Mackubin Thomas Owens, who led a Marine infantry platoon into combat in Vietnam.
"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," Owens writes.
The libel served Kerry well, though.

The better part of a half-century has passed; the nation is once again at war - and the junior senator from Massachusetts now stands as the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.
Surely it is no coincidence that now - after all these years - John F. Kerry is trying to rewrite the dialogue that attended his first moments in the national spotlight.
On "Meet the Press" last weekend, Kerry maintained that while his "words were honest," they were nonetheless "a little bit over the top."
No regrets.
No contrition.
And, certainly, no apology.
"A little bit over the top"?
Well, here's what the then-national spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War had to say on April 23, 1971:
"[U.S. servicemen] 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."
Indeed, he charged, "[Americans] 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."
Did these things really happen the way John Kerry said they did - routinely, as a matter of national policy?
In Oliver Stone movies, maybe.
Yes, some American soldiers committed atrocities. (Though even those crimes paled in comparison to those repeatedly perpetrated by the Vietcong, as an integral part of a decades-long terror campaign meant to coerce South Vietnamese support for the Communist side.)
But even as harsh a critic of U.S. policy as Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, has said that the men involved in the war's most notorious event, the My Lai massacre, knew that the killing there was "out of the ordinary. That is why [the soldiers] tried to hide the event."
But that's not what John Kerry told the Senate.
Kerry agreed with Jane Fonda, who declared - during a protest at which Kerry was the featured speaker - that "My Lai was not an isolated incident but rather a way of life for many of our military."
Kerry, to be entirely fair, didn't actually fashion his charges from whole cloth.
He took them from accounts included in the "Winter Soldier Investigation," a fabrication purportedly based on testimony from, in Kerry's words, "over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans."
That was odious nonsense.
"Winter Soldier" was, in fact, a set-up organized by a JFK-conspiracy theorist, the fabulist Mark Lane.
And it was quickly exposed as a lie by journalists James Reston and Neil Sheehan - themselves harsh critics of U.S. policy - who discovered that many of its supposed eyewitnesses never even served in Vietnam.
To date, John Kerry has never disavowed the Winter Soldier Investigation - or apologized for his role in propagating its notorious falsehoods.
Kerry has tried to explain away his slanderous charges by suggesting they were spontaneous - prompted by the heat of his anger over the war.
But it is now known that Kerry's speech was in fact carefully crafted by Adam Walinsky, a one-time Robert Kennedy aide and speechwriter - who also coached Kerry in how to deliver it for maximum emotional impact.
That is, for utmost political effect.
John Kerry, you see, had carefully planned a political career - and decided to use the war as his signature issue.
The year before he appeared before Congress, he'd entered a congressional race in Massachusetts. And he would exploit his sudden notoriety to move up the electoral ladder until he reached the Senate in 1985.
There are many ironies in Kerry's career, not the least of which being the fact that he's now running for president as the champion of the very same warriors he so viciously slandered 33 years ago.
Sen. Kerry can't bring himself to apologize for calling the men he purports to represent war criminals.
But he doesn't hesitate to hit them up for money.
"Most Americans are not familiar with John Kerry's Vietnam record," reads a current campaign solicitation that complains about "the Bush smear campaign in the press."
"Help us fight back by contributing [money]. And if you're a veteran . . . join Veterans for Kerry right now."
Not so fast.
As Mackubin Thomas Owens wrote in National Review, "What Kerry did after leaving the Navy constituted a breach of trust with his fellow veterans - because, to protest the war, he cast aspersions upon their conduct."
Insists Owens: "He should apologize."
Indeed he should.

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John Kerry and the Vietnam Veteran

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