Re: 60 Minutes II - abused prisoners
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Silviron said:
My point was, that kerry in 1971 told a Congressional Committee that torture, rape and murder of Vietnamese civilians by US troops was universal and encouraged by the entire command.
And about 1/3 of the nation believed him.
That is when people started spiting on soldiers and caling them baby killers.
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Ah, a National Review reader, I see.
I'm impressed that you think Kerry has such great leadership skills. But I really don't think he was single-handedly responsible for anti-war feelings; I mean, the My-Lai courtmartials had started the year before, they probably had some influence on public opinion. Not to mention that there had already been an international
war crimes tribunal.
Of course, that's not the end of the story - we keep finding new things about units like
Tiger Force.
Do I think all Vietnam vets committed war crimes? No, I believe they were relatively rare, and that statistically no more war crimes were committed by US troops in Vietnam than in any other war.
I actually don't remember Kerry from this era. The two pictures I remember are the naked burning girl running from her village, and the South Vietnamese general shooting a prisoner in the head.
But instead of war crimes, let's focus on Kerry's statement:
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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.
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I find his comments perceptive. Thirty years later, what threat does Vietnam pose to us? Suppose we had not pulled out, and instead won the war? Vietnam would be a better place, true... but would that have been worth spending more American lives on?
I actually do believe that it's worthwhile in some cases to send troops in when the US is not directly threatened - for example, I would not have objected to sending troops to stop the Tutsi massacre in Rwanda. But I place a high value on the lives of those who serve, and so I prefer military force be used only against clear and present threats, not vague domino and WMD theories.
