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On April 22, 1971 John F. Kerry, a decorated Vietnam combat
veteran and member of the Executive Committee of Vietnam Veterans
Against the War, read the following statement to Senator William J.
Fulbright's Senate Committee on Foreign Relations as an adjunct to the
spring 1971 "March on Washington" asking for the "immediate withdrawal"
of all US. armed forces from South Vietnam. The statement subsequently
appeared in the April 23, 1971 issue of the Congressional Record.
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I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of the group of
one thousand, which is a small representation of a 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.
I would like to say, representing all those
veterans, that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at
which over one hundred fifty 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.
It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did
happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men
who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did, 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
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's 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
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 threaten it, that we
have to speak out.
I would like to talk to you a little bit about the
result 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.
As a veteran and one who feels this anger, I would
like to talk about it. We are angry because we feel we have been used
in the worst fashion by the administration of this country.
In 1970 at West Point,Vice President Agnew said,
"Some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die
in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most of those
misfits abuse," and this was used as a rallying point for our effort in
Vietnam.
But for us, as boys in Asia whom the country was
supposed to support, his statement is a terrible distortion from which
we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion, and hence the anger of
some of the men who are here in Washington today. It is a distortion
because we in no way consider ourselves the best men of this country,
because those he calls misfits were standing up for us in a way that
nobody else in this country dared to, because so many who have died
would have returned to this country to join the misfits in their
efforts to ask for an immediate withdrawal from South Vietnam, because
so many of those best men have returned as quadriplegics and amputees,
and they lie forgotten in Veterans Administration Hospitals in this
country which fly the flag so many have chosen as their own personal
symbol, and we cannot consider ourselves America's best men when we are
ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia.
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