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No ground troops are in Laos so it is all right to kill Laotians by
remote control. But believe me, the helicopter crews fill the same body
bags and they wreak the same kind of damage on the Vietnamese and
Laotian countryside as anybody else, and the president is talking about
allowing that to go on for many years to come. One can only ask if we
will really be satisfied only when the troops march into Hanoi.
We are asking here in Washington for some action,
action from the Congress of the United States of America, which has 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.
We are here in Washington also to say that the
problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is
part and parcel of everything 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--the use of
weapons, the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage in 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, the killing of prisoners; 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 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 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 behind them in the sun in this country. Finally,
this administration has done us the ultimate dishonor. They have
attempted to disown us and the sacrifices we made for this country. In
their blindness and fear they have tried to deny that we are veterans
or that we served in Nam. We do not need their testimony. Our own scars
and stumps of limbs are witness enough for others and for ourselves.
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own
memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped
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 the fear that have driven this country these last ten years
and more. And so when in 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 the place where America finally turned
and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.
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