Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement by John Kerry
to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations
April 23, 1971
I would like to talk on behalf of 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. These were 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 and the feelings of the men who were reliving their
experiences in Vietnam. 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
Ghengis 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 Patriots 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, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing
that threaten it, that we have to speak out....
In our opinion and from our experience, there is nothing in South
Vietnam 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.
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 in peace, and they practiced
the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was
present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, 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 monies from American taxes were 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 the flag, and blacks provided the highest
percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American
bombs and search and destroy missions, as well as by Viet Cong
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 United States 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." 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. 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 hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese. We
watched pride allow the most unimportant 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
81s and Fire Base 6s, and so many others.
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 doesn't have to admit something that the entire
world already knows, so that we can't say that 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?....We are here in Washington
to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and
diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that 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 such as the use of weapons; the hypocrisy in our taking
umbrage at 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, all 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 here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are
the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to
ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and so many others?
Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have
returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops.
And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says
they never leave their wounded. The marines say they never even leave
their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated
behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real
stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this
country....
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of
that service as easily as this administration has wiped away 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 fear that have driven this country these last ten years and
more. And more. And so when 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 where America finally
turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.
