According to Kerry, what did the people of South Vietnam want?
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Vietnam Veterans Against the State of 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 non isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-24-hour interval ground with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. Information technology is impossible to depict 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, diddled upwardly bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in style reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in add-on 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 Wintertime Soldier Investigation. The term Wintertime 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.
Nosotros who have come here to Washington have come hither because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country, nosotros could be quiet, we could agree our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this land, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that nosotros accept to speak out....
In our stance and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the Us of America. And to endeavour to justify the loss of i American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Lao people's democratic republic past 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 experience has torn this country apart.
Nosotros plant that not but was it a civil war, an attempt by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but as well we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own epitome were hard put to accept upwardly the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.
We plant most people didn't even know the difference between communism and republic. 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 strange presence of the The states, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the fine art of survival by siding with whichever war machine force was present at a particular fourth dimension, exist information technology Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American.
We found besides that all besides often American men were dying in those rice paddies for desire of support from their allies. We saw get-go paw how monies from American taxes were used for a decadent dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a i-sided thought of who was kept free past the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search and destroy missions, every bit well as past Viet Cong terrorism - and however we listened while this country tried to arraign all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.
We rationalized destroying villages in lodge to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to requite upwardly the paradigm of American soldiers who hand out chocolate confined and chewing gum.
Nosotros learned the significant of costless 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 torso counts, in fact the glorification of torso counts. We listened while calendar month afterwards calendar month we were told the dorsum of the enemy was about to break. Nosotros fought using weapons against "oriental human beings." We fought using weapons against those people which I practise not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater. We watched while men charged upwards hills because a general said that hill has to exist taken, and subsequently losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to go out the hill for reoccupation past the North Vietnamese. We watched pride permit the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas, considering we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to testify that bespeak, and then there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Loma 81s and Burn down Base 6s, and and so many others.
At present nosotros are told that the men who fought at that place must lookout man quietly while American lives are lost and then that nosotros can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.
Each day to facilitate the procedure past which the Usa washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life and then that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that nosotros accept made a error. Someone has to die and so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the outset President to lose a war."
We are asking Americans to remember about that because how do you lot ask a human being to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last homo to die for a mistake?....Nosotros are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not simply a question of war and diplomacy. It is role and package of everything that we are trying equally man 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 nosotros are more than guilty than whatsoever other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of gratuitous fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, all accustomed policy by many units in Southward Vietnam. That is what nosotros are trying to say. Information technology is part and packet 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 every bit 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 and then suddenly 1 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 nosotros are trying to say, that we think this matter has to end.
We are here to ask, and we are hither to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're hither to enquire where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to state of war, take returned? These are the commanders who accept deserted their troops. And at that place is no more than serious crime in the laws of state of war. The Ground forces says they never exit 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 state....
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service every bit hands as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. Merely all that they have washed and all that they can do by this denial is to make more articulate than ever our own decision to undertake 1 concluding mission - to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the detest and fear that have driven this land these last ten years and more. And more than. And so when thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a confront, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, non a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned and where soldiers like usa helped it in the turning.
Source: http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/VVAW_Kerry_Senate.html
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