Veterans should banish Kerry

[cbqrr47]

Veterans Should Politically Banish Kerry For Disgracing The Marine Corps Memorial
Major Rick Erickson, 01/27/04



On the cover of ““The New Soldier”” by John Kerry and Vietnam Veterans Against The War, hippies clad in a mismatch of military uniforms are pictured mocking the legendary image of Marines raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi in the 1945 battle for Iwo Jima. Today, the Iwo Jima image is a memorial statue that sits above Arlington National Cemetery and honors all Marines killed in action since 1775. It is one of the most recognized and visited sites in our Capitol City.

“The New Soldier” never made it on the reading list at our military academies. In the cover photo that ridicules the Marine Corps Memorial, one of Kerry’s cronies is tugging on our flag, which is hung upside down as the ultimate symbol of sedition and treachery to all veterans who rallied behind our flag in battle. On the day of that shameful photograph and with its mass circulation on the cover of “The New Soldier,” at least 6,821 Marines who died at Iwo Jima turned over in their graves.


Of all the reasons why John F. Kerry will not become President of the United States, the biggest reason has to be that, once he returned home from Vietnam, he betrayed his fellow servicemen who remained at war. Kerry not only allied with the likes of Hanoi Jane Fonda, but, before the United States Senate in 1971, Kerry went as far as to belittle the bravery of embattled troops by generalizing their every action in Vietnam as an atrocity.


No one questioned General George S. Patton, III, when he accused Kerry of treason in giving aid and comfort to the enemy, especially when it was revealed that North Vietnam incorporated Kerry’s exploits into its communist propaganda machine. However, because of the prevalence of treason at the time and the monumental task of prosecuting Kerry and his proclaimed “revolutionaries,” Kerry’s actions went unpunished and the associated advances of communism went unhindered.


Fortunately, today’s veterans and Americans who overwhelmingly support our armed forces tend to disparage those who dishonor military service and then pretend to be capable of our country’s highest office. This political reality afflicted Bill Clinton, whose anti-military past kept him from winning any more than forty-nine percent of the popular vote. No wonder Kerry’s presidential campaign is doing its best to subvert his estrangement from veterans and service people in general.


The tact of Kerry for President looks a lot like Clinton-Gore’s approach to deceiving voters that such an obvious liability is really the opposite. When Kerry marched in the Veteran’s Day parade in Phoenix last year, in tow behind him were a few people carrying “Veterans for Kerry” placards. Some placard carriers looked like the ragtag types on the cover of “The New Solider” in that they were unshaven, wearing circa 1971 clothes and appeared disoriented.


The ongoing insult is that “Veterans for Kerry” is supposed to represent the veteran community’s support of Kerry, when the reality is that very few veterans support him. Most veterans cannot forgive Kerry for Vietnam Veterans Against The War and its promotion of communism when we were fighting communists. As far as U.S. Marines are concerned, we ought to ensure that Kerry is forever banished from the White House for dishonoring our Memorial on the cover of “The New Soldier.”


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Visit Rick's website at ReadyMilitary.com


Major Rick Erickson has been in the Marine Corps since 1991, when he attended Officer Candidate School, The Basic School and the Infantry Officer Course (1992) in Quantico, Virginia. He reported to the 1st Marine Division in Camp Pendleton, California, where he assumed command of a rifle platoon and then a weapons platoon with 2d Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment (2/5). In 1993, he attended over-the-horizon navigation school and became navigator for 2/5’s Fox Company, which trained in Coronado, California to conduct small boat raids for the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU). In 1994, the 11th MEU deployed to Mogadishu, Somalia, where Major (then 1st Lieutenant) Erickson participated in Operation Quick Draw and Operation Distant Runner in Rwanda.

[P. M. SHEEHAN]

You are 100% on target. What's so damn frustrating is that the liberal media won't address this. There has to be somebody out there who is willing to "trip him up" like Bill O'Reilly on the Factor. People have to call their local radio stations and newspapers. Also, don't forget, as has been reported on this Forum, that Kerry's real name is Kohn. His grandfather came from Austria in the early part of the 20th century and sonn changed the name from Kohn to Kerry. It's reported that the grandfather subsequently committed suicide in a Boston hotel. Don't these fools who support this guy realize that this guy is trying to masquerage as an Irish Catholic from Massachusetts? His initials, JFK, have me kind of frightened.

[thedrifter]

January 27, 2004, 8:25 a.m.
Vetting the Vet Record
Is Kerry a proud war hero or angry antiwar protester?

John Kerry, we know, is running against John Kerry: his own voting record. But there is another record that John Kerry is running against, and this has to do with his very emergence as a Democratic politician: Kerry, the proud Vietnam veteran vs. Kerry, the antiwar activist who accused his fellow Vietnam veterans of the most heinous atrocities imaginable.

John Kerry not only served honorably in Vietnam, but also with distinction, earning a Silver Star (America's third-highest award for valor), a Bronze Star, and three awards of the Purple Heart for wounds received in combat as a swift-boat commander. Kerry did not return from Vietnam a radical antiwar activist. According to the indispensable Stolen Valor, by H. G. "Jug" Burkett and Genna Whitley, "Friends said that when Kerry first began talking about running for office, he was not visibly agitated about the Vietnam War. 'I thought of him as a rather normal vet,' a friend said to a reporter, 'glad to be out but not terribly uptight about the war.' Another acquaintance who talked to Kerry about his political ambitions called him a 'very charismatic fellow looking for a good issue.'" Apparently, this good issue would be Vietnam.

Kerry hooked up with an organization called Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Two events cooked up by this group went a long way toward cementing in the public mind the image of Vietnam as one big atrocity. The first of these was the January 31, 1971, "Winter Soldier Investigation," organized by "the usual suspects" among antiwar celebrities such as Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory, and Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theorist, Mark Lane. Here, individuals purporting to be Vietnam veterans told horrible stories of atrocities in Vietnam: using prisoners for target practice, throwing them out of helicopters, cutting off the ears of dead Viet Cong soldiers, burning villages, and gang-raping women as a matter of course.

The second event was "Dewey Canyon III," or what VVAW called a "limited incursion into the country of Congress" in April of 1971. It was during this VVAW "operation" that John Kerry first came to public attention. The group marched on Congress to deliver petitions to Congress and then to the White House. The highlight of this event occurred when veterans threw their medals and ribbons over a fence in front of the Capitol, symbolizing a rebuke to the government that they claimed had betrayed them. One of the veterans flinging medals back in the face of his government was John Kerry, although it turns out they were not his medals, but someone else's.

Several days later Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His speech, touted as a spontaneous rhetorical endeavor, was a tour de force, convincing many Americans that their country had indeed waged a merciless and immoral war in Vietnam. It was particularly powerful because Kerry did not fit the antiwar-protester mold — he was no scruffy, wide-eyed hippie. He was instead the best that America had to offer. He was, according to Burkett and Whitley, the "All-American boy, mentally twisted by being asked to do terrible things, then abandoned by his government."

Kerry began by referring to the Winter Soldiers Investigation in Detroit. Here, he claimed, "over 150 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 their stories. 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.


This is quite a bill of particulars to lay at the feet of the U.S. military. He said in essence that his fellow veterans had committed unparalleled war crimes in Vietnam as a matter of course, indeed, that it was American policy to commit such atrocities.

In fact, the entire Winter Soldiers Investigation was a lie. It was inspired by Mark Lane's 1970 book entitled Conversations with Americans, which claimed to recount atrocity stories by Vietnam veterans. This book was panned by James Reston Jr. and Neil Sheehan, not exactly known as supporters of the Vietnam War. Sheehan in particular demonstrated that many of Lane's "eye witnesses" either had never served in Vietnam or had not done so in the capacity they claimed.

Nonetheless, Sen. Mark Hatfield inserted the transcript of the Winter Soldier testimonies into the Congressional Record and asked the Commandant of the Marine Corps to investigate the war crimes allegedly committed by Marines. When the Naval Investigative Service attempted to interview the so-called witnesses, most refused to cooperate, even after assurances that they would not be questioned about atrocities they may have committed personally. Those that did cooperate never provided details of actual crimes to investigators. The NIS also discovered that some of the most grisly testimony was given by fake witnesses who had appropriated the names of real Vietnam veterans. Guenter Lewy tells the entire study in his book, America in Vietnam.

Kerry's 1971 testimony includes every left-wing cliché about Vietnam and the men who served there. It is part of the reason that even today, people who are too young to remember Vietnam are predisposed to believe the worst about the Vietnam War and those who fought it. This predisposition was driven home by the fraudulent "Tailwind" episode some months ago.

The first cliché is that atrocities were widespread in Vietnam. But this is nonsense. Atrocities did occur in Vietnam, but they were far from widespread. Between 1965 and 1973, 201 soldiers and 77 Marines were convicted of serious crimes against the Vietnamese. Of course, the fact that many crimes, either in war or peace, go unreported, combined with the particular difficulties encountered by Americans fighting in Vietnam, suggest that more such acts were committed than reported or tried.

But even Daniel Ellsberg, a severe critic of U.S. policy in Vietnam, rejected the argument that the biggest U.S. atrocity in Vietnam, My Lai, was in any way a normal event: "My Lai was beyond the bounds of permissible behavior, and that is recognizable by virtually every soldier in Vietnam. They know it was wrong....The men who were at My Lai knew there were aspects out of the ordinary. That is why they tried to hide the event, talked about it to no one, discussed it very little even among themselves."

My Lai was an extreme case, but anyone who has been in combat understands the thin line between permissible acts and atrocity. The first and potentially most powerful emotion in combat is fear arising from the instinct of self-preservation. But in soldiers, fear is overcome by what the Greeks called thumos, spiritedness and righteous anger. In the Iliad, it is thumos, awakened by the death of his comrade Patroclus that causes Achilles to leave sulking in his tent and wade into the Trojans.

But unchecked, thumos can engender rage and frenzy. It is the role of leadership, which provides strategic context for killing and enforces discipline, to prevent this outcome. Such leadership was not in evidence at My Lai.

But My Lai also must be placed within a larger context. The NVA and VC frequently committed atrocities, not as a result of thumos run amok, but as a matter of policy. While left-wing anti-war critics of U.S. policy in Vietnam were always quick to invoke Auschwitz and the Nazis in discussing alleged American atrocities, they were silent about Hue City, where a month and a half before My Lai, the North Vietnamese and VC systematically murdered 3,000 people. They were also willing to excuse Pol Pot's mass murderer of upwards of a million Cambodians.

The second cliché is that is that Vietnam scarred an entire generation of young men. But for years, many of us who served in Vietnam tried to make the case that the popular image of the Vietnam vet as maladjusted loser, dehumanized killer, or ticking "time bomb" was at odds with reality. Indeed, it was our experience that those who had served in Vietnam generally did so with honor, decency, and restraint; that despite often being viewed with distrust or opprobrium at home, most had asked for nothing but to be left alone to make the transition back to civilian life; and that most had in fact made that transition if not always smoothly, at least successfully.

But the press could always find the stereotypical, traumatized vet who could be counted on to tell the most harrowing and gruesome stories of combat in Vietnam, often involving atrocities, the sort of stories that John Kerry gave credence to in his 1971 testimony. Many of the war stories recounted by these individuals were wildly implausible to any one who had been in Vietnam, but credulous journalists, most of whom had no military experience, uncritically passed their reports along to the public.
To read more
http://www.nationalreview.com/owens/...0401270825.asp

Sempers,

Roger

[P. M. SHEEHAN]

Thanks. Excellent read.

[LONEEAGLE]

All I can say to this from the Drifter and Cbqrr47, is......
" A GREAT BIG THANK YOU." You have enlightened my mind, and I was totally surprised by all of this." "AGAIN THANKS."

[yellowwing]

I have been thinking about this thread all day. My active duty service time was 1983-1989. I was born in May 1965. I was three years old during the Tet offensive.

I was prepared to speak from the liberal left about John Kerry's actions before and after his service time. I realised that it would have been arrogant. I am a Marine, and damn proud of that, but I was not there.

Today in Winnipeg the wind chill was -60F while I walked to an appointment. My freakin' eyelashes froze to each other! Then I thought of the Marines at the Chosin Resevoir. Fighting for weeks on end in that -60F climate.

As a veteran I think we are not as pronounced as we should be as a voting block. I think more must be done. Not just to try to influence politicians to our causes. We are competing with multibillion dollar corporations when it comes to special interests.

Because Iraq is such a hot item, this would be a perfect time to start reaching out to the rest of the Nation. Convince enough of Joe and Jane Public that we still are a vital part of who we all are as citizens.

Perhaps then Veterans affairs would become an issue up there with terrorism, economics, the Fed Rate, and the DJIA. We established a beach head when Veteran Affairs became a full cabinet seat. Let's try to see how far we can really push it!