What Kerry Actually Said
Has anyone here actually read Kerry's 1971 testimony before the Committee on Foreign Relations? The whole thing, not just the gory parts? CNN has thoughtfully provided the text: http://www.c-span.org/vote2004/jkerrytestimony.asp
If you do read it, you will note what a small percentage of his remarks had to do with atrocities; scarcely two minutes worth in more than two hours of testimony. You will also note how weirdly his words from 1971 echo in 2004, as we complete our second year of "engagement" in Iraq. Here's a sample:
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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 on peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Vietcong, 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 money from American taxes was 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 our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong 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.
In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing 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 use the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.
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As a former journalist myself, I am deeply aware of how easy it is to seize upon a sentence or two and blow it up into a huge, ugly reflection on the speaker. That certainly seems to be the case with "Stolen Honor." If people here are really interested in what Senator Kerry said 33 years ago, I urge them to read his statement on the CNN site and decide for themselves whether he was a tool of Hanoi and an enemy to veterans, or simply exercising his First Amendment right as a citizen of the United States to speak his mind and persuade his representatives to share his view of a very controversial, very painful war.
Claudia