What Kerry said in 1971

As TAPPED notes, the Swift Boat Veterans for Bush were only the appetiser. The main course will be the focus on Kerry's actions following the war -- his opposition to what we now know was a truly heroic war to bring freedom and democracy to Southeast Asia.

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), a veteran, said this line of attack is fair game. "What does offend me, and what I think is unconscionable, was when we had soldiers in the field and people who were prisoners of war, he labeled them all . . . as war criminals," he said. "I still get mad about that some 30 years later."

As we'll be learning ad nauseum in the days and weeks to come, Kerry told Congress that the soldiers in Vietnam were all a bunch of rapists and dog killers, including those serving in POW camps.

Trouble is, that's simply not what Kerry said, implied, hinted at, or even wordlessly thought to himself. Quite the contrary, and that is what makes the new attacks more vicious than the debunked claims that he didn't earn his medals. That's because the new attacks go to the very heart of what Kerry has dedicated much of his life to since returning from Vietnam -- supporting veterans, their rights, and their benefits.

I would like to talk, representing 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, 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 the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape 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 country side 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.

In other words, Kerry was speaking for soldiers who described their horror at what they felt they were forced to do and the trauma they brought home with them.

I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.

As a veteran and one who feels this anger, I would like to talk about it. We are angry because we feel we have been used in the worst fashion by the administration of this country.
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We are probably much more angry than that and I don't want to go into the foreign policy aspects because I am outclassed here. I know that all of you talk about every possible alternative of getting out of Vietnam. We understand that. We know you have considered the seriousness of the aspects to the utmost level and I am not going to try to dwell on that, but I want to relate to you the feeling that many of the men who have returned to this country express because we are probably angriest about all that we were told about Vietnam and about the mystical war against communism.
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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 Vietcong.

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.
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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 dies 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 dies in Vietnam? How do ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
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But the problem of veterans goes beyond this personal problem, because you think about a poster in this country with a picture of Uncle Sam and the picture says "I want you." And a young man comes out of high school and says, "That is fine. I am going to serve my country." And he goes to Vietnam and he shoots and he kills and he does his job or maybe he doesn't kill, maybe he just goes and he comes back, and when he gets back to this country he finds that he isn't really wanted, because the largest unemployment figure in the country- it varies depending on who you get it from, the VA Administration 15 percent, various other sources 22 percent. But the largest corps of unemployed in this country are veterans of this war, and of those veterans 33 percent of the unemployed are black. That means 1 out of every 10 of the Nation's unemployed is a veteran of Vietnam.

The hospitals across the country won't, or can't meet their demands. It is not a question of not trying. They don't have the appropriations. A man recently died after he had a tracheotomy in California, not because of the operation but because there weren't enough personnel to clean the mucous out of his tube and he suffocated to death.

Another young man just died in a New York VA hospital the other day. A friend of mine was lying in a bed two beds away and tried to help him, but he couldn't. He rang a bell and there was nobody there to service that man and so he died of convulsions.

I understand 57 percent of all those entering the VA hospitals talk about suicide. Some 27 percent have tried, and they try because they come back to this country and they have to face what they did in Vietnam, and then they come back and find the indifference of a country that doesn't really care, that doesn't really care.

As I said, for a man who has devoted a fair amount of his public life (that "weak record" Dick Cheney keeps talking about) to veterans affairs, to fighting for VA hospital appropriations, and to healing the wounds of the POW issue, the new attacks must be particularly painful.

Go read the whole thing. It's worth it.

Meanwhile, Kerry is getting stronger on the stump.

Later, at a fund-raiser in Philadelphia, Mr. Kerry called the attacks "so petty it is almost pathetic" but then responded to their substance more directly than he had. Noting that some have criticized him for staying in Vietnam for just four months, Mr. Kerry said: "Well, I was there longer than that, number one. Number two, I served two tours. Number three, they thought enough of my service to make me aide to an admiral.

"The Navy, 35 years ago, made the awards that they made under the normal process that they made, and I am proud of them," he continued. "And I am proud of my service, and I am proud that I stood up against the war when I came home, because it was the right thing to do."

As noted in the following post, Busheney may regret getting this guy riled up.