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"In a recent interview with Knight Ridder Inc., Kerry defended what he heard at Winter Soldier [January 1971], calling it 'highly documented and very disturbing.' I did in my heart what I thought was correct to help people understand what was going on,' Kerry said of his activism. 'I honor completely everybody's service. I always honored the service of people over there. I never insinuated that everybody fell into one pot. I was looking forward to telling the truth about some of the things that were happening.' "
http://www.freep.com/news/locway/winter2_20040302.htm
WINTER SOLDIER: John Kerry's turning point
March 2, 2004
BY JIM SCHAEFER
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
Thirty-three years ago this winter, more than a hundred Vietnam War veterans from around the United States gathered at a Howard Johnson hotel in Detroit's New Center.
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Why did the Vietnam War veterans call their 1971 conference Winter Soldier? The title was a reference to Thomas Paine's "The American Crisis," written to rally Revolutionary War troops during the winter of 1776. "The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in the crisis, shrink from the services of their country," Paine wrote. "But he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman." And why did they choose Detroit for the conference? They liked the city's large working-class and African-American populations, two groups that sent a lot of soldiers to the war. |
That largely forgotten conference, called the Winter Soldier Investigation, has come under national scrutiny in recent weeks because one person who attended was a Navy veteran named John Kerry, then 27, who is now closing in on the Democratic nomination for president.
The painful stories Kerry heard at Third and West Grand Boulevard had a major impact on his life. For him, Winter Soldier proved to be a key event in his evolution from wounded war hero to antiwar protester.
"Detroit was the great eye-opener for John Kerry," historian Douglas Brinkley, author of the 2004 Kerry war biography, "Tour of Duty," said in a recent interview.
"It was a kind of intellectual turning point. It was a moment that helped jar him out of kind of a complacent antiwar protester to one that was on a mission to charge the Nixon administration with war crimes."
The young men in Detroit delivered their testimonyin mostly matter-of-fact tones. But sometimes their sentences were halting, half-finished, tearful.
They spoke one by one.
"I swung my machine gun onto this group of peasants and opened fire. . . ."
"For every ear you cut off someone would buy you two beers. . . ." "Our company executed a 10-year-old boy. . . ." "The heads of the bodies were cut off and they were placed on stakes. . . ."
"The major that I worked for had a fantastic capability of staking prisoners, utilizing a knife that was extremely sharp, and sort of fileting them like a fish. . . . Prisoners treated this way were executed at the end because there was no way that we could take them into any medical aide and say, 'This dude fell down some steps.' "
Changing lives
Americans aware of the three days of testimony reacted with mixed emotions. The revelations floored some, but others protested outside the hotel with signs like "Benedict Arnold slept here." Some skeptical news media outlets even ignored the event or labeled the stories unproven propaganda.
But Winter Soldier clearly changed lives. In January 1971, America was already struggling with the revelations of the My Lai massacre, in which soldiers under the command of Lt. William Calley killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians. Winter Soldier was born, in part, to present evidence that My Lai wasn't unique.
The Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), with some help from antiwar actress Jane Fonda, planned the event, which ran from Jan. 31 through Feb. 2. They did not intend to vilify the ex-soldiers who appeared there, but to claim that U.S. military policy encouraged their war crimes.
Kerry returned from Vietnam in 1969, after a tour as a patrol boat captain. Upset over President Richard Nixon's denigration of antiwar veterans and his escalation of the war into Laos and Cambodia, Kerry started mixing with members of the antiwar movement.
In Detroit, the ex-soldiers sat at the front of the ballroom at linen-covered tables. When possible, they paired up with other members of their military units, so that some corroboration could be offered for the events they described. Some wore faded fatigues, scruffy beards or headbands. Some dragged on cigarettes and nodded while others spoke. Some stared off into the distance, shook their heads softly or took one of the microphones to advocate ending the war, now.
Kerry did not testify; he mostly observed. A film documentary made on the conference briefly captures Kerry asking an ex-soldier what he wants to say about what Kerry called "the crimes" in Vietnam.
"I'd almost need a book to answer that, man," the young man tells him. "I didn't like being an animal, and I didn't like seeing everybody else turn into animals, either."
The camera does not show Kerry responding.
Clean-shaven and wearing a collared shirt and slacks, Kerry did not fit in, his friends say. Indeed, two participants contacted by the Free Press said they never saw him in Detroit.
Brinkley wrote that Kerry stayed purposely low-key.
"While Kerry thought the U.S.-declared free fire zones, B52 bombing raids, defoliation campaigns, and search-and-destroy policies in Vietnam all morally reprehensible, he refused to mount a soapbox and detail atrocities he witnessed in the Mekong Delta at a forlorn motel," Brinkley wrote in "Tour of Duty."
"He was adverse to the cultivated sloppiness of professional peaceniks."
High emotions
Leftist lawyers and others helped pay for veterans' rooms at the hotel. Kerry and a friend, David Thorne, checked in together, Brinkley said. They attended the hearings with another friend, George Butler, who lived on Oakland Avenue in Detroit then and works as a filmmaker today."Nothing in my life prepared me for what I saw there. Nothing," Butler told the Free Press. "Kerry had never seen anything like this. David and John and I were very good friends. We'd eat lunch together and we were just shaking our heads at the kind of testimony we were hearing." Scott Camil of Gainesville, Fla., said in a recent interview that his own testimony surprised him. Camil, a former member of the 1st Marine Division, attracted considerable attention at the event by testifying that U.S. soldiers cut off ears of dead Vietnamese, raped women and eviscerated prisoners.
Winter Solider "changed me from being for the war to being against the war," Camil said. "I met a Vietnamese guy there. I liked him and I was thinking, gosh, I could be friends with them. . . .
"In the questioning at Winter Soldier about these things, my humanity came back." Kerry's service in Vietnam did not prepare him for what he heard in Detroit.
Even though he earned a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts, his assignment transporting supplies and troops somewhat insulated him from the horrors these grunts in Detroit were reporting.
"He was almost speechless," Brinkley said. "He didn't know quite what to do. It was hard to absorb all the atrocities all at one time without being absorbed by the emotion."
Growing visibility
Some people heralded the Winter Soldier Investigation; others mocked it.
On the last day of testimony, a middle-aged woman carrying a U.S. flag climbed onto the podium and called the audience "Communists" before being escorted away.
In the Free Press and Detroit News, the Winter Soldier Investigation was, at times, front-page material. The Free Press corroborated some testimony; the Newscalled the event a shameful propaganda ploy.
Even today, Web sites, publications and critics question the accuracy of Winter Soldier testimony, implying those who spoke were liars or impostors.
Whatever the case, Winter Soldier clearly energized the antiwar movement.
"Never before had we gotten that many veterans together who thought alike," said Michael Erard, a veteran originally from Southgate who helped organize the event. "These weren't college students. . . . We were as against the war as they were."
Kerry emerged from Winter Soldier focused on gaining national exposure for the event. He cemented his plan to push for a national march of veterans on Washington, D.C.
In a recent interview with Knight Ridder Inc., Kerry defended what he heard at Winter Soldier, calling it "highly documented and very disturbing."
"I did in my heart what I thought was correct to help people understand what was going on," Kerry said of his activism. "I honor completely everybody's service. I always honored the service of people over there. I never insinuated that everybody fell into one pot. I was looking forward to telling the truth about some of the things that were happening."
In the weeks that followed, he became the group's most visible member. And never before had the VVAW had someone like Kerry, who identified with the cause yet had the pedigree to mix with blue bloods and politicians on Capitol Hill.
As 2,000 ex-soldiers arrived in Washington for five days of protest in April, Kerry took to the microphone to urge calm, arguing that arrests and violence would get the group no further than other protesters had gotten.
Kerry also spent time lobbying politicians, doing newspaper interviews and appearing on TV news shows. He appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he dragged the revelations of Winter Soldier permanently into the public eye.
Kerry told senators that U.S. veterans in Detroit reported "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. . . .
"They told the 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 . . .
"We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now," Kerry testified. "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 . . . that we have to speak out."
Contact JIM SCHAEFER at 313-223-4542 or schaefer@....
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http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/y/phoenix.htm and
Phoenix Program in Vietnam. U.S. terrorism, torture, and death squads on an industrial scale. Tens of thousands murdered. Hundreds of thousands tortured. Many quotes, links, books, etc..
http://corporatism.tripod.com/phoenix.htm and
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Pro-capitalist, anti-corporatist, anti-Fox News morons.
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