Jack Dresser, Ph.D.
Capt., Medical Service Corps, USAR (1962-65)
A Veteran for Kerry
 

Some call John Kerry disloyal, a traitor for his 1971 Senate testimony.  Ex-POW John McCain has never said that, but we hear it from loudmouth proxies for the “chicken hawks” - the neocons who themselves, to a man, evaded Vietnam duty.  What right have they earned to minimize or attempt to negate what they know not of, or to which some contributed?  Two Bush neocons date from the Nixon administration.
 

Kerry was not an organizer of the VVAW, which originated in 1967 and grew to some 30,000 outraged veterans as a vehicle for attempting to resolve profound feelings of guilt, remorse, and betrayal by their political leaders.  Kerry was appointed in 1970 by his peers to the VVAW Executive Committee to help prepare the “Dewey Canyon III” testimony and invited by Sen. Fulbright to deliver the testimony representing these “winter soldiers” who stayed the hard course rather than simply returning to safety and silence back home.  His testimony related the experiences of some 150 soldiers who had recently met in Detroit and represented the viewpoints of the VVAW organization.  Emotionally scarred veterans began talking with each other in rap groups in 1970, opening up shared feelings and confessions unwelcomed by the media and largely incommunicable to the civilian population, leading up to the Detroit meeting.
 

The Geneva Convention violations Kerry described were systemic and well-known, such as napalm bombing of villages, “search and destroy” missions, and “free fire zones.”  The individual atrocities he described are not unusual in the bizarre, altered psychological state of combat, commonplace throughout the long, sad history of human warfare, and described in Chapter 4 of the U.S. Army Field Manual as manifestations of combat stress.  Combat stress in some form affects 98% of all soldiers within 60 days of continuous combat exposure.  Our soldiers’ capacity for atrocities had already been revealed to public view by the My Lai incident and its prosecution, with widespread and systemic manifestations - many institutionalized as policy - described by Kerry’s VVAW peers.  I have heard several such accounts myself.  The racism in our troops’ orientation and training that justified indiscriminate killing was flagrant, with Gen. Westmoreland declaring that “Asians don’t value life” the same way we do.  (This same attitude prevails in Iraq: the Pentagon refuses and our media fails to report Iraqi casualties.  Perhaps DeLay the pest exterminator should be in charge.   He has the suitable background and mindset.)
 

I quote the last 3 paragraphs of Kerry’s Senate testimony, beginning with something that should resonate with any student of the genocidal history of our American West:
 

“An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation of Alcatraz put it to me very succinctly. He told me how as 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 then suddenly one 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 we are trying to say, that we think this thing has to end.
 

We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave 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 country.
 

We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission - to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so when thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.”
 

This last sentence states the redemptive purpose of the testimony with ringing clarity.  It reflects a noble purpose and is deeply loving of their comrades in arms.  How dare any lifelong civilians from the comfort of their lounge chairs and the safety of their suburban living rooms question this collective testimony of returning warriors?  Or any other veteran who did not happen to witness or participate in such events?  Kerry stated that acts he described were “accepted policy by many (not all) units in South Vietnam.” This testimony served to accelerate our disengagement from this terrible, bloody mess, no doubt saving thousands of American and Vietnamese lives.  History has completely vindicated the winter soldiers.  The domino theory was a hysterical right-wing delusion, just like the imaginary threat of Saddam.  The Vietnam War began when we blocked an election that would have elected Ho Chi Minh by a landslide. Three million dead later, he ended up in the same place. We lost the war, no dominos fell, nothing happened.  Kerry and his comrades were absolutely, completely, resoundingly right. Period.  Given the evidence of history, no argument in retrospect is possible. They did a great service for their country.
 

The VVAW organization remains active, opposing the similarly senseless, unconscionable Iraq misadventure.  Another paragraph in the Kerry speech could have been written yesterday about Iraq and the division in America today:
 

“In our opinion and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam 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... is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.”
 

Had the Vietnam War hawks paid attention to the data of history and anthropology, they would have recognized that the domino theory was nonsense.  Cultures do not simply succumb to invaders and become carbon copies.  Each culture has its own enduring identity, and any attempts by outside cultures to superimpose another identity are typically undigested, vomited altogether or metabolized into something quite different from the original, usually creating widespread dysfunction in the process.  Had the Bushites any knowledge of social science or history, or orientation to empiricism and rationality, they would understand the same about Iraq rather than endlessly chanting their mantras about “freedom” – which is “untidy,” Rumsfeld recites ad nauseum –  and “democracy” – ever “on the march,” the Bush flim-flam goes –  as the Iraqis experience chaos and carnage to which they might apply different names.

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Copyright 2004 Jack Dresser, Ph.D.