Padma Zangpo

By John F. Kerry

I would like to tell you something about what veterans are doing in this country, and about our feeling now that we’ve come back from a war we didn't really want to fight.

A little over a week ago we held an investigation in Detroit where over 150 honorably discharged veterans, many of them highly decorated, testified to war crimes committed in Indochina—not iso­lated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.

The investigation was not staged so that veterans could spill out their hearts or purge their souls; it was done to prove that the policy of the United States in Indochina is tantamount to genocide, and that not only the soldiers are responsible for what is happening, but that everyone here in America who has allowed the brutalization and de-personalization to go on is responsible. It was done also to show that you don't start making things right by prosecuting William Galley, no matter how guilty he may be; you also prosecute the men who en­couraged the situation. It was done to show that there is not just one Mylai but countless Mylais and they are continuing every single day. There was an almost total press blackout on the testimony of those veterans.

But this isn't new to those of us who were in the war. I can re­member traveling to Saigon and trying to talk to the admiral who commanded the naval forces to tell him that what we were doing was wrong. I remember going to a writer for a national magazine and telling him this was a story the American people should hear. He agreed, but said it would never get by his desk because the Army would rescind the magazine's accreditation to cover the war, and if you don't cover the war you don't sell magazines, and if you don't sell magazines then nothing happens because that’s the American way.

But the press isn't the only party in this country that's guilty of this rampant insensitivity. When I went to the chairman of the board of a large New York-based firm and asked him for money to help us get transcripts of the testimony to present to each member of Congress so that we can press our demands for open hearings, 1 was told in seriousness: "I don't think you can market war crimes—it s a marketing question, you know.” And then in the next breath to his executive vice-president: "Hell, we used to do that in World War II. Christ, what's new?"

We all know that this de-sensitizing started a long time ago in this country, but it is carried out in a far more vicious way with the soldier. At boot camp he's presented with a poster in his barracks of a crucified Vietnamese and underneath it says, "Kill the gooks." The message begins to sink in. During training, calisthenics are done to a four-count, and at the end of the four-count everybody jumps up and yells "Kill!" For the Marines at Camp Pendleton, before they depart for Vietnam, there's a very special treat; the sergeant takes a live rabbit and skins it, tearing it open, pulling out the entrails to throw at the assembled soldiers, saying, "That's how it's done in Nam; go get'em. Marines!

And so we're suddenly faced with a sickening situation in this country. There's no longer any moral indignation. And if there is, it comes from people who are almost exhausted from past indignities in­flicted on them. The country seems to be lying down and accepting something as serious as Laos, just as before we dismissed the loss of 700,000 lives in Pakistan, the so-called greatest disaster of all time. Well, I think we're in the midst of the greatest disaster of all time right now, because they are still dying over there every day. And I don't just mean American boys.

And the mass of people in this country literally don't give a damn. After all, you can switch off the TV news and put on Dick Van Dyke. We're not on food rationing; people can still charge prostitutes on credit cards; so what if a few lives are used to save American face in an unsaveable situation? It should not be hard for people in this country to admit there is no difference between a ground troop and a helicopter troop; yet we have accepted a differen­tiation fed us by the Administration. No ground troops are in Laos, so it's all right to kill Laotians as long as it's done by remote control. Believe me, the helicopter crews fill the same body bags as the ground troops, and they do the same damage to the Vietnamese countryside and the Laotian people. It's absolutely incredible that this country is ready to accept this kind of hypocrisy.

But what this country doesn't know is that America has created a monster in the form of millions of fighting men who have been taught to deal in violence, and who have been given a chance to die for the biggest nothing in history. We have returned to this country with a sense of anger and betrayal which nobody has yet grasped. We're angry about the same things you are in terms of policy—a little angrier because our lives were the things used to test those policies.

But we're angry also because of statements like the one Vice President Agnew made when he spoke at West Point in 1970. He spoke of how some people glamorize the criminal misfits of society while the best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedoms that those misfits abuse. Support the boys in Vietnam. But for us, those boys in Vietnam whom the country is supposed to support, this is a terrible distortion from which we draw only the deepest revulsion.

It's a distortion because we in no way considered ourselves the "best men" in this country, because those he called misfits were standing up for us in a way nobody else in this country dared to, be­cause we know that so many who died would have come back to join the misfits, and because so many of us have actually returned to this country to demand an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. And be­cause so many of those "best men" have returned as amputees and quadraplegics to lie in rancid hospitals which fly the flag that Mr. Agnew holds so close.

And one can't consider us "best men" when we were ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Asia. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos or anywhere in Indochina, or anywhere in the world, or even here in America, by saying that that kind of loss of life is linked to the preservation of freedom, is to play exactly the kind of criminal hypocrisy that has torn this country apart.

Our anger goes beyond the simple policy matters. It goes into the fact that all the things we were told about Vietnam we found un­true when we got there. We found that too often American men were dying in those rice paddies from want of support from our so-called allies. We saw first hand the money—your taxes—squandered by a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that Agnew had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, as blacks provided the highest per­centage of casualties.

We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search-and-destroy missions and by Viet Cong terrorists, and we lis­tened while America blamed it all on the Viet Cong. We watched while we rationalized destroying villages to save them, while we saw America lose her sense of morality as she coolly accepted a Mylai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers handing out chewing gum and chocolate bars.

We watched while pride allowed unimportant battles to be esca­lated into the most important stands of the war—because we couldn't lose and we couldn't retreat and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were provided to prove that point. Now we are told that we have to watch quietly while the American, lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.

The problem of the veteran doesn't just end with his anger. One out of every 10 of the unemployed in this country today is a Vietnam veteran. That's 22.5 percent of all the veterans who are unemployed. 33 percent of these are black. We have veterans who practically have to sue the Veterans Administration to get their artifi­cial limns. 57 percent of those entering hospitals have thought about suicide and 27 percent have tried it. 68 percent of the troops in Viet­nam arc on dope,   and the addicts who return receive little if any care.

We're going to do something about this situation. On April 19, members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, now numbering 7 .000 men and growing, are marching on Washington—in uniform, wearing medals. We are paying homage to the dead in Arlington, We arc then marching with veterans of other wars, with families of the deceased, families of prisoners of war, whoever will join us, on the Capitol.   And we are camping and we are staying there to demand that our needs be met. But more important, we won’t move until they set a date for withdrawal of troops from Vietnam.

We will also be returning our war medals to Congress and be de­manding that the judiciary of this country rule on the Massachusetts hill which calls for the declaration that the Vietnam war is unconsti­tutional. We are asking for the support of all sections of the peace movement because we do not feel that this is a time to be dormant. The war is part and parcel of everything that we are trying to com­municate to people of this country. The problem of Vietnam is not just the problem of war and diplomacy; it's a problem of the very ba­sic American idealism that we are trying to question.

All American Indian friend of mine, a veteran, a member of the Indian Nation of Alcatraz, put it to me very succinctly: he told me how, as a boy on the Indian reservation, he had watched television and cheered the cowboys who killed the Indians in an ambush. Then suddenly one day he woke up in Vietnam and he found himself doing to the Vietnamese exactly what had been done to his people and what he had been conditioned by America to applaud. I think that says ii all. The veteran has been used horribly.

But now he's going to do something about it. He's going to take all the goodness of his uniform, all the apple pie and motherhood and medals in the service of his country, and he's going to place it before the people of this country, telling it like it really is.

e responsible for what is happening, but that everyone here in America who has allowed the brutalization and de-personalization to go on is responsible. It was done also to show that you don't start making things right by prosecuting William Galley, no matter how guilty he may be; you also prosecute the men who en­couraged the situation. It was done to show that there is not just one Mylai but countless Mylais and they are continuing every single day. There was an almost total press blackout on the testimony of those veterans.

But this isn't new to those of us who were in the war. I can re­member traveling to Saigon and trying to talk to the admiral who commanded the naval forces to tell him that what we were doing was wrong. I remember going to a writer for a national magazine and telling him this was a story the American people should hear. He agreed, but said it would never get by his desk because the Army would rescind the magazine's accreditation to cover the war, and if you don't cover the war you don't sell magazines, and if you don't sell magazines then nothing happens because that’s the American way.

But the press isn't the only party in this country that's guilty of this rampant insensitivity. When I went to the chairman of the board of a large New York-based firm and asked him for money to help us get transcripts of the testimony to present to each member of Congress so that we can press our demands for open hearings, 1 was told in seriousness: "I don't think you can market war crimes—it s a marketing question, you know.” And then in the next breath to his executive vice-president: "Hell, we used to do that in World War II. Christ, what's new?"

We all know that this de-sensitizing started a long time ago in this country, but it is carried out in a far more vicious way with the soldier. At boot camp he's presented with a poster in his barracks of a crucified Vietnamese and underneath it says, "Kill the gooks." The message begins to sink in. During training, calisthenics are done to a four-count, and at the end of the four-count everybody jumps up and yells "Kill!" For the Marines at Camp Pendleton, before they depart for Vietnam, there's a very special treat; the sergeant takes a live rabbit and skins it, tearing it open, pulling out the entrails to throw at the assembled soldiers, saying, "That's how it's done in Nam; go get'em. Marines!

And so we're suddenly faced with a sickening situation in this country. There's no longer any moral indignation. And if there is, it comes from people who are almost exhausted from past indignities in­flicted on them. The country seems to be lying down and accepting something as serious as Laos, just as before we dismissed the loss of 700,000 lives in Pakistan, the so-called greatest disaster of all time. Well, I think we're in the midst of the greatest disaster of all time right now, because they are still dying over there every day. And I don't just mean American boys.

And the mass of people in this country literally don't give a damn. After all, you can switch off the TV news and put on Dick Van Dyke. We're not on food rationing; people can still charge prostitutes on credit cards; so what if a few lives are used to save American face in an unsaveable situation? It should not be hard for people in this country to admit there is no difference between a ground troop and a helicopter troop; yet we have accepted a differen­tiation fed us by the Administration. No ground troops are in Laos, so it's all right to kill Laotians as long as it's done by remote control. Believe me, the helicopter crews fill the same body bags as the ground troops, and they do the same damage to the Vietnamese countryside and the Laotian people. It's absolutely incredible that this country is ready to accept this kind of hypocrisy.

But what this country doesn't know is that America has created a monster in the form of millions of fighting men who have been taught to deal in violence, and who have been given a chance to die for the biggest nothing in history. We have returned to this country with a sense of anger and betrayal which nobody has yet grasped. We're angry about the same things you are in terms of policy—a little angrier because our lives were the things used to test those policies.

But we're angry also because of statements like the one Vice President Agnew made when he spoke at West Point in 1970. He spoke of how some people glamorize the criminal misfits of society while the best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedoms that those misfits abuse. Support the boys in Vietnam. But for us, those boys in Vietnam whom the country is supposed to support, this is a terrible distortion from which we draw only the deepest revulsion.

It's a distortion because we in no way considered ourselves the "best men" in this country, because those he called misfits were standing up for us in a way nobody else in this country dared to, be­cause we know that so many who died would have come back to join the misfits, and because so many of us have actually returned to this country to demand an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. And be­cause so many of those "best men" have returned as amputees and quadraplegics to lie in rancid hospitals which fly the flag that Mr. Agnew holds so close.

And one can't consider us "best men" when we were ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Asia. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos or anywhere in Indochina, or anywhere in the world, or even here in America, by saying that that kind of loss of life is linked to the preservation of freedom, is to play exactly the kind of criminal hypocrisy that has torn this country apart.

Our anger goes beyond the simple policy matters. It goes into the fact that all the things we were told about Vietnam we found un­true when we got there. We found that too often American men were dying in those rice paddies from want of support from our so-called allies. We saw first hand the money—your taxes—squandered by a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that Agnew had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, as blacks provided the highest per­centage of casualties.

We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search-and-destroy missions and by Viet Cong terrorists, and we lis­tened while America blamed it all on the Viet Cong. We watched while we rationalized destroying villages to save them, while we saw America lose her sense of morality as she coolly accepted a Mylai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers handing out chewing gum and chocolate bars.

We watched while pride allowed unimportant battles to be esca­lated into the most important stands of the war—because we couldn't lose and we couldn't retreat and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were provided to prove that point. Now we are told that we have to watch quietly while the American, lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.

The problem of the veteran doesn't just end with his anger. One out of every 10 of the unemployed in this country today is a Vietnam veteran. That's 22.5 percent of all the veterans who are unemployed. 33 percent of these are black. We have veterans who practically have to sue the Veterans Administration to get their artifi­cial limns. 57 percent of those entering hospitals have thought about suicide and 27 percent have tried it. 68 percent of the troops in Viet­nam arc on dope,   and the addicts who return receive little if any care.

We're going to do something about this situation. On April 19, members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, now numbering 7 .000 men and growing, are marching on Washington—in uniform, wearing medals. We are paying homage to the dead in Arlington, We arc then marching with veterans of other wars, with families of the deceased, families of prisoners of war, whoever will join us, on the Capitol.   And we are camping and we are staying there to demand that our needs be met. But more important, we won’t move until they set a date for withdrawal of troops from Vietnam.

We will also be returning our war medals to Congress and be de­manding that the judiciary of this country rule on the Massachusetts hill which calls for the declaration that the Vietnam war is unconsti­tutional. We are asking for the support of all sections of the peace movement because we do not feel that this is a time to be dormant. The war is part and parcel of everything that we are trying to com­municate to people of this country. The problem of Vietnam is not just the problem of war and diplomacy; it's a problem of the very ba­sic American idealism that we are trying to question.

All American Indian friend of mine, a veteran, a member of the Indian Nation of Alcatraz, put it to me very succinctly: he told me how, as a boy on the Indian reservation, he had watched television and cheered the cowboys who killed the Indians in an ambush. Then suddenly one day he woke up in Vietnam and he found himself doing to the Vietnamese exactly what had been done to his people and what he had been conditioned by America to applaud. I think that says ii all. The veteran has been used horribly.

But now he's going to do something about it. He's going to take all the goodness of his uniform, all the apple pie and motherhood and medals in the service of his country, and he's going to place it before the people of this country, telling it like it really is.