U.S. Atrocities during Vietnam War

I am aware that there are people saying that John Kerry lied when he testified about atrocities taking place during the Vietnam war. And also some people are maliciously calling Kerry a "War Criminal".
John Kerry testified that he had seen acts of atrocity occuring while he was serving in Vietnam, although he never participated in any of these crimes. Kerry was telling truth about atrocities, these following books and others document the fact that atrocities commited by U.S. soldiers did indeed occur during the Vietnam war.


The Vietnam War (An Almanac)
Introduction by Fox Butterfield
General Editor: John S. Bowman
World Almanac Publications
"Excerpts" from- The Vietnam War (An Almanac)
(pg: 124) August 1965. The first charge that US troops have engaged in unacceptable actions against civilians is reported by CBS-TV, when it shows men of the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines, burning most of the village of Camne, six miles southwest of Danang.
(Pg:168 ) 2-10 May 1967. An 'International Tribunal on War Crimes ... opens sessions in Stockholm on 2 May. The tribunal hands down a decision accusing the United States of aggression and 'widespread, deliberate and systematic bombing of civilian objectives.'
(pg: 199) 16 March 1968. In what will become the most publicized war atrocity commited by US troops in Vietnam, a platoon from Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry of the newly formed American Division, slaughters between 200 and 500 unarmed villagers at the hamlet of Mylai-4. ... . Although the platoon receives no opposing fire as it approaches Mylai it's commanding officer, Lieutenant William Calley, orders his men to go on firing. The scene which follows can only be described as horrific: several old men are bayoneted, some women and children were praying outside of the local temple are shot in the back of the head, and at least one girl is raped before being killed.
(pg:238 ) 5 September 1969. Criminal charges are formally preferred against Lieutenant William Calley. The charges include six specifications of premeditated murder...
(pg: 252) 17 March 1970. The US army, following an investigation by a panel headed by Lieutenant General William Peers, accuses 14 officers of supression of information relating to an incident at Songmy in March 1968... The report says that US soldiers commited individual and group acts of murder, rape, sodomy, maiming and assault that took the lives of a large number of civilians and concludes that a 'tragedy of major proportions' occured ...
(pg: 253) 1 April 1970. The United States officially charges Captain Ernest Medina of being 'responsible' for the murder of Vietnamese civilians killed by members of his infantry company at Songmy. ...Army accuses him of premeditated murder of not less than 175...
(pg:268 ) 17 November 1970. The US Army opens it's case against Lieutenant William Calley, charging that Calley ordered a large group of civilians to be pushed into a ditch and killed in an apparently mindless slaughter.
(pg: 274) 6 January 1971. ...Lieutenant William Calley, Jr, Captain Ernest Medina, and Captain Eugene Kotouc. On 29 March the Fort Benning court martial jury finds Calley guilty of the premeditated murder of at least 22 South Vietnamese civilians. ... the sentence of life imprisonment moves President Nixon to intervene ... . On 20 August, Calley's life term is reduced to 20 years. ... Of all those originally charged, only Calley is convicted.
(pg: 314) 4 June 1972. Seymour Hersh further reports that a massacre at Mykhe 4, two miles from Mylai, was perpetrated by Bruno Company, Task Force Barker, American Division, on 16 March 1968..... . The Peers report also acknowledges that 'a large number of non-combatants were killed during a search of the hamlet.
(pg: 315) 19 June 1972. Calling the Mylai massacre 'trifling by comparison,' veteran Vietnam war correspondent Kevin Buckley charges that US soldiers deliberately killed thousands of Vietnamese citizens under the guise of 'pacification.' Buckley cites 1968 operation 'Speedy Express' in which as many as 5,000 civilians may have been killed in the Mekong Delta province of Kien Hoa. ... civilians he interviewed report that most of the enemy fatalities were unarmed farmers working in rice fields.
(pg:318 ) 29 July 1972. Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark visits North Vietnam ... Inquiry into US War Crimes in Indochina to investigate alleged US bombing of non-military targets in North Vietnam. Clark reports ... that he has seen damage to hospitals, dikes, schools, and other civilian areas.

A Soldier Reports
Author: General William C. Westmoreland
Doubleday & Company
"Excerpts" from- A Soldier Reports
(pg: 185) ... amply demonstrated later by events that occured when the discipline of an American company broke down at a place called My Lai. ... Yet the war in Vietnam was not against Asian hordes but against an enemy with relatively limited manpower.
(pg: 456) In April 1969 the Department of the Army and a number of legislators and government officials received letters from a former soldier who had served in Vietnam, Ronald L. Ridenhour, alleging war crimes by American soldiers in an operation in March 1968, in the hamlet of My Lai (refered to as "Pinkville")... . Involved was a component of the American Division's 11th Infantry Brigade. ... It resulted in charges against four officers and enlisted men. Twenty-five former enlisted men were implicated, but since they had already been discharged from the Army, they were beyond the Army's jurisdiction. Almost as deplorable as the events alleged was the possibility that officers ... had either covered up the incident of failed to make a comprehensive investigation. ... When I learned that some members of President Nixon's administration wanted to whitewash any possible negligence ... , I threatened through a White House official to excercise my prerogative as a member of the Joint Chiefs ... to go personally to the President and object.
(pg: 459) ... First Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr. Charged with the murder of more than a hundred civilians, he was convicted ... of the murder of "at least" twenty-two. He was sentenced to dismissal from service and confinement at hard labor for life, but the later was reduced ... to twenty years and further reduced to ten years, an action that President Nixon sustained. Lieutenant Calley was legally judged by a jury whose members all familiar with the nature of combat in Vietnam and well aware that even the kind of war waged in Vietnam is no license for murder. ... was no justification or rationale for the conscious massacre of defenseless babies, children, mothers, and old men in a kind of diabolical slow-motion nightmare that went on for the better part of a day, with a cold-blooded break for lunch.

Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War
Authors: James F. Dunnigan & Albert A. Nofi
Thomas Dunne Books
"Excerpts" from- Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam war
(pg: 233) In fact there were no armed VC in the hamlet. In My Lai 4 Calley basically ordered his troops to undertake a systematic massacre. ... Many of hte troops protested, refusing to take part despite threats from Calley that they would be subject to court martial. ... while a helicopter pilot, WO Hugh C. Thompson, Jr, personally prevented the murder of a number of villagers by threatening to fire on the troops ... . From the first, the nature of the action was known to Calleys superiors, among them ... CPT Ernest Medina, who was present for a time in the hamlet for a time ... . ... apparently knew about what occured almost immediately afterwards. ... None of them did anything about the matter. Attempts by soldiers to report the incident ... were quashed. Outsiders from the army staff who inquired about anomalies in the official report ... (only a handful of weapons were reported recovered, and there were virtually no American casualties, a truly remarkable circumstance), were brushed of by double-talk or bluster. Not until spring of 1969 did the massacre come to the attention of the army... . Calley was sentenced to life ... reduced first to twenty years, then to ten by civilian authorities, and finally to two years of house arrest. So judicial penalties for the atrocity were comparatively light.
(pg: 235) Altogether 220 cases were brought , and 121 men were convicted on charges ranging from rape to mass murder, as well as several instances of filing false reports to cover up atrocities.

Quote:
"I think that John Kerry's service in Vietnam was admirable" ~ G W Bush

More U.S. Atrocities during Vietnam War

Here are excerpts from more books, that document the reality of atrocities committed by U.S. troops during the Vietnam War.

Vietnam: A History
Author: Stanley Karnow
The Viking Press
"Excerpts" from Vietnam: A History
(pg:24) Morale also deteriorated folliwing revelations of a massacre in which a U.S. infantry company slaughtered more than three hundred Vietnamese inhabitants of Mylai village in cold blood- an episode that prompted GI's to assume that their commanders were covering up other atrocities.
(Pgs:600-601) And the U.S. army indicted Lieutenant William Calley and Sergeant David Mitchell for the massacre of South Vietnamese civilians at Mylai ... .

Charlie Company
Authors: Peter Goldman and Tony Fuller
William Morrow and Company
"Excerpts" from : Charlie Company
(pg:9) ... and the scandal late in 1969 over the massacre of 347 Vietnamese noncombatants in a hamlet called My Lai. The My Lai atrocity was an aberration in the war, so far as it is known, a paroxysm of murderous violence by a grunt company drunk on blood and war-weariness. ... and the bodies of old men, women and children rotting in a ditch in My Lai had a shattering effect on America's image of itself as invincible on the one hand, and humane on the other.
(pg:125) Charlie Company was still in Vietnam when the scandal broke in ... 1969, reading about it a few of the men thought about those smiles and the hatred they sometimes concealed and felt a pang of empathy for William Calley, the Lieutenant accused of having presided over the bloodletting. ... . There were no My Lais in Charlie Company's war, but there was no presumption of the innocence of civilians either- ... . In a total war, even the little kid running at you yelling, "Candy, GI!" might be carrying a live hand grenade, and if you saw it in time, J.C.Wilson remembered, you shot him.

The Vietnam War: Opposing Viewpoints
Author: William Dudley
Greenhaven Press, Inc.
"Excerpts" from : The Vietnam War: Opposing Viewpoints
(pg:225) We saw Vietnam ravaged equalled by American bombs and search and destroy missions, ... 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. ... . Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."


QUOTE
"Well, the truth is the truth. The truth has a force of its own. I'm just going out there and telling the truth." ~ Senator John F. Kerry (May 28, 2004)

American Atrocities in Vietnam

People have been saying that John Kerry had lied when he testified regarding atrocities. He witnessed these atrocities first hand when he served in Vietnam, and other veterans told him of some of the atrcocities they had seen. The Swift Boat Vets for truth had been attacking Kerry, saying that he didn't deserve his medals. Now, they're falsely attacking him in an ad claiming that he admitted to commiting atrocities. They're only using the part where Kerry said" yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities" out of context, and omitting the rest of Kerry's explaination. If you read Kerry's statement in it's entirety, you will realize that Kerry wasn't admitting to war crimes. He was trying to convey the difference between a soldier that does his duty, and a soldier that committed atrocities. To summarize what Kerry said, he was basically saying that war itself is an "atrocity." The only real reason that the Swift Boat Vets for Truth are upset with him, is because he brought the reality of American atrocities to the nation's attention.

Here are John Kerry exact words, that are being misrepresented to the public by Swift Boat Vets for Truth in an attempt to smear him:

There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50 calibre machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare, all of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this is ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down. And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant Calley, are war criminals.

-- John Kerry, on NBC's "Meet the Press" April 18, 1971

American Atrocities in Vietnam

Tour of Duty
Author: Douglas Brinkley
William Morrow (Harper Collins Publishers)
"Excerpts" from: Tour of Duty
(pg:8-9) What quickly became clear was that Kerry was accusing the U.S. government of war crimes, as ordained through such policies as free fire zones, harassment-and-interdiction fire, search-and-destroy missions, carpet bombings, and the torture and execution of prisoners. He scorned the rationale that one had to destroy a village in order to save it ... . "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," Kerry lamented to his elders. "We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed cheapness on the lives of Orientals." Thus the Navy man raised the grim specter of atrocities committed by Americans in Vietnam. He referred to the "winter soldier investigation" ... . Other veterans, in gory detail, had told gruesome stories of sadistically torturing and raping Vietnamese women. Burning villages and machine-gunning peasants who were thought to be Viet Cong had become part of U.S. policy. Kerry was placing the blame on the U.S. government for instituting such immoral policies. Now he added veterans across the nation were coming forward to confess to war crimes. That winter in Detroit, decorated veterans had "told stories at times that they had raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped 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 a fashion reminiscient of Gengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war."
(pg:270) ... civilian deaths committed in Vietnam by U.S. soldiers, particularly the My Lai incident and the Thanh Phong incident. And while Bob Kerrey came under fire in 2001, soon after he left the U.S. Senate, from the New York Times, The Nation, CBS's 60 Minutes for his role in a Navy SEAL unit's alleged joy-torching of the village of Thanh Phong, no such attention has been paid to the other side of the story of what American servicemen did in South Vietnam, such as the rescue of forty-two civilian detainees from starvation by Lieutenant John Kerry and his crew.
(pg:440) ... in April 2001, when Gregory L. Vistica, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, ... alleging that Bob Kerrey had led his Navy SEAL unit to kill thirteen unarmed civilians in the village of Thanh Phong on the night of February 25, 1969. Senators Kerry, Cleland, and Chuck Hagel penned a letter published in the Washington Post that read in part: "Bob Kerrey's personal and difficult disclosure last week demonstrates the courage we all have known in him for years. It aslso reveals the real guilt and pain that persists among combat veterans of all war, and particularly Vietnam." "People that criticized Bob just didn't understand the realities of Vietnam," Kerry declared.

Quote:
"I think Senator Kerry should be proud of his record," "No, I don't think he lied" ~ George W. Bush (Aug 26, 2004)

Vote JOHN KERRY for President in 2004, for A Better America!!

http://www.veteransinstitute.org

Scootiedude...

The lies being hammered into the American psyche by Rove, and the others in the Bush Regime, are a part of their doing all they can to make us forget information like you've posted. Unfortunately, it seems to be working...why and how, I do not know. It's as if the majority of Americans have suddenly become blind, deaf, and DUMB...and I don't mean mute.

Your post, and posts of others like you, including my own, are part of the voices heard (or read) on forums like this one and other political chatboards that are trying to get the word out...if people are willing to stay the course and wade through the quagmire of irate responses of the nonthinking people who have fallen prey to the Bush cartel's lies and machinations. If the blinders and the earplugs are taken off before Nov. 2, Kerry may win.

But, I'm not sure that will happen...for some reason, we're believing all of the fear tactics instead of reasonable thinking...and I really do not feel good about the future of our nation nor about the future of its people...especially the young people, who will have to inherit this awful mess Bush has created in four short years...not just Iraq, but the economic deficit as well.

Catherine

JOHN KERRY tonight!!

Let's pray to God, that he helps John Kerry cross that finish line for an election victory.

Vote JOHN KERRY, for A Stronger America Now!!

Scootie dude and Catherine, considering you probably weren't born when all this took place, perhaps you should hear directly from the men who suffered the most because of Scary Kerry's Lies and Deception. I remember how bad it was. A lot of people remember and that is why Scary Kerry, although he had the help of every Liberal news organization spreading his doom and gloom propaganda, was not elected Commander in Chief. He spent his whole life working towards this moment and the American people spoke: Scary Kerry was not voted into office because of mostly moral issues. The fact is, he doesn't have any morals, any heart or any clue of what is important to the American people. His days are over and so are those of the DEMONcRATS.

http://www.stolenhonor.com/documentary/watch-video.asp

This site leans so far to the left I had to lay my monitor over on it's side to view it.

bushndick...just for your information..had I been a male, I would have been drafted to fight in Vietnam, so please don't try to play the age game.

First of all, the way you have used unnecessary name calling to try to make your point does not speak very well for your credibility. Your President (Bush is not MY president, now will he ever be) did not win by a landslide. In fact, this was the worst presidential win since Woodrow Wilson's back in 1916! ...which doesn't speak very well for those who think Bush hung the moon.

Your reference to the DEMOCRATS (in case you're "hard of spelling") could have a few points I agree with...the Democrats are going to have to take a long, hard look at what went wrong, but I don't think my party will "dummy down" to try to fit into the new idealogy of the Bushies. Ideology is the belief that a particular doctrine is the only way in which a society should live. You voted ideology, not values, because if the voters were looking at values, they would never have voted for a Commander-in-Chief who lies, lies, and lies some more. This election was won, not on issues or ideas that really matter, but on three other things..GOD, GUNS, and GAYS...This isn't a mandate. I suggest you go here:

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20041105.html

to read the excellent comments by John Dean as he attempts to explain the reasons Bush won, and it's amazing how much the people who voted for Bush agreed with the people who voted for Kerry...except on the GOD, GUNS, and GAYs aspect. Thus, the lies and machinations of a sitting president pale in comparison to these three ideals that are so dear to the Republican heart...that's why Bush got another term...Bush is Bush...he will mess up sooner or later...most likely sooner. His being elected this time around did not rebrain him and it certainly isn't going to make him admit that he's not Napoleon reincarnated.

As a poster said at www.republicansforkerry.org: "The Bush campaign was hearing "Four more years!!!" when in fact people were saying "No more queers!!". Bush did what politicians often do when job performance falters--he picked a minority for the public to "whup up on." It worked for Bush today, it worked for a plethora of southern segregationists in the 1950's, and it worked for Germany's National Socialists in 1936."

Prejudice is a powerful motivator, especially when it's being advanced and encouraged in the name of God from many pulpits across the country.

Obviously, you buy into that same idealogy. Now you've got your President..enjoy his reign...if you voted for him, you deserve him.

Catherine