He’s better than the lesser of two evils.

HOW DO YOU ASK A MAN TO BE

THE LAST MAN TO DIE FOR A MISTAKE

From John Kerry’s statement before the Senate Foreign

          Relations Committee, April 22, 1971.

I would like to say for the record, and for the men behind me

who are also wearing the uniform and their medals, that my

being here is really symbolic. I am not here as John Kerry, but

as one member of a group of one thousand, which in turn is a

small representation of a very much larger group of veterans

in this country. Were it possible for all of them to sit at

this table they would be here and present the same kind of

testimony.

I would like to talk about the feelings these men carry with

them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn’t

realize it yet but it has created a monster in the form of

thousands of men who have been taught to deal and 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 betrayal that no one so far has been able to grasp.

We are angry because we feel we have been used in the worst

fashion by the administration of this country.

In 1970 at West Point Vice President Agnew said “some

glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men

die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most

of those misfits abuse,” and this was used as a rallying

point for our effort in Vietnam. But for us, as boys in Asia

whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a

terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep

sense of revulsion, and hence the anger of some of the men

who are here in Washington today. It is a distortion because

we in no way consider ourselves the best men of this country;

because those he calls misfits were standing up for us in a

way that nobody else in this country dared to; because so

many who have died would have returned to this country to

join the misfits in their efforts to ask for an immediate

withdrawal from South Vietnam; because so many of those best

men have returned as quadriplegics and amputees — and they

lie forgotten in Veterans Administration hospitals in this

country which fly the flag which so many have chosen as their

own personal symbol — and we cannot consider ourselves

America’s best men when we are ashamed of and hated for

what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia.

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, which those

misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal

hypocrisy.

We are probably angriest about all that we were told about

Vietnam and about the mystical war against communism. We

found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by people who

had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial

influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese

whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were

hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were sup-

posedly saving them from. We found most people didn’t even

know the difference between communism and democracy.

They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters

strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages

and tearing their country apart. . They practiced the art of

survival by siding with whichever military force was present

at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese, or

American.

We found that all too often American men were dying in

those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We

saw firsthand how monies from American taxes were 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,

and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We

saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search-

and-destroy missions, as well as by Viet Cong terrorism, 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. We learned the meaning of free-fire

zones. shooting anything that moves, and we watched while

America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals.

We watched the United States’ falsification of body counts,

in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while

month after month we were told the back of the enemy is about

to break. We fought [with] weapons against those people which

I do not believe this country would dream of using were we

fighting in the European theatre. We watched while men charged

up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and

after losing one platoon or two platoons, they marched away to

leave the hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese. We

watched pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown

into extravaganzas, because we couldn’t lose, and we couldn’t

retreat, and because it didn’t matter how many American bodies

were lost to prove that point, and so there were Hamburger

Hills and Khesahns and Hill 81s and Fire Base 6s, and so many

others.

And now we are told that the men who fought there must watch

quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise

the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese. 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 die 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 die in Vietnam? How do you

ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are

trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of ration-

alizations, and if you read carefully the President’s last speech

to the people of this country, you can see that he says, and says

clearly, “but the issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism, and

the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the

Communists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a

free people.” But the point is that they are not a free people

now, and we cannot fight communism all over the world. I think

we should have learned that lesson by now.

Suddenly we are faced with a very sickening situation in

this country, because there is no moral indignation and, if

there is, it comes from people who are almost exhausted by

their past indignations. . . The country seems to have lain

down and shrugged off something as serious as Laos, just as

we calmly shrugged off the loss of 700,000 lives in Pakistan,

the so-called greatest disaster of all times. But we are here

as veterans to say we think we are in the midst of the

greatest disaster of all times now, because they are still

dying over there — not just Americans but Vietnamese —

and we are rationalizing leaving that country so that those

people can go on killing each other for years to come.

Americans seem to have accepted the idea that the war is

winding down, at least for Americans, and they have also

allowed the bodies which were once used by a President for

statistics to prove that we were winning the war, to be used

as evidence against a man who followed orders and who inter-

preted those order no differently than hundreds of other men

in Vietnam.

We veterans can only look with amazement on the fact that

this country has been unable to see there is absolutely no

difference between ground troops and a helicopter crew, and

yet people have accepted a differentiation fed them by the

administration. No ground troops are in Laos, so it is all

right to kill Laotians by remote control. But believe me the

helicopter crews fill the same body bags and they wreak the

same kind of damage on the Vietnamese and Laotian country-

side as anybody else, and the President is talking about

allowing that to go on for many years to come. One can only

ask if we will really be satisfied only when the troops march

into Hanoi.

We are asking here in Washington for some action, action

from the Congress of the United States of America, which has

the power to raise and maintain armies, and which by the

Constitution also has the power to declare war. We have come

here, not to the President, because we believe that this body

can be responsive to the will of the people, and we believe

that the will of the people says that we should be out of

Vietnam now.

We are here in Washington also to say that the problem of

this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is

part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human

beings to communicate to people in this country — the

question of racism, which is rampant in the military, and

so many other questions such as the use of weapons; the

hypocrisy in our taking umbrage in the Geneva Conventions

and using that as justification for a continuation of this

war when we are more guilty than any other body of violations

of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free-fire

zones, harassment interdiction fire, search-and-destroy

missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, the

killing of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in

South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. We are

also here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where

are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership?

We are here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy,

Johnson, and so man others? Where are they now that we,

the men whom they sent off to war, have returned? These

are commanders who have deserted their troops, and there

is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says

they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they

never leave even their dead. These men have left all the

casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public

rectitude. They have left the real stuff of their reputa-

tions bleaching behind them in the sun.

Finally, this administration has done us the ultimate

dishonor. They have attempted to disown us and the sacri-

fices we made for this country. In their blindness and their

fear they have tried to deny that we are veterans or that we

served in Nam. We do not need their testimony. Our own

scars and stumps of limbs are witness enough for others

and for ourselves.

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 mores, 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 the

place where America finally turned and where soldiers like

us helped it in the turning.

******************************************************

From “The New Soldier” by John Kerry and Vietnam Veterans

Against the War, Collier Books, New York, New York, 1971,

pages: 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24