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
