Any DU Viet Vets Out There Who saw/heard of/ committed "atrocities"?

[guajira]

Where are all the Vets who could support and verify what Kerry has been saying all these years??

Surely there are many who could be speaking up (?)

[vetwife]

1. Yes but they are afraid of losing their compensation....

it is all they have and it could be taken away. They won't speak up. Not personally. They also don't want to land back in the psych ward.

[Cicero]

2. Is this the Winter Soldier Investigation?

Hasn't a lot of that turned up to be false? I'm sorry, I've heard a lot of conflicting stuff out there.

Later,

[Cicero]

3. dupe, sorry

[luaneryder]

6. I'd have to agree, they don't want either.

That's the way this works: if you piss off someone in power who can stop your check, it happens. I only saw gruesome polaroids and that was enough. Why someone would want photos of these things is beyond comprehension. I can still see them in my mind today.

[guajira]

4. There's Strength in Numbers

If enough vets speak out, they will have to be listened to. Kerry saved a lot of lives by speaking out against the Vietnam "War" and should be praised and rewarded for his actions!!

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

5. I was a marine in Japan in '63.

A group of CIA contractors stayed in our barracks overnight waiting for a flight back to America from VN. They passed around photos they had taken of dead Vietnames civilians that they told us had been killed by the ARVN with the help of our Special Forces (Green Berets).

These guys weren't CIA agents or anything like that. They just drove fuel trucks from one of the ports to the various airbases.

But, hell, the atrocities were all over the nightly news.

[guajira]

8. Good Point - Kerry team should be reviewing war videos

and reminding Americans of just how horrible Vietnam really was! Many voters are too young to know what really happened!

[helluvafella]

7. We ALL heard of them. Probably anybody who

was in the 'shit' had first-hand knowledge of them, even if they didn't themselves actually do the deeds. I met a guy, in college after the war, who had smuggled home 20 ears he'd personally cut off folks he'd snuffed... A lot of the stories are by now apocryphal. If you want the true testimony, google "Winter Soldiers', the group Kerry was representing when he testified before the Senate in '72...

[Media_Lies_Daily]

9. The Phoenix Program (multiple links)....

You want eyewitnesses to atrocities? Read the links that follow.

Why would any of those vets admit to what they saw or did thirty to forty years ago? Why would they want to expose themselves and their families to that kind of scrutiny? Why would any of them want to relieve any of those painful memories walled away for so long?

I knew guys when I was in the service between 1976 and 1981 that would talk about the things they did in Vietnam, but only if they got really drunk. And then they would talk about the civilians they were ordered to shoot, or the rape(s) they committed, or the screaming prisoners they tossed out of helicopters from a thousand feet up. And most would cry as they talked because they could never get rid of the images that kept popping up in their heads.

"Phoenix Program":

Documents from the Phoenix Program
<http://www.thememoryhole.org/phoenix/>

The Phoenix Program
<http://free.freespeech.org/americanstateterrorism/vietnamgenocide/PhoenixProgram.html>

PHOENIX PROGRAM (PHUNG HOANG)
BOOKS, (DOCUMENTS, REPORTS, ETC.)
<http://users.skynet.be/terrorism/html/vietnam_phoenix.htm>

VIETNAM
Pacification, Counterinsurgency, & the Phoenix Program
<http://intellit.muskingum.edu/vietnam_folder/vietnamphoenix.html>

The Advisor. The Phoenix Program in Vietnam
<http://www.amerak.com/the_advisor.htm>

Vietnam 1964 - 1975
<http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA%20Hits/Vietnam6475_CIAHits.html>

....and a special bonus link:

Tom Ridge in Vietnam
Tarnished Star
<http://www.counterpunch.org/ridge2.html>

Yes, THAT Tom Ridge, Homeland Security Czar....

Excerpt:

"Ridge was stationed in a coastal village in South Vietnam where his company was involved in what his office delicately refers to as the Army's "pacification" campaign. Pacification was the CIA's reader-friendly word for its extermination of civilian opposition to the US war machine in South Vietnam. Another alias for pacification was the Phoenix Program. It routinely involved sweeps through hamlets to make mass arrests, brutal interrogations, the destruction of villages, napalming of rice fields and wide-spread assassination."

[annabanana]

11. thank you M-L-D.....it can't be undone......

But maybe we can prevent endless repetition. It does no one good to pretend it didn't happen. ;(

[guajira]

14. I was in the room at work (in Miami) when a Viet vet jumped out of

the 11th floor window. I heard the noise of the window breaking and then the person with me and I ran to the window and realized what had happened.

This was back in the early 1970's!!

[Shallah Kali]

10. What of the Tiger Force investigation?

http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=SRTIGERFORCE

[Frances]

12. Please have compassion for the vets

I was teaching at a community college during the Vietnam War and one of my students told me about an atrocity that he had participated in. He was carrying a huge load of guilt and will do so the rest of his life. I think God will forgive him because he is is so sorry for what he did.

Another Vietnam vet apologized to my daughter's Vietnamese friend for the things he did when he was fighting in Vietnam and she was living there.

John O'Neill and the other Swift Boat Veterans want everyone to pretend that war is a John Wayne movie. The good guys (us) never do anything wrong and the other side is evil.

War is not like that. Otherwise good people may do terrible things in a war. They may also have terrible things done to them. That's why war should always be a last resort.

Kerry is a hero in my opinion not only for his bravery in fighting in Vietnam but even more so for his bravery in trying to keep other young men from being wounded physically and emotionally in an unnecessary war.

[helluvafella]

13. I do not know ANY thoughtful person who served there

who does NOT bear a load of guilt for their actions in Nam.

Even Robt. McNamara recanted, and he is/was not someone whom I would have thought capable of such a reconsideration.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

17. I worked with Vietnam combat vets as a counselor.

I was an Employee Assistance counselor and had several show up who were very disturbed. Alcoholism, drug addiction, etc. I always told them that I was a war protestor and a vet who had refused to go to VN, and offered them the option of another counselor, they never took me up on it. They wanted to talk about their experiences with someone who wasn't going to pat them on their heads and tell them what good boys they had been. These guys weren't "anti-war" and Vietnam had been the highlight of their lives, but they were really screwed up because of what they had seen or done. Some of them irremedially. There were 2 suicides and others continued to commit the slow motion suicide of alcoholism and/or addiction. Those were the ones who couldn't bring themselves to talk about their experiences.

Victims of the glorious war on Communism in SE Asia.

[guajira]

15. Seems like Supporting Kerry could be a good way to get rid of

guilt. Why carry the guilt for life, while Kerry bears the brunt of having been honest about what happened in Vietnam?

[nefarious]

16. A Vietnam vet I worked with...

In the mid 1980's... Guy was a roughneck welder from Texas. Said he played football for one of the Texas Universities, when he finished college he joined the military. Got a soldier's job in Delta Force, and did a two year hitch in Vietnam, 1967 to 1969. Mai Lai was nothing he said. They regularly snuck into villages and killed people at night, preferred using cross-bows and bowie knives to avoid detection. Also guarded against ambushes with sawed-off shotguns with shells refitted with welding wire - said one shot could clear a tree. When he returned, he said he worked in underwater oil rig welding, before he came to that factory.

The guy was pretty crazy, with an alpha-leader type personality. Others who worked with him called his stories bullshit, which made him very upset and started fights.

He once brought in a string "necklace" with 39 dried out ears on it, all from enemy soldiers - because killing them was more challenging. He was always particular to mention they were all left ears.

Guy was eventually grabbed by the cops on charges he raped his second wife's 14 year old daughter, and I never heard about him after that.

[arbusto_baboso]

20. This guy was lying about something.....

Delta Force didn't exist until 1978.

Now, if he was talking about PROJECT DELTA, that's another story.

But, it's usually the wannabe types who go completely off the deep friggin' end like this guy did.

[radwriter0555]

18. are you saying that the my lai massacre didn't happen? Come on, we

know that humans descend to the lowest form of the order. The stories we've heard about some men doing terrible things in viet nam truly did happen, and we're evidenced of that ability by the atrocities we're witness to now, in real time, in Iraq.

You surely don't expect men who did bad things to come forward and publicly announce their misdeeds, do you?

Imagine being out in a 3rd world where you could do whatever your heart desired, commit terrible crimes against the people who were hurting your army buddies... You can't imagine that its's possible men stooped to murder, rape, theft and worse? Come on, this is the real world.

[shanti]

19. from the vets i know

most refuse to discuss them. one friend still has flashbacks.

[Bandit]

21. I am a living eye witness account of war crimes committed

I have witnessed a lot of what Kerry spoke of in his Senate testimony so many years ago. I have witnessed enemy bodies being booby trapped by Americans, I have witnessed Americans mistreating prisoners, I have witnessed mutilations of enemy dead, I have witnessed the poisoning of food and the deliberate booby trapping of armiment given to ARVN soldiers.. I have even witnessed the destruction of a friendly village with weapons (Rockets filled with fleshette darts)that Geneva convention outlaws. I have witnessed behavior so barbaric that I will not describe it here. American soldiers are not angels by any means. Kerry spoke the truth then and he speaks the truth now.