This unique audio recording has been featured on media outlets
around the globe, including Pacifica’s Democracy Now!
with Amy Goodman, C-SPAN’s “Road to the White
House”, MSNBC’s “Hardball” and “Deborah
Norville Tonight”, and numerous independent media outlets.
It includes testimony from Mr. Kerry that continues to fuel
the larger debate over all presidential candidates’
ability to lead a country in the midst of a global war on
terrorism.
Excerpt
from John Kerry’s 1971 Senate Testimony:
"... I would like to talk, representing all those
veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we
had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged
and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war
crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents
but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full
awareness of officers at all levels of command.
It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen
in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the
men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but
they did. They relived the absolute horror of what this
country, in a sense, made them do.
They told the stories at times they had personally raped,
cut off ears, cut off heads, tape 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 fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and
dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged
the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal
ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging
which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
We call this investigation the "Winter Soldier Investigation."
The term "Winter Soldier" is a play on words of
Thomas Paine in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot
and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because
the going was rough.
We who have come here to Washington have come here because
we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come
back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold our
silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but
we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact
that the crimes threaten it, no reds, and not redcoats but
the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that
we have to speak out.
I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the
result is of the feelings these men carry with them after
coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn't know it yet,
but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions
of men who have been taught to deal and to 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 a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped."
Series: Washington Report, no. 10.
