SwiftVets.com

[BuffaloJack]

B.Green,
I will assume, for the moment, that you are not a troll and are just young and that the only Viet Nam experience that you know is that provided by the borderline commies in Hollywood.
I served 2 years in Viet Nam, 6+ months on swiftboats and the balance in the Coastal Surveillance Centers. Whenever we engaged the enemy, it was standing practice to survey the site afterward and render aid to the wounded. I personally took an AK47 from a the hands of a wounded Viet Cong woman and applied battle dressings to try and stop her bleeding. We called a medevac helicopter and she was airlifted to a hospital. A week or so later (we called the hospital to check) she was transferred to a women's POW camp. In my entire 2 years in Viet Nam, I did not hear of anyone committing actocities. It was just the opposite. The guys I served with went out of their way to conduct themselves honorably. There are misfits and malcontents everywhere in the world and some GIs fit this profile also, but they were no more common than you would find in the states distributed through the normal population. Mr. Kerry is prone to exaggeration and he seems to have the ability to fabricate fantastic stories in order to advance himself politically. He will tell you anything you want to hear. It just isn't the truth.
I did see atrocities committed in Viet Nam though, the most heinous of which was committed by the Communists against my wife's uncle. He had helped some GIs with directions to some small village nearby. Two days later when my wife's family got up to begin their day, they found his head on a pole in the front yard as a warning not to help the Americans. If you haven't figured out by now, I have been married to a Vietnamese girl for the past 33 years. She is an avid Kerry hater with more reason to hate Kerry than even me.
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Swift Boats - Qui Nhon (12/69-4/70), Cat Lo (4/70-5/70), Vung Tau (5/70-12/71)

[kmudd]

[USMCVet]

[BuffaloJack]

Kerry repeatedly refers to "Free Fire Zones" as an indication of a war crime. A "Free Fire Zone" meant that you didn't have to get permission to return fire is fired upon. Everywhere else you hadda radio to HQ and say "The bad guys are shootin' the hell out of us, can we perhaps return fire?". Kerry's interpretation was that anything that moved in a "Free Fire Zone" was a target and ought to be killed.
If he, as a supposed leader in combat, couldn't understand the basic "Rules of Engagement", then how could he ever be considered for the position of Commander in Chief. He is thoroughly and totally "Unfit for Command".
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Swift Boats - Qui Nhon (12/69-4/70), Cat Lo (4/70-5/70), Vung Tau (5/70-12/71)

[The Balloon Artist]

When we arrived back in the states following my father's time at Aviano Airbase in Itlay in December of '66, I was throughly exposed to the TV set. Having spent 3 years in Itlay and no American TV to watch I was mesmerized. Batman, Green Hornet, Bad Texas weather, and the Vietnam war everyday for dinner. Excuse me the press the press was there. Why they ignored the atocities of of the VC and NV I don't know. But they did cover what we did on a daily basis. Right down to reported being killed there first day by hostile fire. The only other exception to thisw is the likelyhood that the press in Vietnam later staffed the CNN offices in Bagdad.

I have been feed a report about a (mythical?) Tiger Force that was supposedly commisioned to rape, pilliage, murder, burn and destroy. The first reports of this came out in a Ohio newspaper late last year. You can google search this and find the same info I got. I pm'd a mod and they had no other info either re this. Even if this was true true regarding the actions taken by this group. What may never be known is the status of their victims. Were they VC? It makes no sense to attack your allies in a war.
Further as there were many discredited documenteries Dan Rather et al about Vietnam. Skinning the victims and stacking the bodies like cordwood. Get real who is going to slaughter and then go through all that trouble? . Tiger Force was not mentioned either. Many of Kerry's original Band of brothers were found to be "REMF"s no offence to those ofd you who were. It's just that Kerry's bunch never saw any action at all much less an atrocity. Perhaps even another myth created by the press that the entire country was enveloped in a fight.

Now, War ain't pretty. People die, stuff happens, and sometimes people behave even worse. An American Soldier may not like to recall some events of his war time experience later in a different context of life, but then and there, they did what had to be done in accordance to laws and governing bodies.

One key in whether this is a discussion of atrocities or antiwar activities is thus. The antiwar crowd (war is wrong period when carried out by the US) doesn't care who or what is doing anywhere in the world as long as the US is not involved in solving or finshing the work. But these are the same morons who believe you negoiate with tryants and terrorist and that any war conducted by the US is an atrocity.
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What about John Kerry's four months in Vietnam qualify him to be president?
Al Gore was there for five.