SwiftVets.com

[mach9]

August 6, 2006
The odyssey of Joe Bangert
By KEVIN DENNEHY
STAFF WRITER

On an overcast afternoon last month, Joe Bangert wandered across his Brewster lawn, sandals on his feet and a fresh white beard on his face, and took a last look around.

He was flying out of Providence later that night, and knew he wouldn't be back on Cape Cod for a while.

Thirty-seven years ago, he returned from the war in Vietnam. The Philadelphia native settled on the Cape, met a wife and raised a family.

But never far behind were his experiences from the war, the horrible things he says he saw there. His vocal opposition to the war never softened over the years.

Those close to him know there has been another constant companion over the years: alcohol addiction.

In early June, his two demons - Vietnam and alcohol - converged when a subpoena arrived on his doorstep.

Lawyers for a Pennsylvania filmmaker wanted him to produce evidence of U.S. military atrocities Bangert has long insisted he witnessed while in Vietnam - such as the skinning of a young girl.

Bangert was one of several witnesses called for depositions as part of the suit, which is linked to a controversial 2004 film that questioned the integrity of U.S. Sen. John Kerry, who was then running for president.

Bangert, a longtime friend of Kerry, was photographed next to him when he won the New Hampshire primary and worked on his campaign.
As Bangert saw it, the subpoena was challenging his integrity. And, he said, those who supported the war in Vietnam were coming after him - a long-haired war protester - all over again.

Days after getting the subpoena, he got drunk - a violation of an earlier probation - and was put into involuntary treatment after a run-in with police.

By that day in early July, he was leaving the home where he and his wife had raised their children.

''My war in Vietnam never really ended, and it's not because I'm holding on to the past,'' Bangert said. ''I don't want to hold on to this.

''I overreacted a little bit. And it was very painful,'' he said of the June incident that led to a month in rehab at Bridgewater State Hospital. ''I did kind of lose it. I have character defects, and it just came down on me like a ton of bricks, and a lot of it's my own (fault), because I like to stick it out there.

''But no matter what people think of my character, I'm a man of honor.''
Last month, an old friend flew in from Hawaii to take Bangert back to Vietnam. He was hoping to find peace.

Fighting the war

Joe Bangert was 18 years old when he walked into a Philadelphia recruitment office to enlist in the Marines in early 1967.

By the end of the year, he was a helicopter gunner and was assigned to Marine Observation Squadron 6.

After training, he was stationed at a base near Quang Tri, a city in central Vietnam near the demilitarized zone that separated North and South Vietnam.

Military records tell the story of a decorated soldier, the recipient of air medals, service medals, even a good conduct medal. But Bangert's opposition to the war began while he was still in uniform in Southeast Asia.

He was knocked down from sergeant to corporal, he said, when he refused to shoot anymore. Bangert said he stopped firing his gun after two good friends were killed and he had to pick up their bodies.

By early 1970, he left the military with an honorable discharge.

Over the next few years, he became a voice against the war, protesting in Washington, D.C., and taking a lead in role in the fledgling group Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

In April 1971, during the Dewey Canyon III protest in Washington, D.C., he performed guerilla theater on the steps of the Justice Department. A cover photo on The Economist magazine that week shows Bangert, with thick beard and wild hair, waving a toy machine gun.

It was during this time that he met John Kerry, another veteran who returned home an opponent of the war. Their dissent was captured in ''Winter Soldier,'' a stark black-and-white documentary filmed in early 1971 at a Howard Johnson's hotel in Detroit. In the film, former soldiers recount atrocities they say they'd witnessed against Vietnamese civilians.

Some of the most grisly testimony comes from Bangert, who describes the shooting and skinning of a Vietnamese girl.

To this day, critics argue there is no evidence any of the incidents took place, and they question the credibility of the speakers.

The controversy would be a central issue during the 2004 presidential campaign, one that was pushed strongly by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in the group's effort to discredit Kerry - and the veterans who supported him.

Footage from ''Winter Soldier'' was used by filmmaker Carlton Sherwood for his documentary ''Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal,'' which charges that Kerry's anti-war activities jeopardized POW safety.
In the film, which debuted in fall 2004, a narrator describes purveyors of Vietnam atrocities as ''frauds, men who had never set foot on the battlefield, or left the comfort of the states, or even served in uniform except in mock contempt of the military.''

Some footage shows Kenneth Campbell, another veteran from ''Winter Soldier'' who now teaches politics in Delaware. Just after the film's release, Campbell sued Sherwood for defamation in a Philadelphia court.

On an afternoon before Memorial Day weekend this year, Bangert, another ''Winter Soldier'' voice and friend of Campbell, learned that he would be asked to produce evidence in the case.

''They're being sued and they're coming after Kerry's lieutenants, looking for a weak link,'' Bangert said after getting the subpoena. ''And there's not a weak link among us.''

Within days, though, Bangert got intoxicated at his Brewster home and turned himself in to Brewster firefighters.

Sherwood released the film through a for-profit called Red, White and Blue Productions. A phone number listed for the company is no longer in service. Neither is a number listed for WVC3, an antiterrorism consulting firm that lists Sherwood as its executive vice president and director of communications.

An attorney representing Sherwood declined comment for this story but said he would pass a request for an interview on to Sherwood.
Sherwood never returned a call to the Times.

Looking for peace

In early July, as John Kerry made political stops nationwide, he left little doubt he would run again for the presidency in 2008.

On Cape Cod that month, Bangert was in court. His June arrest had violated his probation for an earlier drunken driving arrest and had resulted in the 30-day stint in rehabilitation.

On July 7, Bangert appeared in Orleans District Court for a probation hearing.

Standing beside him was Wilson Sproehnle, an old friend from Philadelphia and himself a Vietnam veteran. He is also Bangert's Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor.

When the judge got to Bangert, a probation officer read the case, then described Bangert as a likeable man, a military veteran trying to recover.
Bangert received the minimum fine of $500 for the probation violation.

Outside the court afterward, Bangert said how relieved he was that he got off relatively easy. Despite being on probation, he felt he had to leave Massachusetts for a while.

Within days, he and Sproehnle flew to Philadelphia for a short stay. Eventually, they flew to Hawaii, where Sproenhle lives, and now plan to move on to Vietnam.

In addition to being a leader for veterans issues in Massachusetts for many years - including taking the lead in shedding light on the health effects of Agent Orange - Bangert has also been back to Vietnam several times.

In the years after the war, he tried to promote more communication between Vietnam and the United States, and he actively pushed for more business investment in the Southeast Asia nation.

Now he's going back to find his own peace of mind.

''I'm going to Hawaii for a month, going to take care of this booze problem,'' Bangert said. ''And then I'm going to Vietnam with my sponsor. I've always wanted to go to Vietnam sober.''

On the afternoon he left the Cape to begin that journey, Bangert took his bags out to the driveway and waited for the car that would take him to the airport.

''My war never stopped,'' he said. ''And that's why I'm in a world of (expletive), to quote 'Full Metal Jacket.'

''But not really. I'm doing good compared to some other guys.''

Just before he left, Bangert received a phone call from an attorney. His friend Kenneth Campbell, it turned out, had dropped his suit against the filmmaker Sherwood.

Bangert's testimony in the ''Stolen Honor'' case would never be needed, after all.

Kevin Dennehy can be reached at kdennehy@capecodonline.com.
(Published: August 6, 2006)

Note: Topic changed to reflect article title...article re-formatted for readability/me#1

[LewWaters]

Do I detect a pattern here? Along with the LA Times article posted by Me#1, I am beginning to see verifications being offered to sKerry's 1971 testimony. Or, at least, what the anti-war left sees as verification that sKerry was totally truthful.

If this is the goal, it would fit the anti-war left. Slander 2.5 million brave decorated Veterans who served honorably, just to place their anti-American candidate into office.

I would sure love to be the fly on the wall at some very private meetings, starting with the junior Senator from Massachussetts on down the line.

[mach9]

Do you mean today's LA Times article*? I didn't see it posted here. But you're dead on. Definitely a pattern.

*August 6, 2006
Report reveals Vietnam War troop atrocities
By NICK TURSE
and DEBORAH NELSON
LOS ANGELES TIMES
The men of B Company were in a dangerous state of mind. They had lost five men in a firefight the day before. The morning of Feb. 8, 1968, brought unwelcome orders to resume their sweep of the countryside, a green patchwork of rice paddies along Vietnam's central coast.
They met no resistance as they entered a nondescript settlement in Quang Nam province. So Jamie Henry, a 20-year-old medic, set his rifle down in a hut, unfastened his bandoliers and lighted a cigarette.
Just then, the voice of a lieutenant crackled across the radio. He reported that he had rounded up 19 civilians and wanted to know what to do with them. Henry recalled the company commander's response: ''Kill anything that moves.''
Henry stepped outside the hut and saw a small crowd of women and children. Then the shooting began.
Moments later, the 19 villagers lay dead or dying.
Back home in California, Henry published an account of the slaughter and held a news conference to air his allegations. Yet he and other Vietnam veterans who spoke out about war crimes were branded traitors and fabricators.
No one was ever prosecuted for the massacre.
Files declassified
Now, nearly 40 years later, declassified Army files show that Henry was telling the truth - about the Feb. 8 killings and a series of other atrocities by the men of B Company of the 1st Battalion, 35th Infantry, 4th Infantry Division.
The files are part of a once-secret archive assembled by a Pentagon task force in the early 1970s. It shows that confirmed atrocities by U.S. forces in Vietnam were more extensive than previously was known.
The documents detail 320 alleged incidents that were substantiated by Army investigators - not including the most notorious U.S. atrocity, the March 1968 My Lai massacre.
Although not a complete accounting of Vietnam war crimes, the archive is the largest such collection to surface to date. About 9,000 pages in all, it includes investigative files, sworn statements by witnesses and status reports for top military brass.
The records describe recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese - families in their homes, farmers in rice paddies, teenagers out fishing.
Hundreds of soldiers, in interviews with investigators and letters to commanders, described a violent minority who murdered, raped and tortured with impunity.
Abuses were not confined to a few rogue units, a Los Angeles Times review of the files found. They were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam.
Retired Brig. Gen. John H. Johns, a Vietnam veteran who served on the task force, said he once supported keeping the records secret but now believes they deserve wide attention in light of alleged attacks on civilians and abuse of prisoners in Iraq.
''We can't change current practices unless we acknowledge the past,'' said Johns, 78.
Among the substantiated cases in the archive:
n''‚Seven massacres from 1967 through 1971 in which at least 137 civilians died.
n''‚Seventy-eight other attacks on noncombatants in which at least 57 were killed, 56 wounded and 15 sexually assaulted.
n''‚One hundred forty-one instances in which U.S. soldiers tortured civilian detainees or prisoners of war with fists, sticks, bats, water or electric shock.
Strong evidence
Investigators determined that evidence against 203 soldiers accused of harming Vietnamese civilians or prisoners was strong enough to warrant formal charges. These ''founded'' cases were referred to the soldiers' superiors for action.
Ultimately, 57 of them were court-martialed and just 22 convicted, the records show.
Fourteen received prison sentences ranging from six months to 20 years, but most won significant reductions on appeal. The stiffest sentence went to a military intelligence interrogator convicted of committing indecent acts on a 13-year-old girl in an interrogation hut in 1967.
He served seven months of a 20-year term, the records show.
Many substantiated cases were closed with a letter of reprimand, a fine or, in more than half the cases, no action at all.
There was little interest in prosecuting Vietnam war crimes, said Steven Chucala, who in the early 1970s was legal adviser to the commanding officer of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division.
He said he disagreed with the attitude but understood it.
''Everyone wanted Vietnam to go away,'' said Chucala, now a civilian attorney for the Army at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.
In many cases, suspects had left the service. The Army did not attempt to pursue them, despite a written opinion in 1969 by Robert E. Jordan III, then the Army's general counsel, that ex-soldiers could be prosecuted through courts-martial, military commissions or tribunals.
''I don't remember why it didn't go anywhere,'' said Jordan, now a lawyer in Washington, D.C.
Top Army brass should have demanded a tougher response, said retired Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard, the highest-ranking member of the Pentagon task force in the early 1970s.
''We could have court-martialed them but didn't,'' Gard said of soldiers accused of war crimes. ''The whole thing is terribly disturbing.''
Early warnings
In March 1968, members of the 23rd Infantry Division slaughtered about 500 Vietnamese civilians in the hamlet of My Lai. Reporter Seymour Hersh exposed the massacre the following year.
By then, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam at the time of My Lai, had become Army chief of staff.
A task force was assembled from members of his staff to monitor war crimes allegations and serve as an early-warning system.
Over the next few years, members of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group reviewed Army investigations and wrote reports and summaries for military brass and the White House.
The records were declassified in 1994, after 20 years as required by law, and moved to the National Archives in College Park, Md., where they went largely unnoticed.
The Los Angeles Times examined most of the files and obtained copies of about 3,000 pages - about one-third of the total - before government officials removed them from the public shelves, saying they contained personal information that was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
In addition to the 320 substantiated incidents, the records contain material related to more than 500 alleged atrocities that Army investigators could not prove or that they discounted.
Johns said many war crimes did not make it into the archive.
Some were prosecuted without being identified as war crimes, as required by military regulations. Others were never reported.
Westmoreland notified
In a letter to Westmoreland in 1970, an anonymous sergeant described widespread, unreported killings of civilians by members of the 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta - and blamed pressure from superiors to generate high body counts.
''A batalion (sic) would kill maybe 15 to 20 (civilians) a day. With 4 batalions in the brigade that would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 to 1500 a month, easy,'' the unnamed sergeant wrote. ''If I am only 10 percent right, and believe me it's lots more, then I am trying to tell you about 120-150 murders, or a My Lay (sic) each month for over a year.''
A high-level Army review of the letter cited its ''forcefulness,'' ''sincerity'' and ''inescapable logic,'' and urged then-Secretary of the Army Stanley R. Resor to make sure the push for verifiable body counts ''does not encourage the human tendency to inflate the count by violating established rules of engagement.''
Investigators tried to find the letter writer and ''prevent his complaints from reaching'' then-Rep. Ronald V. Dellums, D-Calif., according to an August 1971 memo to Westmoreland.
The records do not say whether the writer was located, and there is no evidence in the files that his complaint was investigated further.
Pvt. Henry
James D. ''Jamie'' Henry was 19 in March 1967, when the Army shaved his hippie locks and packed him off to boot camp.
He had been living with his mother in Sonoma County, Calif., working as hospital aide and moonlighting as a flower child in San Francisco, when he received a letter from his draft board.
Soon he was on his way to Vietnam, part of a 100,000-man influx that brought U.S. troop strength to 485,000 by the end of 1967. They entered a conflict growing ever bloodier for Americans - 9,378 U.S. troops would die in 1967, 87 percent more than the year before.
Henry was a medic with B Company of the 1st Battalion, 35th Infantry, 4th Infantry Division. He described his experiences in a sworn statement to Army investigators several years later and in recent interviews with the Los Angeles Times.
In the fall of 1967, he was on his first patrol, marching along the edge of a rice paddy in Quang Nam province, when the soldiers encountered a teenage girl.
''The guy in the lead immediately stops her and puts his hand down her pants,'' Henry said. ''I just thought, 'My God, what's going on?' ''
A day or two later, he saw soldiers senselessly stabbing a pig.
''I talked to them about it, and they told me if I wanted to live very long I should shut my mouth,'' he told Army investigators.
Eyes and ears open
Henry might have kept his mouth shut, but he kept his eyes and ears open.
On Oct. 8, 1967, after a firefight near Chu Lai, members of his company spotted a 12-year-old boy out in a rainstorm. He was unarmed and clad only in shorts.
''Somebody caught him up on a hill, and they brought him down and the lieutenant asked who wanted to kill him,'' Henry told investigators.
Two volunteers stepped forward. One kicked the boy in the stomach. The other took him behind a rock and shot him, according to Henry's statement. They tossed his body in a river and reported him as an enemy combatant killed in action.
Three days later, B Company detained and beat an elderly man suspected of supporting the enemy. He had trouble keeping pace as the soldiers marched him up a steep hill.
''When I turned around, two men had him, one guy had his arms, one guy had his legs and they threw him off the hill onto a bunch of rocks,'' Henry's statement said.
On Oct. 15, some of the men took a break during a large-scale ''search-and-destroy'' operation. Henry said he overheard a lieutenant on the radio requesting permission to test-fire his weapon, and went to see what was happening.
He found two soldiers using a Vietnamese man for target practice, Henry said. They had discovered the victim sleeping in a hut and decided to kill him for sport.
''Everybody was taking pot shots at him, seeing how accurate they were,'' Henry said in his statement.
Back at base camp on Oct. 23, he said, members of the 1st Platoon told him they had ambushed five unarmed women and reported them as enemies killed in action. Later, members of another platoon told him they had seen the bodies.
For his combat service, Henry earned a Bronze Star with a V for valor, and a Combat Medical Badge, among other awards. A fellow member of his unit said in a sworn statement that Henry regularly disregarded his own safety to save soldiers' lives and showed ''compassion and decency'' toward enemy prisoners.
When Henry finished his tour and arrived at Fort Hood, Texas, in September 1968, he went to see an Army legal officer to report the atrocities he'd witnessed. The officer advised him to keep quiet until he got out of the Army, ''because of the million and one charges you can be brought up on for blinking your eye,'' Henry said.
Honorably discharged in March 1969, Henry moved to Canoga Park, Calif., enrolled in college and helped organize a campus chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
Then he ended his silence: He published his account of the massacre in the debut issue of Scanlan's Monthly, a short-lived muckraking magazine, on Feb. 27, 1970. Henry held a news conference the same day at the Los Angeles Press Club.
Army investigators interviewed Henry the day after the news conference. His sworn statement filled 10 single-spaced, typed pages. Henry did not expect anything to come of it: ''I never got the impression they were ever doing anything.''
The investigation



Unknown to Henry, Army investigators pursued his allegations, tracking down members of his old unit over the next 31�„2 years.
Witnesses described the killing of the young boy, the man used for target practice, the five unarmed women, the man thrown beneath the armored personnel carrier and other atrocities. Their statements also provided vivid corroboration of the Feb. 8, 1968, massacre.
The Criminal Investigation Division assigned Warrant Officer Jonathan P. Coulson in Los Angeles to complete the investigation and write a final report on the ''Henry Allegation.'' He sent his findings to headquarters in Washington, D.C., in January 1974.
Evidence showed the massacre did occur, the report said. The War Crimes Working Group records give no indication that action was taken against any of the men named in the report.
(Published: August 6, 2006)

[Me#1You#10]

[mach9]

This is a cultural war of epic proportion. I wonder if our side is up to the task of combatting it.[/quote]

We are if we've got the money to do it!

[JN173]

For the benifit of those who are lurking or who don't remember Mr. Bangert, the following is excerpts of his "Winter Soldier" testimony.

I would have loved for him to have been forced "to produce evidence of U.S. military atrocities Bangert has long insisted he witnessed while in Vietnam - such as the skinning of a young girl."

http://ice.he.net/~freepnet/kerry/staticpages/index.php?page=20040315221225656

[Schadow]

[mach9]

[quote="JN173"] . . . anyway, they were human beings, obviously dead, and they would take them and string them out on fences, on barbed wire fences, stripped, and sometimes they would take flesh wounds, take a knife and cut the body all over the place to make it bleed, and look gory as a reminder to the people in the village."


He sure missed a lot of episodes of Quincy, M. E. Slash the dead body & make it bleed?

[carpro]