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kmudd
Master Chief Petty Officer
Joined: 16 Aug 2004
Posts: 825
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 Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2004 7:57 pm Post subject: |
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The following is from an essay about Bob Kerrey not John Kerrey but this part answers the question about if there was widespread war crimes.
| Quote: | Bob Kerrey, War Criminal?(Critical Essay)
Commentary; 7/1/2001; Schoenfeld, Gabriel
Some of Bob Kerrey's fellow veterans, ostensibly in a position to know, insist that massacres were indeed common. One of them is Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a founder back in the early 1970's of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. At a 1971 congressional hearing, Kerry told of an unofficial investigation conducted by his organization in which over "150 honorably discharged veterans testified to war crimes" committed in Southeast Asia:
They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears,
cut off heads, taped 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 foodstocks, and generally ravaged the
countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war.
Undeniably, serious crimes were committed against civilians by American soldiers. But as Guenter Lewy shows, the court-martial record from the period of January 1965 through March 1973 reveals that incidents of this kind were relatively rare and relatively small-scale. Over the course of eight years, 122 Army and Marine personnel were convicted of murder or manslaughter; of the total number of incidents, only a quarter "represented killings during the course of combat not justified by military necessity." The most infamous was the massacre at My Lai in 1968 in which more than 400 Vietnamese villagers were murdered.
As is the case today with Thanh Phong, some antiwar activists have long insisted that "My Lai epitomizes the Vietnam war," in the words of the Yale psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton. But in fact, as Norman Podhoretz writes persuasively in Why We Were in Vietnam (1982), a book that also anticipates and answers many of the questions raised by the Kerrey affair, no other outrages on anything close to the scale of My Lai have ever been uncovered; "given the number of antiwar journalists reporting on Vietnam," Podhoretz adds, it is highly unlikely that "if other such atrocities had occurred, they could have been kept secret." Thus, if Thanh Phong is indeed a new addition to the list of crimes committed by Americans in Vietnam, it would darken but not significantly alter the overall picture.
IN THE final analysis, civilian deaths in large numbers, whether incurred deliberately or accidentally, are one of the central and inevitable features of modern war. Nor are those now loudly questioning American conduct in Vietnam always so fastidious about such casualties, as the case of Daniel J. Goldhagen illustrates. Only a few years ago, during the war in Yugoslavia, this same scholar, whose conscience is now deeply exercised by the fate of Vietnamese villagers in the Mekong Delta, was calling for a military campaign that would have caused civilian blood to flow in quantities sufficient to turn the Danube red.
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nightingale97
Ensign
Joined: 20 Aug 2004
Posts: 50
Location: Texas
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| Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2004 8:03 pm Post subject: |
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I missed the show and "Kathy's" call...but I'm 99% sure she has no real data to prove her statements. I would need to see a published scientific research paper completed by reputable researchers who have interviewed all the VN vets. My husband who did a complete tour in 68-69 in the 101st said he NEVER saw nor heard of any atrocities in his nor any other unit.
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Proud to serve! No medals required! |
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Navy_Navy_Navy
Admin
Joined: 07 May 2004
Posts: 5777
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| Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2004 8:09 pm Post subject: |
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It turns my stomach that 30+ years later, the same socialist propandists STILL want you to believe that My Lai "epitomizes the Vietnam war."
Are you happy with your legacy, Kerry? Are you proud of what you led and what you helped to build and insinuate into our culture?
Talk back - these idiots have NO friggin' clue. 
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~ Echo Juliet ~
Altering course to starboard - On Fire, Keep Clear
Navy woman, Navy wife, Navy mother |
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FrydayNC1
Seaman Recruit
Joined: 21 Aug 2004
Posts: 23
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| Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2004 8:20 pm Post subject: |
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75% of all vets committed war crimes. I got some bad news for Kathy. at the wars peak we had something like 550,000 troops there, doing so doing her math that means we had 416,250 troops running around committing war crimes. That figures include Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force and Coast Guard. I know the ship I served on during 1967 fired on truck coveys, ran through fishing net, blew up a few of those sampans. I would have to guess Kathy is pure 75% BS.
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rekcutt
Ensign
Joined: 20 Aug 2004
Posts: 68
Location: Texas
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| Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2004 9:27 pm Post subject: Kathy |
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Sounds to me like Kathy is a loon, a common trait found in liberals.
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SwiftVets, keep up the GREAT work, truth will win out over spin. |
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Wolfgang
Ensign
Joined: 14 Aug 2004
Posts: 61
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| Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2004 10:38 pm Post subject: Re: ON RUSH...Kathy says 75% committed atrocities |
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| Grampa wrote: | | 4moreyears wrote: | | Incredible...Kathy's brother committed suicide after returning from VN. Now she states that 75% of veterans committed war crimes. |
Who the hell is Kathy and what makes her an authority on war crimes statistics? |
Can anyone help me and Grampa out with this? |
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sixdogteam
Seaman
Joined: 06 Aug 2004
Posts: 183
Location: Upper Wabash River Valley
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| Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2004 10:53 pm Post subject: |
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My tour was 11 months, 10 days, and I have direct knowledge of only one atrocity, deliberate murder of an innocent farmer, and the perps were reported and incident investigated... We had two actual fraggings/ attempted fraggings (one of which I witnessed the explosion) of our own officers, and one other grenade "warning", all investigated...Atrocities occur in all wars at all times, on all sides, but to my knowledge were no more prevalent in Viet Nam than any other conflict on our part--these traiors like "Kathy" and John Fonda Kerry, who don't know what they're talking about, are our enemies even more than the VC and NVA were, and need to shut up. I can't believe that they really believe in the accuracy of what they're saying, and that makes them lying traitor scum.
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HHC 212th CAB MMAF RVN '70-'71 |
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Hans Burkhardt
Ensign
Joined: 05 Aug 2004
Posts: 53
Location: USA
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| Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2004 11:29 pm Post subject: |
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More fodder for the mindless sheeple.
Think about it; I'm not sure my figures are exactly correct but I believe I heard that it takes 3 support personnel to sustain one combat trooper. If that number is evern close to being correct, 75% of the vets were support in non-combat situations. How does this relate to the 75% that she was talking about?? Even if I forgot the exact distribution, a ratio of 2 to 1 still blows the statement out of the water. |
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Beatrice1000
Resource Specialist
Joined: 10 Aug 2004
Posts: 1179
Location: Minneapolis, MN
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| Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2004 11:34 pm Post subject: |
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| Navy_Navy_Navy wrote: | | All kinds of cockroaches are crawling out of the woodwork to support the original lies and slander perpetrated by John F'n Kerry & Co. |
Yes - I have noted the press turning in this direction --they seem to be eager about it, looking for it, to my dismay! Like they want blood, or something. -- I get a feeling that Kerry's people, behind the scenes, are running all over the country to find people that did criminal acts in Viet Nam .. sort of like, could it be now, ANOTHER wintersoldier investigation??
75% were war criminals!!?? oh man, these people have got to be stopped -- they CANNOT DO THIS AGAIN!! |
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