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War and remembrance


Jerusalem Post; 3/12/2004; MACKUBIN THOMAS OWENS




Jerusalem Post

03-12-2004

Headline: War and remembrance
Byline: MACKUBIN THOMAS OWENS
Edition; Up Front
Section: Features
Page: 12

Friday, March 12, 2004 -- Over the last three decades, polls have indicated that the American public believes Republicans will do a better job of defending the United States against its enemies than Democrats. Democrats are hoping that their presumptive nominee for the presidential contest in 2004, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Ma), will be able to count on his record as a decorated Vietnam veteran to deflect the customary accusation against Democrats as "soft on defense."

There are two reasons why this may not work.

First, in his 19 years in the US Senate, Kerry has established quite a record as an opponent of defense programs and the US intelligence establishment. Indeed, he has voted against nearly every major weapons system that has come before the Senate over two decades, including those that have been successful in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Second, after the Vietnam War, Kerry chose to oppose the war in a manner that slanders and dishonors the service of the same Vietnam veterans with whom he now surrounds himself. He did so by claiming that US soldiers had committed widespread atrocities and war crimes that were a matter of policy.

For instance in the testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971 that transformed him into a rising political star, Kerry repeated as fact the charge that American soldiers "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 a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam..."

These were not isolated incidents, he said, "but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command..."

Kerry, who served with distinction in Vietnam, had every right to speak out against the war after his return. But the vehicle he chose was the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), a small, radical group that was bankrolled by Jane Fonda and other Hollywood activists. This group, never exceeding a membership of 7,000 from a pool of some nine million veterans, essentially "Americanized" Soviet propaganda.

As Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former high-ranking Romanian intelligence chief, related in a February 26 piece for National Review Online, he was responsible for fabricating stories about US atrocities in Vietnam and "flacking" them to Western news organizations. The Soviets also set up Stockholm Conference on Vietnam "as a permanent international organization to aid or to conduct operations to help Americans dodge the draft or defect, to demoralize its army with anti-American propaganda, to conduct protests, demonstrations, and boycotts, and to sanction anyone connected with the war."

THE SORT of charges that Kerry repeated had been making the rounds at Stockholm since 1965. It was as if an Israeli were to give credence to Arab claims that the IDF routinely commits atrocities, as in the infamous case of the Jenin "massacre."

Kerry's campaign seems determined to misrepresent his record after the war. According to a campaign spokesman, Kerry "praised the noble service of his fellow servicemen and women." But this is very odd praise indeed. Kerry in essence claimed that his fellow veterans had committed unparalleled war crimes in Vietnam as a matter of course; indeed, that it was US policy to commit such atrocities.

Kerry's 1971 testimony includes every left-wing cliche about Vietnam and the men who served there. It is part of the reason that, even today, people who are too young to remember Vietnam are predisposed to believe the worst about that conflict and those who fought it.

Of course, atrocities did occur in Vietnam, as they have in all wars; the most notorious was the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which hundreds of civilians were killed. But despite the accepted image of the Vietnam War as particularly brutal, atrocities were infrequent. Between 1965 and 1973, 201 soldiers and 77 Marines were convicted of serious crimes against the Vietnamese. (Needless to say, the fact that many crimes, in war as in peace, go unreported, combined with the particular difficulties encountered by Americans fighting in Vietnam, suggest that more such acts were committed than reported.)

But even Daniel Ellsberg, a severe critic of US policy in Vietnam, rejected the argument that My Lai was in any way a normal event: "My Lai was beyond the bounds of permissible behavior, and that is recognizable by virtually every soldier in Vietnam. They know it was wrong... The men who were at My Lai knew there were aspects out of the ordinary. That is why they tried to hide the event, talked about it to no one, discussed it very little even among themselves."

So how does one account for the testimony of the veterans that Kerry cited in his address to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee? My own belief is that it was part of a ritual. To the anti-war Left, atrocities revealed the Nazi-like character of "Amerika." But, unlike their Nazi counterparts, US soldiers could be redeemed: By confessing that they had indeed committed widespread atrocities, the Vietnam veterans were able to receive absolution for their sins from the anti-war Left, and were accordingly transmuted into innocent victims of a brutal war.

As Guenter Lewy wrote in America in Vietnam, the reports of alleged atrocities were retrospective and therefore subject to distortion, "created by the veterans' perception of the interviewers and organizers of the hearings, by their attitudes toward the military and by their difficulties in adjusting to civilian life after discharge."

THERE IS also the question of veracity. In this vein, the American military sociologist, Charles Moskos, has suggested that atrocity stories out of Vietnam were the functional equivalent of heroic war stories from World War II. Atrocity stories provided a meaning to participation in the Vietnam War that resonated with those who opposed the war who now judged the returning soldiers.

Some atrocity claims were the product of fantasy on the part of soldiers who returned from the war emotionally disturbed. The anti-war psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton wrote of a veteran who, after some time in group therapy, could "confess that he had been much less violent in Vietnam than he had implied. He had previously given the impression that he had killed many people there, whereas in actuality, despite extensive combat experience, he could not be certain he had killed anyone."

Finally, there are the phonies. Vietnam veterans are indebted to B.G. "Jug" Burkett and Glenna Whitley who in their indispensable book, Stolen Valor, demonstrated that some 1,700 individuals, including some of the most prominent examples of the Vietnam veteran as dysfunctional loser, had fabricated their war stories. Many had never even been in the service. Others had been, but had never been in Vietnam.

The fact is that the stories that Kerry presented as fact in his 1971 testimony should have been unbelievable on their face (especially for a veteran). They had been debunked even by anti-war liberals at the time, and have been further discredited since.

This entire episode suggests a character flaw in Kerry, one that should send up a red flag for those Vietnam veterans who have supported him so far. In the Stephen Ambrose series about American soldiers in World War II, Band of Brothers, one of the characters says, "I was not a hero, but I was surrounded by heroes." Kerry essentially says of his comrades in Vietnam that "I was a hero, but I was surrounded by murderers and rapists."

Today, Kerry appeals to veterans in his quest for the White House. He invokes his Vietnam service at every turn. But how can he? If he believes his 1971 indictment of his country and his fellow veterans was true, then he couldn't possibly be proud of his Vietnam service. Who can be proud of committing war crimes of the sort that Kerry recounted in his testimony?

But if he is proud of his service today, perhaps it is because he always knew that his indictment in 1971 was a piece of political theater that he, an aspiring politician, exploited merely as a "good issue." If the latter is true, he should apologize to all the men who served in that war, for slandering them to advance his political fortunes.

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