I spent several hours last weekend reading the transcript of the Winter Soldier Investigation to which John Kerry referred in his testimony to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations in 1971. It was an enlightening, albeit, grueling read that stirred many emotions in me. Of course I knew about the atrocities, had heard of My Lai, Agent Orange, and the destruction of Vietnamese villages, but there's nothing like reading the testimonies of the men who personaly witnessed, and in many cases committed, acts of unspeakable horror. Yet speak they did, testifying in almost unbearable detail about the atrocities of the war in Vietnam. When I finished reading, I thought about trying to put my emotions into words and then I came across a beautifully written essay that said everything I thought and felt more eloquently than I think I could.
For The Living: The Winter Soldier Investigation
By Lisa Gaye Dixon
As someone involved in the performing arts, I have come to an understanding of the power of language, both written and spoken. Although a person can also be moved by what is left unwritten or unsaid, sometimes the telling of a dangerous truth has more power than could ever be imagined. I have recently read the full text of the Winter Soldier Investigation (WSI), on the Internet - all of it, beginning to end. This seemed to surprise some of my friends and acquaintances, that one would (or could) read the entire transcript, but I didn't really think about it at the time, not until much later. Then I thought: yes, this is an event, this telling, and it has power. And it has touched me.
I returned to live in my home town late last year, and have only recently become aware of the existence of VVAW and its members. Until my meeting and talking with Joe Miller and Barry Romo and Jeff Machota, and my reading of the WSI, I had been fairly ignorant of the role we played in Vietnam. I suppose I was one of those armchair protesters, who know more about an issue than 80% of the population, but are still sadly lacking in any real, in-depth understanding of it. I knew we were wrong to be in Vietnam. I knew we had fought a basically 'unwinnable' war for unreal reasons; I even knew about things like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Agent Orange and My Lai and atrocities committed by the U.S. troops, but I was also (sadly) a child of the 80s. I grew up with Rambo and Superman and Let's Get Harry and God knows how many other whitewashing films that gave the lie to what we did in Vietnam. I thought about it all with a jaundiced, lazy eye, knowing something was not quite right, but unwilling to look further into it myself. I was, like the rest of the world, truly ignorant of what we did to others, and what we did to ourselves.As I began to read the Winter Soldier Investigation, the first major impression I got was of looking into a time capsule. As the testimony is verbatim (for the most part), I heard the voices of young men speaking in the vernacular of the Sixties and Seventies: the time of AIM, the Black Panthers, the Chicano movement - people of color beginning to reclaim their own across the land. Having spent way too much time immersed in the cultural wasteland of the Eighties, this hearkened me back to my pre-teen days, when 'hippie' wasn't a bad word and calling someone 'brother' actually meant something. This alone was a re-learning experience.
Then, as I began to read further, as I read page after page after page of young men, often boys really, speaking about what they had done and what had been done to them, I began to feel two distinct things: The first was a deep, profound sadness. My God, what had we been doing? Everyone talks about how Vietnam was the first war brought into our homes because of the arrival of television, but no one ever, ever, EVER told me about the consistent, relentless burning of homes, free fire zones, mad minutes, dropping shackled prisoners from helicopters, torture as a matter of course. Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather had neglected to mention this. I was sad because, well, no one really wants to be proven right in their cynicism. I wanted the bad guys to be only at the top. I wanted to be able to blame the generals and the pentagon and the president yes, but not the boys who came from hometowns like mine, not the young men I might have known. Not everyone.
Even so, my sadness was laced with fear. Not of these men, these Winter Soldiers baring their souls, but of those who spread the terror of an unreal communist threat, of those who didn't really believe, but indoctrinated others to do so. Because throughout reading all the tales of immediate barbarity the same question kept creeping into the back of my mind: Where is the wellspring of this evil? Is it the young man who mistakenly believes he is fighting to save something, and too late realizes his duplicity? Is it the senator, the general, the congressman who sees dollar signs over the green hills of southeast Asia? And, is that not the true evil, to knowingly send men to kill and be killed, to brainwash them into believing in the subhumanity of others for profit? This is as chilling to me as any of the tales told by the Winter Soldiers.
On another level, I also began to feel a rising anger. We hadn't just tortured countless Vietnamese. We had acutely damaged an entire generation of American men. We had taken the souls of young men and twisted them to a dark intention, then discarded them like so much roadside garbage when they were no longer of use to us. I shivered as I read. I read and read, one account after another, each successive man piling his story of atrocity onto that one of brutality, either witnessed or participated in, and...well even now I cannot find the words to express exactly what I felt. But I knew I had to keep reading.
And strangely, I began to feel something else. Even on the page, I felt a courage that was far beyond what any of us experiences in our relatively safe lives on a day to day basis. I sensed the shock and anger of these men as they spoke, not just of actions taken against Vietnamese civilians, but against each other. They spoke of institutionalized and pervasive racism within the armed forces, from who walks point to who gets dishonorably discharged - lies, constant fear of the enemy and of each other. Of the betrayal of their bodies and their beliefs, And always, as they related their stories the shadow of their own deaths lay in the telling. Speaking the truth is sometimes difficult and often dangerous, and the truths told here - about their country and about themselves - the very telling alone was an assault on the powers that be.
There is something in the African-American community (and among other peoples as well) called 'bearing witness.' Bearing Witness means that you become a part of what you learn. You cannot ignore that which passes before your eyes, and though you might not have been an eyewitness or participant, through the giving and the taking in, you become one. You have a responsibility not to let that memory die, to pass the lesson on, to speak for those who are no longer able to do so. To tell the story, and tell it true, so that it will not be forgotten. Holocaust survivors do this for those who died in the camps, Black folks pass down legends from one generation to the next, stories that often reach from the middle passage through slavery down to the present. Most immigrant communities, Latino, Irish, Eastern European, etc., have a history rich with stories of brutality and triumph. While the stories of these men, the Winter Soldiers, came from a different set of circumstances, the crux of the need is still the same. As I read what these men had to say, I began to share something with them, to 'bear witness' to their experiences, and to a pain that I could in no way feel, but nonetheless must somehow come to understand. In reading, I had become a part of the telling, and now I had a responsibility. I was no longer an audience to be kept at a distance, uninvolved and 'clean.' As I read I learned, and as I learned, I had to do. By bearing witness, I join my voice with yours and I say, 'yes, you will be heard.'
So, what have I learned? I have learned that true courage has nothing to do with white-hatted heroes riding into the sunset. Rather, it is to do with everyday people facing inner demons and fire, acknowledging the truth of themselves and thereby reaffirming their own humanity. I cannot say why I feel as deeply as I do. Maybe it's because, as a black woman, living in a country that values neither my color nor my sex, it is a strange comfort to have met VVAW members who often intuitively understand what I feel: the experience of being a 'stranger in a strange land', in my own home country. Maybe it is simply that as a fellow human being I know that I cannot let the truth be lost. Yes, it is important for people to read and review and think about the Vietnam War. For the same reasons we must not forget the Holocaust, or Slavery or the Killing Fields of Cambodia, or the Gaza Strip. In doing this, in remembering, the telling is not done to assuage or absolve guilt, but to scrape away the lies and reveal the truth. Hopefully in doing so we can lessen the pain for those who remain, and begin to dismantle and disempower the status quo, and lend strength to those in struggle everywhere.
A luta continua....
Lisa Dixon is an 'alien in residence,' having returned to the cornfields after an extended absence. She sings, writes, acts, and works.
Wow. That's powerful.
Posted by: Karlo at September 2, 2004 09:58 PMVery powerful.
I'm just reading the testimonies and I'm amazed by how clearly John Kerry's message comes through all that they say. He was so right, the atrocities were part of a policy. God, that's so evil.
I would be very interested to know the history of all the Neocons and Pentagon staff in the Bush administration to see how many of them were involved in Vietnam policy making back then. Didn't Rumsfeld work in the Pentagon under Nixon?
Posted by: supa at September 3, 2004 05:42 AM"the atrocities were part of a policy"
Utter BS. Did atrocities happen? YES were they part of the grand strategy? HELL NO
Whenever it could be proven that such atrocity occured, those involved were charged, tried, and if the charges were proven, punished. As they should be. We see that the same is being done in regard to Abu Ghraib.
Most of those "vets" in the Winter Soldier Investigation were later proven to have never served in Viet Nam, indeed, some of them never served at all.
And forget all that occurred in Viet Nam, Kerry has proven time and again that he is unfit by his senate voting record:He voted against EVERY new proposed weapons system and AFTER the first bombing of the WTC, he attempted to gut funding for our intelligence agencies....You all decry the fact that Bush led us into war on the "basis of faulty intellegence"(ignoring the fact that every other intell unit in the world agreed with our assesment), has it ever occurred to you that maybe the intell would have been better if they hadn't had to fight for every scrap of funds to conduct such operations due to people like Kerry?
Posted by: delftsman3 at September 3, 2004 10:04 AMHas it ever occured to you that the most damaging thing to the priciples of the United States has been that which Ike warned us about in his final speech as President back in 1960: the military/industrial complex.
Posted by: cul at September 3, 2004 12:44 PMMilitary-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html
"Most of those "vets" in the Winter Soldier Investigation were later proven to have never served in Viet Nam, indeed, some of them never served at all."
Proven? Where is the proof? This is what annoys me about Republicans, they just say things, they never back anything up.
These men gave their name, their rank, their platoon, the town they're from, the date they enlisted, and so much detail that it defies all probability that they could have made this stuff up. And you expect me to just take it on your word?
You're on the Internet, do some googling and come up with the facts to back your assertions.
Delftsman, the U.S. spends as much as the next 20 countries COMBINED on military spending and would probably account for a huge chunk of the entire world's military spending if we created a pie chart. Yet we represent only a tiny thin slice of the world's population. So when would you be satisfied? Should we spend 99% of the world's military expenditures? Is there every a time when conservatives say "no" to war or money for the military. I get the sense from you that military spending is an inherent good on par with children's laughter or helping old ladies across the street--something that can never be questioned except by the morally and intellectually corrupt.
Posted by: Karlo at September 3, 2004 10:49 PM'Delftsman, the U.S. spends as much as the next 20 countries COMBINED on military spending and would probably account for a huge chunk of the entire world's military spending if we created a pie chart."
Yes it's true we send a great deal more than most counmtries do on defense; one reason for that is that we provide the defense for most of the rest of the world. Bush wants to change that; thats the reason for moving the troops out of Germany and Korea.
Defense spending is one of the few CONSTITUTIONAL expeditures the government engages in. It's not the be all and end all, but as a small "l" libertarian, it's one of the few that government should engage in for the common good. Carter allowed the military to laguish, and we got Al Quaida; we let them attack us on foreign soil, beginning with the Marine barracks in Beiruit with no response(one of the few times Reagan really messed up by listening to the doves like Kerry in Congress;continuing through the various embassy bombings;the Aquili Lauro(sic):the USS Cole leading up to 9/11. Bush had the guts to say "NO MORE" and is trying to root out the problem....the problem wouldn't exist if we had responded as we should have in the first instance.
The children can laugh and the old ladies cross the street in safety because enough young men and women realize that freedom isn't free, and are willing to put themselves in harms way, knowing that they may have to pay the price of that freedom. There is no higher calling than the defense of freedom, I only wish that I could rejoin in that effort.
Supa:http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GuestColumns/Swett20040224.shtml I know this is just an opinion piece, but the telling paragraph is this:
"In the end, the Navy was unable to verify any of the hundreds of war crimes alleged by the Winter Soldier Investigation. Neither has anyone else during the 33 years since, including journalists, historians, and military and Congressional investigators."
It was shown that many of the claiments used the names of real vets when making their allegations to lend creedence to those allegations, thats why they refused to testify before a real investigation....identity theft was a crime then as well as now.
Must be that old Military-Industrial Complex hiding the truth...no one had the guts to break ranks, even journalists? Not one Democrat wanting to shove it to a Republican administration,in 35 years?
Here are the people that brought you the winter soldiers investigation; as determined by the FBI: http://ice.he.net/~freepnet/kerry/staticpages/index.php?page=VVAWFBI
I know....the FBI is a facist state tool, right?
I guess we should all report to the Gulags then, because once the level of cynicism is to the point that we can trust none of those agencies that are supposed to safeguard the public trust, we are in a police state.
Ok delftsman, fair enough. Although your sources look suspect, I will look into them.
Posted by: supa at September 5, 2004 12:32 AMUh both those links are from the same source:
Scott Swett is a director of the Free Republic Network, sponsor of www.wintersoldier.com.
He's what is known all over the net as a "Freeper," from whence the Right Wingers get their talking points and spread them throughout the Net,in hordes.
delftsman, you might as well be using the NeoNazi stormfront as your source, it's equally biased, and about as fanatically Right Wing as you can get.
This part glares out at me:
"It’s not nearly as easy to smear America’s military with false atrocity charges – or to hide a politician’s ugly past -- in the Age of the Internet."
Right. And it's not nearly as easy for the Swift Boat ads to smear Kerry's record. Nor is it as easy for Scott Swett's wintersoldier site, which is a blatant smear campaign against John Kerry, to prevail under scrutiny.
At the end of the day, none of this is about Vietnam or the soldiers, it's a hot botton issue to get veterans like you all worked up and talking, in order to discredit a Presidential candidate, so that Bush can get re-elected.
Posted by: Diana at September 5, 2004 01:09 AMScott Swett says: As recounted in Guenter Lewy's 1978 book “America in Vietnam,” few witnesses agreed to talk with military investigators, even after being assured that they would not be asked about their own crimes.
This point was brought up by O'Neill, a Navy representing Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace, in a Dick Cavett interview with John Kerry:
MR. O'NEILL: that's very interesting that you would say that, John. I've got an article right now. It's from the May 8, 1971, New York Times. It concerns some of the testimony. It concerns a Danny S. Notley (phonetic spelling), who apparently is a member of your organization. The Army pursued him all the way to Minnesota to try and get him to sign a deposition regarding the allegations of war crimes that he made, and he refused to, as have all 50 people that testified there and 150 that testified in Detroit, and so I suggest that if you're honest, you ought to finally produce the depositions after all of us waiting for two months.
Kerry answered this question thus:
"the reason that some of these men have not signed depositions is very, very simple, and it's up to each individual. One reason is that specifically they are not looking to implicate other people. They haven't cited names of individuals involved because they don't want more Calleys. They don't want men to enter double jeopardy, to have to come back to the United States of America and be penalized for those things that they did that were the result of the mistakes and the bad decisions of their leaders.
And the purpose of them not signing them is literally to call for an examination of policy and not scapegoats and to examine it from the President of the United States to General Westmoreland and others. And when they do that, then they will sign and then they will talk."
It's perfectly obvious that you could never have gotten over 200 soldiers to admit to having committed war crimes if they would have to legally implicate themselves by signing depositions. Nor did they want to implicate their fellow soldiers. That wasn't the point. The point was to show that there was a policy that went all the way to the top, and that the war must be stopped so that these atrocities don't continue.
But all you really have to do is read the testimonies. Nobody could make this stuff
Posted by: Diana at September 5, 2004 01:28 AMLink to the Dick Cavett Show transcript:
http://ice.he.net/~freepnet/kerry/staticpages/index.php?page=20040503214623700
Posted by: Diana at September 5, 2004 01:29 AMThe Source of the INFORMATION was from the FBI files, Diane. I can understand you don't like the group that is disseminating the information, thats a fair complaint,don't ever take anyone's word for anything untill you can verify from seperate sources, but that doesn't alter the facts as provided by the FBI. Don't dismiss it out of hand; google other sources and see if the facts bear out. You still can't explain why NONE of these charges have ever been determined to have merit by ANY investigative force; if these actions were so widespread, indeed a matter of policy, SOMEONE,SOMEWHERE, would have come forward with the truth in the intervening 35 years.
You say that they wouldn't sign and implicate themselves or others as war criminals, yet that is exactly what Kerry did in his testimony before Congress. So why wasn't he prosecuted? It seems that their defense of not wanting to be "scapegoated" just doesn't hold up in that light doesn't it? If they didn't prosecute ONE man for self-admitted crimes, I hardly think that a large group would have been, the public wouldn't have stood for it.
I was in the Army at the time, Diane, and I can assure you that there was no such policies put out by the government. Any soldier given orders to that effect would refuse those orders as mandated under the UCMJ, or face charges of war crimes. THAT was drummed into our heads from the first day of boot camp.
Posted by: delftsman3 at September 6, 2004 07:48 AM"The children can laugh and the old ladies cross the street in safety because enough young men and women realize that freedom isn't free, and are willing to put themselves in harms way, knowing that they may have to pay the price of that freedom."
If Reagan, Bush 1, Kissinger and the other right-wing bunch hadn't supported Deng, the Shah, Pinochet, the Taliban, Saddam, Noriega, and their other foreign terrorist flunkeys to begin with, anti-U.S. terrorists worldwide would have had a hell of a time in their recruitment efforts, don't you think? "Freedom" might not be free, but fighting for Halliburton also isn't free. It costs thousands of U.S. and coalition lives (not to mentioned many more innocent Iraqi lives. And I won't bother bringing up the financial costs.
Posted by: Karlo at September 6, 2004 11:32 PMBTW, here's a comment by one of those that testified for VVAW:http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=40333
How many others were coerced in the same manner?
I suppose that Carter and Clinton stopped the move to Terrorism? funny that all the acts were either commited or planned under THEIR administrations (except for the marine barracks in Beiruit) (9/11 to upwards of four years planning according to Al Quiada sources) And the Clinton Administration used Halliburton the entire 8 years, with no-bid contracts....they arer the only company big enough to do the jobs asked of them...and it seems the Army is opening the contracts up for bidding after the first of the year, so much for Cheney's influance...
Posted by: delftsman3 at September 9, 2004 07:14 AMI agree with you delftman. Clinton was also a schmuck. As for evil acts being "planned" under Democratic administrations, do you really believe that? So everyone evil takes 4 years off every time a Republican gets elected. Bush sounds more and more like the ancient Chinese emperors who would simply face south, and the rice would then grow, the kingdom be peaceful and the deer all have sex and produce offspring. 5000 years of history and we're still believing the same bullshit.
Posted by: Karlo at September 14, 2004 12:37 AM