Letters to the editor
Anti-Kerry campaign lacks credibility
To the editor:
The so-called "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" launched a devastating ad campaign against John Kerry, claiming he did not really face enemy fire in Vietnam, nor deserve the medals awarded. Now Sinclair media, controlling 25 percent of national television markets, has shown part of a "documentary" days before the election, purported to report Kerry's betrayal of all veterans.
If we want to re-debate the Vietnam War and Kerry's role in it, let's do so, but with historical honesty. It was a war never declared by Congress, therefore, illegal by our Constitution. It was initiated by our State Department's Domino Theory, that to keep communism from our shores, we must fight it in Vietnam, chosen as the battleground after a fabricated report that our navy was attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. No evidence of an attack was ever presented to the Congress, which gave the president a blank check on the war.
Kerry's testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reported the testimony of other veterans, who at the Detroit Winter Soldier conference admitted they had committed or witnessed atrocities. The swift boat veterans deny any atrocities ever happened. Would that it were so, but two words dispel this illusion.
The words are My Lai, the village rumored where American soldiers killed hundreds of unarmed women, children and old men. "Communist propaganda" it was called, until photographs appeared, witnesses testified. Army Lt. William Calley was prosecuted and sentenced to life in prison, then pardoned within days by President Nixon to house arrest. But it was Presidents Johnson and Nixon, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and the U.S. military high command who should have been prosecuted for a war of free fire zones, search and destroy missions, carpet bombing, napalm, burning villages, and the CIA's Operation Phoenix with twenty thousand secret assassinations.
After 15 years, 58,000 young Americans died, hundreds of thousands were injured and traumatized by the killing of two million Vietnamese, most non-combatants. Atrocities? War crimes? What else can we call it?
No American went to war to commit atrocities, but to defend their country. But we were never attacked by Vietnam. It was a war of choice, not of necessity. Brutal acts were committed by many, on both sides. Lt. Kerry testified about these acts to our derelict Congress that should have questioned our presidents all through that national nightmare, the Vietnam War.
Oh, and Vietnam? It is now communist, sort of, and they make Nike shoes for the U.S. market. The workers get paid 11 cents an hour. Maybe we did win the war, after all.
Gil Villagran
Sociology professor