30 January 2010
 
The Winter Soldier

(John Kerry testifies to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
 
I don't know if the war in SE Asia is over yet. I mean, the last WW II vet to have been president is around and still going strong. Still, I think the Vets from America’s war in Vietnam who could have been president have all had their shot at it and are done.
 
Mr. Obama certainly makes a dramatic break from a tradition that has a lot of baggage. I got a note from a pal who said they were about done with all this ancient history, and I am getting there myself. In less than a week Rex will be laid to rest at Arlington, and his story will be done.
 
I glanced at the traffic cameras down south this morning, since the pavement was still dry here. But that will not last. The closest camera to the farm shows a few inches of snow already, and if I am going to go down, it will be after the snow on the roads sorts itself out tomorrow.
 
That leaves a dreamy day ahead with only a few chores. And time to think about Winter Soldiers.
 
I used the found time to jot a personal note to the widow of an old service buddy, a sweet woman who still misses her man profoundly nearly six years after his passing.
 
Tim was a tough guy, an enlisted Navy door-gunner on a heavy SAR bird in the tough times in SE Asia, and then after earning his degree, an irascible F-4 Radar Intercept Officer with impeccable combat credentials when I met him in Fighter Squadron in 1978.
 
Tim would have been one with Rex and the Swifties on the matter of John Kerry, I think. He had been courageous in his time in the war, and asked no quarter of anyone. Not the Navy, and not the North Vietnamese when his crew went feet-dry to rescue downed aviators, and certainly not the VC.
 
Just going over the campaign issues of the Clinton-bush II campaigns makes me tired. George W.'s spotty Air Guard record, complete with media-endorsed forgeries; Dick Cheney's non-existent one; Al Gore's quiet tour in-country; John McCain's epic of torture and endurance.
 
Interestingly, none of them, including McCain, made claims of being heroes.
 
John Kerry was the exception. He was something special. He wanted it both ways; instant heroism and a short tour, then crusading anti-warrior, peacemaker with the victorious regime in Hanoi, eventually re-casting himself as an authentic hero and prospective Commander-In-Chief.
 
I had a pal come back through town this week, done with the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Mosul, in northern Iraq. Three tours out there in the war. It is done, at least for her, even if the fires still crackle. I salute her service. She tried to do the right thing in a struggle that she did not create, just as so many did in Vietnam.
 
I remember the same unsettled feeling about that war, from 1973 on, once the prisoners and the troops were home. The conflict continued without us, and eventually spilled over into the killing fields of Cambodia.
 
You can well understand that Rex and many of his generation were pissed off about it, the first war lost, and then the insult of the way their service was characterized in the victorious narrative of the North Vietnamese parroted by fellow-travelers like Jane Fonda.
 
They showed us a short film of the actress on her memorable visit to Hanoi. It was still classified, for some reason known only to the bureaucracy, but it was remarkable for the child-like joy on her face as she hopped up onto a North Vietnamese anti-air artillery piece.
 
I still think she is hot, by the way, maybe not the way she was in Barbarella, but still a handsome woman. But her politics. Well, it makes you wonder.
 
Ted Kennedy arcs back through the story, too, one of those long shadows that so typify our generation's saga.
 
Teddy helped bring the second JFK-  John Forbes Kerry- along to the Senate with him, and there is a pattern in something they both did. It was a penchant for talking to the enemy. It is documented, and opinion has nothing to do with either one.
 
Ted actually offered his services to the Kremlin to offer to undermine President Reagan in 1983. The mission is documented in the Sovet-era archives, along with what he was prepared to do to further the Communist party line in America.
 
Ex-Sen. John Tunney (D-CA) was tapped to do the leg-work for face-to-face meetings between himself and CPSU General Secretary Yuri Andropov.
 
Tunney took a memo from Kennedy to Moscow on the state of US-Soviet relations. Presidnt Reagan was preparing to deploy mid-range nuclear missiles to Europe, seriously reducing warning time for the Soviets. The summary of the meeting, penned by the KGB, suggested "that in the interest of world peace, it would be useful and timely to take a few extra steps to counteract the militaristic policies of Ronald Reagan."
 
Creepie.
 
Kerry's interest in politics began in 1960, when the original JFK was running for President. Kerry gave his first political speeches for Kennedy. When Teddy was running for the Senate seat in the summer of 1962, Kerry worked for him. The connection stayed strong right through his later naval service and beyond.
 
He gave an interview to the Harvard Crimson the month after he returned to private life in 1970 (though of course his reserve obligation continued until 1978). He touched on a number of topics, but also explained that he "wanted to see how the political machine works."
 
He certainly found out.
 
I am still wrestling with LTJG Kerry and his legacy. I will set the combat part aside, and leave the controversy about his conduct in the war to others who were there to experience a common reality.
 
Everything he did appears to comport with the rules as they were, and if he was a medal-hound and a collector of hardware that could lead to an early rotation, in accordance with existing regulation, well, that would not have been unheard of at the time. I won't judge what I might have done in similar circumstances.
 
It is what he did afterwards is what puzzles me. He was an aide to RADM Schlech in Boston when he requested release from active duty to run for Congress in 1970.
 
Kerry flew Ted Kennedy's Chief of Staff around the state on a political junket in October of 1969 (he was a private pilot) while still on active duty, and that might have been where the inspiration came from.
 
In that Harvard Crimson interview, he modestly accounted for his deeds in SE Asia and also demonstrated a lack of familiarity with his prospective district. He did not seem to be much of a firebrand, though, perhaps still uncertain of how to play his hand.
 
He dropped out of the race shortly thereafter, though I am sure the Kennedy mentorship continued. The thing I cannot understand is how Kerry found himself later that year making two trips to Paris to engage in discussions with the Popular Front and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on how to end the war.
 
You may recall that the Paris Peace Talks were billed as "four party," though as John testified later he had talked to "both sides." Since it did not include the US or the South Vietnamese, I suppose that meant, in his mind, it was the only two that mattered.
 
The enemy.
 
He brought the party line from the VC back home, and that was his line with Vietnam Vets Against the War. He affiliated with that organization, and moderated a panel at the Winter Soldier propaganda show in Detroit. There, dozens of former servicemen (there are debates about the provenance of some, and doubts about the stories) testified to a litany of monstrous unprovoked actions against the innocent Vietnamese population- just as the VC and DRV strategists had suggested to the VVAW leadership.
 
John Kerry was moving up fast. He was the star in the testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the one he would chair later on. It was taking a while for his hair to grow out, but he looked suitably scruffy in his green utility shirt with the fancy ribbons pinned on the breast.
 
I can’t top it, and I won’t make it up. Here are John Kerry’s words to the Senate of the United States:
 
...I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of the group of 1,000 which is a small representation of a very much larger group of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table they would be here and have the same kind of testimony...
I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command....They told the stories 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 food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country. We call this investigation the "Winter Soldier Investigation."

I remember how effective the testimony was. It ignored the reality that atrocities were being visited on civilians by the VC as a matter of policy. Terror was an instrument of intimidation, which is hardly new, and the Taliban and the Iraqi Sunni resistance have clearly taken a page from the VC playbook.
 
Let us be clear. My Lai and other horrors really happened. They were not a matter of policy.
 
It was also pilot Hugh Thompson who put his helicopter down between the soldiers and villagers, ordering his men to shoot their fellow Americans if they attacked the civilians.
 
War is a nuanced thing. So is effective propaganda, or “agitprop” as it is known in the trade.
 
Kerry’s testimony clearly gave aid and comfort to the enemy in Vietnam. When they eventually got home, some POWS vividly recalled the fear that they would be executed in retaliation.
 
The caricature of the Vietnam Vet as drug-addled hyper-violent psychopath came from this compelling bit of agitprop, which was aided and abetted by some famous names of the World's Greatest Deliberative Body.
 
Certainly, the conventional wisdom of the unchallenged national media accepted the cartoon as fact, and added to the pressure on the Nixon Administration in the streets of America, and hence on the US negotiators in Paris.
 
That is where I feel the hand of Teddy, or Teddy's smarter advisors at the time, when the little lion had yet to drown any innocent people and his future looked bright, and the path to the White House seemed inevitable.

Even the name the VVAW chose for the demonstration that wrapped around the Senate testimony was brilliant:  “Operation Dewey Canyon III.” DEWEY CANYON I had been the Marine reinforcement of Khe Sanh in 1969. DEWEY CANYON II was the first phase of LAM SON 719, a large offensive operation against NVA communications lines in Laos.
 
The throwing of ribbons- easily replaced- and of other people's medals over fences? It was a big issue in the Swift Boat campaign, but for me, it is theater, no more and no less.
 
That John Kerry kept his own medals safe during DC III says volumes.
 
Shoot, I recall burning a draft card (expired, of course) at a rally in the hopes that it might get me the favors of a lady who seemed to be under the influence of a higher passion.
 
Kerry dropped his association with the VVAW when one of the more radical- or practical- vets suggested a course of kidnapping and murder of senior officials as a means of advancing the VC agenda. That was too honest or too direct a course for John, who dropped out of the power struggle to seek a more genteel course ahead, one that would avoid serious jail time as a potential co-conspirator if someone actually took action on the proposition.
 
Anyway, the testimony to the Senate is what was unforgivable to Rex and the others who so bitterly attacked John Kerry when he re-imagined himself as a traditional hero and prospective Commander in Chief.
 
Oh well. I will leave the matter of stolen honor to those whose honor was taken from them. They got even. The media no longer has a stranglehold on information.
 
Do you recall when The NY Times tried it again?
 
The National Paper of Record started a series of sensational articles about grisly crimes associated with people returning from the Iraq War. The implication was clear. All the cartoons of the Vietnam veteran as monster were back, pasted onto those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
The vets would not stand for it. A wave of protest swept through the blogosphere, pointing out that the All Volunteer Force, traumatized though it might have been by constant combat, was still better-educated, harder working, less prone to drug use, and less violent than any equivalent cohort of their civilian peers, including the Times newsroom.
 
A new generation of vets had learned a lesson from the Swifties and their campaign against John Kerry.
 
Rex was an honorary member of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and he and Jinny often attended the dinners while they were trashing candidate Kerry. They believed the Senator had sold them down the river, so to speak, and seemed to have sold the MIA's out, too, in the interest of normalizing relations with the SRV. *
 
That accounts for Rex's last crusade, the one to honor Jack Graf, our missing man. We will finish that up this week, since his service is coming this Friday.
 
I was happy to help him out on that one. Jack didn't do anything except his duty, after all, and if we cannot bring him home, the least we can do is remember him.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com <http://www.vicsocotra.com>
 
Note: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), or North Vietnam, was renamed the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) upon the forceful unification with the former Republic of Vietnam in 1975.