'Redacted': Battle Casualty

What is there left to say about the Hollywood assumption that Americans are too clueless to realize that war is hell, that the war in Iraq is particularly troubling and that only moral instruction from, well, Hollywood can bring a benighted nation to its senses? Moviegoers have already signaled their disdain. Three recent antiwar pictures that reflect the film colony's imperious self-regard — "In the Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and "Lions for Lambs" — have been quickly fitted with box-office body bags. Soon they'll be joined by "Redacted," the talky, torpid, borderline-hysterical new movie by Brian De Palma.

The picture's conceptual incoherence is clear at the outset, when we're told that it was "inspired by an incident widely reported to have happened in Iraq." What can this possibly mean? The atrocity at the center of "Redacted" isn't some sort of rumor; it's a well-established fact. In March of 2006, in a village south of Baghdad, five U.S. Army soldiers broke into the home of an Iraqi family; some of them murdered the mother and father and their 5-year-old daughter, then gang-raped their 14-year-old daughter, shot her in the head and set her body and the house afire. (The blaze was apparently an attempt to make the attack look like the work of terrorist insurgents.)

The movie's implication is that such horrific incidents are not unusual, but that they're covered up by the military and the craven mainstream media. This is possible, of course. But the contention is unpersuasive in this particular case, since all five of the soldiers involved were arrested and charged, and three have been tried and sentenced to 90, 100 and 110 years in prison — information the movie declines to convey.

‘REDACTED’

How many American soldiers will lose their lives because of this anti-war movie? That is the first question anyone who sees the recently released anti-American film should ask. I was one of only four people at the Ritz Bourse Theater for the first showing in Philadelphia last Friday. I hope this suggests that it will fail to find an audience in the United States. I have no doubt it will be a hit with those who seek to destroy America.

While the pattern of Hollywood’s anti-American commitment is the same as it was in Vietnam, one of the major differences between Vietnam and Iraq is the timing of the Hollywood movies. At least Hollywood generally waited until the troops were out of Vietnam before their movies were released vilifying American soldiers. Today, the studios are competing to get the movies out NOW while our troops are still in the line of fire.

In my view and in the view of my fellow veterans, Redacted will cause untold numbers of American casualties. The movie goes to extreme efforts to cast the American troops in the worst possible light. In the film, a group of psychopathic, demented American soldiers rape and kill an innocent Iraqi girl and her family. If that sounds familiar, twenty years ago De Palma’s Casualties of War featured another group of psychopathic, demented American soldiers who rape and kill an innocent Vietnamese girl. Redacted implies that American troops commit war crimes, are out of control and have total disregard for the Iraqi people especially women and children. This is the same harsh rhetoric that echoed through the halls of Congress and the streets of San Francisco and New York during the Vietnam War. Our Congress, Hollywood and academics became convinced that we, the American troops serving in Vietnam, were war criminals.

Remembering all the movies in which the leading role was a Vietnam Veteran either committing or permanently damaged by the war crimes he had witnessed, I have to ask this question about Redacted: Are Writer/Producer Brian DePalma and Financier Mark Cuban useful dupes for the Islamic terrorists in the same way that Jane Fonda and John Kerry were for the Communists during Vietnam or do these guys really believe that American troops are war criminals?

Today there are war crime claims against American troop s similar to those three decades ago against Vietnam Veterans. The most vocal critic today has been Jesse MacBeth, a former Army ranger who claimed his fellow troops hung and burned hundreds of Iraqi civilians. He talked about his many medals including his Purple Heart and he quickly became the poster child of the anti-war, anti-American, and anti-military organizations.

The problem was MacBeth never served in combat or even left the U.S. In fact, he was a boot camp “washout,” tossed out of the Army after only 44 days. When he was indicted for filing false disability claims with the Veterans Administration, MacBeth was tried, convicted and sent to Federal prison.

When Rush Limbaugh condemned him as a phony soldier, it was Rush Limbaugh who encountered the wrath of many in congress attacking him but not MacBeth. MacBeth’s own admission that he lied, mattered little to those who stampeded to this phony’s defense accusing Limbaugh of falsely attacking a U.S. soldier. To his credit, Limbaugh didn’t blink.

American troops are not perfect but they are the best and most humane that the world has to offer. How can we stop these unfounded and vicious attacks on our troops?

Those who accused us, the Vietnam veterans, of war crimes thirty years ago must be exposed for their false accusations. For the past three years, the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation (”VVLF”) has worked diligently to prove that the troops were maligned. We believe that our last call to duty is to stop the lies about the Vietnam soldiers in order to stop the same treatment of the American troops today.

We believe we must send the message to Congress and especially to those individuals in our government who are doing again today what was done to us during and after the Vietnam War.

Col Bud Day, America’s highest decorated veteran, is the Chairman of the VVLF Board and the majority of the board members are former POWs held in the Hanoi Hilton. For them, this is personal. Every Vietnam Veteran has been forced to fight the stain of war crimes allegations since the war ended more than thirty years ago. POWs were threatened with their lives to “confess” to being war criminals, only to return to an American public that was soon to be brainwashed by Hollywood into believing that the “war criminal” charges were true.

Who are the culprits responsible for this maligning of America’s Vietnam soldiers? The worst offenders were approximately 116 anti-war activists who claimed to have witnessed or committed war crimes at the co-called “Winter Soldier” hearings in1971. They made their accusations to Jane Fonda, John Kerry and other sat this high profile media event. The claims were then read into the Congressional Record on April 5 1971 by Senator Mark Hatfield. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee in turn held hearings on the so-called’testimony’, and heaped praise on John Kerry for bringing these claims to the Senate committee. The Senate called for an investigation that never really happened until VVLF took responsibility 34 years later.

Over the past three years the VVLF has obtained sworn statements, documents and evidence that addresses these accusations. Upon close scrutiny, very few, if any, witnessed or committed war crimes. Many of the accusations are flatly contradicted by other veterans who were there, or by military records showing what really happened. Some of these accusers have recanted. Here are some examples:

* One claimed that U.S. troops killed a Vietnamese civilian woman (right after he bought drugs from her), yet that same veteran wrote an article for Stars & Stripes about the very same day that stated that the enemy killed the woman.
* Another “testified” to countless atrocities yet when forced to explain under oath, he repeatedly conceded it was an “assumption” on his part that innocent civilians and POWs were killed, and his allegations have been categorically repudiated by the many men who served with him.
* Years later, many of these accusers have explicitly disavowed what they said. One signed an affidavit that stated he was coerced into giving his atrocity allegations.
* Indeed, most of those who made these allegations were simply passing along hearsay, apocryphal tales that arose in Vietnam like the alligator-in-the-sewers urban myths that occasionally pop up today.

I am personally familiar with several of these alleged war crimes having served with the First Infantry Division in 1968. Several claims were made against troops with the 1st Infantry Division regarding specific times and places where I served. These allegations were included in the Congressional Record and included charges that soldiers fired artillery from our base camp into Vietnamese villages killing civilians and children. Another claim is that forty-six rounds were fired into Ben San Leper Colony killing many of the occupants.

I recently relayed the allegations against my own Infantry Division to our platoon medic. His response took an emotional tone. He was one of many medics in our company who volunteered their time to go on med-cap (medical pacification) missions. We had very few days off but when we did, the medics went into the needy villages (including Ben San Leper Colony) to treat the sick, the elderly and children. He and many others did not take lives in this village. They saved lives! He is not a war criminal.

And neither am I. And neither are the hundreds of thousands of other Vietnam veterans falsely accused by Hollywood, the media, and Congress. The lies are forever recorded in the Congressional Record. VVLF plans to submit for inclusion to the Congressional Record the true facts repudiating the lies that have persisted in the Congressional Record for almost forty years.

As a final indignity, DePalma closes the movie with a montage of picture of dead Iraqis. Before the montage begins, the screen goes black and then the title “Collateral Damage” comes up with the claim”Actual photographs from the Iraq War” printed beneath it, and then the slide show begins. One problem though ...among the emotionally draining pictures of real dead bodies, I began to notice that the actors from the film resemble those seen dead. Did they really pose their actors in mortal positions to pull at the audience’s heartstrings?

In the beginning, DePalma states that the film is fictionalized. Exactly how are we supposed to know what is fiction and what isn’t? Few would realize the cost in Americans lives and blood Redacted and similar films might exact when they are shown in foreign theaters.

DePalma talked about collateral damage in the film. Is he prepared to explain to the all the American POWS and their families that the torture they suffered while Jane Fonda and John Kerry were accusing American Soldiers of war crimes was “only collateral damage”?

VVLF is doing its best to correct the record... and to redact from the American memory the false picture of the American soldier as war criminal.

Bob McMahon was a Platoon Leader with the 1st Infantry Division beginning in February 1968 and later became a senior advisor with Advisory Team 44 living in three different villages with more than 100Vietnamese Forces. He now serves as Treasurer and Co-Executive Director of the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation.

http://www.vvlf.org/

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