John, Jane, and … Henry (Kerry responsible for whole "baby killer" slur?)

By his own admission, Kerry and/or members of his crew killed a number of civilians (including at least one baby) and South Vietnamese (friendly) soldiers in a Mekong Delta operation.

Kerry is quoted by the “Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry” Web site as having said, “It is one of those terrible things, and I'll never forget, ever, the sight of that child," about the dead baby. Oh, I see. Senator Kerry is bothered by the thought of one Vietnamese baby that is instantly killed by machinegun fire, but not by over 40 million American babies that are killed, in a torturous manner — not in the heat of battle, but for money — by abortionists. Can somebody help me figure that out?

But, my confusion about Kerry continues. You see, the stories about Jane Fonda’s activities in North Vietnam were numerous and well-known in the early 1970s. As an adolescent at that time, even I knew some of them. (When other boys were reading comic books, I was watching the news. That’s why I have a big-picture historical perspective on things.) Jane Fonda was openly and actively involved with the Communists, against our country, and so was John Kerry. Because the stories about Fonda were so well-known, there is no way that Kerry got involved with her unknowingly. Now, I want to tell you one little-known story about Hanoi Jane.

When I was in the Air Force, I knew an officer named Henry. He had been a fighter pilot in Vietnam. He was shot down, and spent more than six years in Hoa Lo Prison (commonly nicknamed “The Hanoi Hilton”). When a movie was made about life in “The Hanoi Hilton”, the main characters had a running conversation with another prisoner, who was never seen in the movie. That prisoner, as I understand it, was Henry in real life. Regardless of my recollections of who played whom in the movie, Henry was a real officer, a real gentleman, and a real hero. (And, his real name was Henry. I’m withholding his last name, out of respect for his age and privacy.)

While Henry was a POW, he was subjected to many of the rigors — both mental and physical — that have come to typify our memories of the Vietnam War. In a presentation about his experience, he said softly, “Most people don’t think that you can touch your elbows together behind your back. With help, you can. But, you don’t want to.” He said that in 1983, and I’ve never forgotten it. Nor should you. (In 1985, I was “helped” by a parachute malfunction to watch the calf of my leg fly over my outstretched forearm. It was an amazing sight; but, trust me, you don’t want to see it for yourself.)

One of the mental rigors was that of being forced to praise their captors over the loudspeaker system. Henry and other prisoners had found an interesting way to “get over” on their captors in this process. To boost their fellow captive’s morale, daily announcements took advantage of the fact that North Vietnamese prison officers listened to English with accented ears. Thus, for awhile, Henry and his buddies got away with announcements about “Horse S*** Minh” (instead of Ho Chi Minh), and similar deviations from proper enunciation. Then, one day, they got caught. Henry and his friends were beaten, tortured, deprived of sleep, and put into solitary confinement. He was in a cell — made of damp concrete, not quite long enough for his body, and with no toilet — for more than two years alone.

Then, one day, in an excited voice, a camp officer came and told Henry that a visiting American dignitary would be coming to see him. To the best of his hampered ability, Henry cleaned himself up, and stood at attention near the door of his cell. He heard the footsteps of a delegation coming down the hall. He tried to look like the proud fighter pilot that he still was deep inside. The door swung open, and…

Henry did not see another American face for over two more years. Now, there is a story with many similar elements floating around on the Internet. That other story has been debunked. Not only did I hear this story directly from Henry himself; but, years later, I had the privilege of speaking with one of his fellow prisoners, who confirmed the story. That other prisoner was named in the movie. Unfortunately, because of the hype about the debunked story, it seems that Henry’s story has fallen through the cracks. Shame on us. There should be a building named after him somewhere. (And, I know which building it should be.)

Shortly before the “downsizing” of my own military career, and years after that presentation, I had the privilege of speaking briefly with Henry on the phone. By that time, he had retired from the Air Force, and had found a nice Federal job. (But, after Bill Clinton became president, Henry’s job was eliminated in a “pogrom” of known conservatives. You see, in the mid-1980s, Henry was only two handshakes away from President Reagan — and “certain people” knew that.)

OK, so the same guy that enabled people like Jane Fonda to start calling our soldiers “baby killers” now wants to enlist those Vietnam veterans to vote for him for president. My suggestion is that, if you want to really know about Vietnam veterans and their views of Senator John Kerry, you should ask people like Henry.

I am sorry but I disagree with you. How democrat leaders had dealt with Vietnam was a big disaster and we can only be glad that Nixon ended it. http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/section/VietnamW_U.S.Withdrawal.asp The length of the war, the high number of U.S. casualties, and the exposure of U.S. involvement in war crimes such as the massacre at My Lai helped to turn many in the United States against the war. On Mar. 16, 1968, a unit of the U.S. army Americal division, led by Lt. William L. Calley, invaded the South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai (more correctly, Son My), an alleged Viet Cong stronghold. In the course of combat operations, unarmed civilians, including women and children, were shot to death (the final army estimate for the number killed was 347). The incident remained unknown to the American public until the autumn of 1969, when a series of letters by a former soldier to government officials forced the army to take action. Several soldiers and veterans were charged with murder, and a number of officers were accused of dereliction of duty for covering up the incident. Special investigations by the U.S. army and the House of Representatives concluded that a massacre had in fact taken place. Of the many soldiers originally charged, only five were court-martialed, and one, Lt. Calley, convicted. On Mar. 29, 1971, he was found guilty of the premeditated murder of at least twenty-two Vietnamese civilians and sentenced to life imprisonment. His sentence was later reduced to 10 years, and in Sept., 1974, a federal district court overturned the conviction and Calley was released. The My Lai incident aroused widespread controversy and contributed to growing disillusionment in the United States with the Vietnam War. The U.S. army formally released a report on its investigation of the incident in Nov., 1974. In 1998 three U.S. soldiers saved Vietnamese civilians during the massacre were honored with the Soldier's Medal.

Kerry speaks about HIS War Crimes

Portion of John Kerry remarks on NBC's "Meet the Press" May 6, 2001:
MR. RUSSERT: You mentioned you're a military guy. There's been a lot of discussion about Bob Kerrey, your former Democratic colleague in the Senate, about his talking about his anguish about what happened in Vietnam. You were on this program 30 years ago as a leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. And we went back and have an audiotape of that and some still photos. And your comments are particularly timely in this overall discussion of Bob Kerrey. And I'd like for you to listen to those with our audience and then try to put that war into some context:
(Audiotape, April 18, 1971):
MR. CROSBY NOYES (Washington Evening Star): Mr. Kerry, you said at one time or another that you think our policies in Vietnam are tantamount to genocide and that the responsibility lies at all chains of command over there. Do you consider that you personally as a Naval officer committed atrocities in Vietnam or crimes punishable by law in this country?
KERRY: There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50 calibre machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare, all of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this is ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down. And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant Calley, are war criminals.
(End audiotape)
MR. RUSSERT: Thirty years later, you stand by that?
SEN. KERRY: I don't stand by the genocide. I think those were the words of an angry young man. We did not try to do that. But I do stand by the description-I don't even believe there is a purpose served in the word "war criminal." I really don't. But I stand by the rest of what happened over there, Tim.
I mean, you know, we-it was-I mean, we've got to put this war in its right perspective and time helps us do that. I believe very deeply that it was a noble effort to begin with. I signed up. I volunteered. I wanted to go over there and I wanted to win. It was a noble effort to try to make a country democratic; to try to carry our principles and values to another part of the world. But we misjudged history. We misjudged our own country. We misjudged our strategy. And we fell into a dark place. All of us. And I think we learned that over time. And I hope the contribution that some of us made as veterans was to come back and help people understand that.
I think our soldiers served as nobly, on the whole, as in any war, and people need to understand that. There were great sacrifices, great contributions. And they came back to a country that didn't thank the veteran, that didn't-I mean, everything that the veteran gained in the ensuing years, Agent Orange recognition, post-Vietnam stress syndrome recognition, the extension of the G.I. Bill, you know, improvement of the V.A. hospitals, all came from Vietnam veterans themselves fighting for it. Indeed, even the memorial in Washington came from that.
MR. RUSSERT: By your own comments, Bob Kerrey was not alone in doing the things that he did.
SEN. KERRY: Oh, of course, not. And not only that, we, the government of our country, ran an assassination program. I mean, Bill Colby has acknowledged it. We had the Phoenix Program, where they actually went into villages to eliminate the civilian infrastructure of the Vietcong. Now, you couldn't tell the difference in many cases who they were. And countless veterans testified 30 years ago to that reality. And I think-look, there's no excusing shooting children in cold blood, or women, and killing them in cold blood. There isn't, under any circumstances. But we're not asking, you know, nor is Bob Kerrey saying, "Excuse us for what we did." We're asking people to try to understand the context and forgiveness. And I think the nation needs to understand what the nation put its young in a position to do, and move on and take those lessons and apply them to the future.
MR. RUSSERT: The folks who oversaw the war, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, you do not now 30 years later consider them war criminals?
SEN. KERRY: No, I think we did things that were tantamount that certainly violated the laws of war, but I think it was the natural consequence of the Cold War itself. People made decisions based on their perceptions of the world at that time. They were in error. They were judgments of error. But I think no purpose is served now by going down that road. I think, you know, the rhetoric of youth and of anger can be redeemed by the acts that we put in place after time to try to move us beyond that. And I think there are great lessons to learn from it. But we would serve no purpose with that now. But we have to be honest about the mistakes we made. We don't have legitimacy in the world, Tim, if we go to other countries, in Bosnia or China or anywhere else, and not say, "You know, we made some terrible mistakes."
And that honesty, that lack of a sense of honesty is part of what is driving people's anger toward the United States today. That's why we have the vote in the U.N. That's why people-our allies, too-are disturbed by this defense posture. You can't abrogate the ABM treaty and move forward on your own to build this defense in a way that threatens the perceptions of security people have. And if you build a defense system, Tim, that can do what they say at the outside, which is change mutual assured destruction, you have invited a potential adversary to build, build, build, to find a way around it. The lesson of the Cold War is, you do not make this planet safer by moving unilaterally into a place of new weapons. Every single advance in weaponry through the Cold War was matched by one side or the other, and that's why we put the ABM treaty in place, and that's why we need to proceed very cautiously and very thoughtfully.
MR. RUSSERT: John Kerry, we thank you for your views.
SEN. KERRY: Thank you.

Kerry needs to be pressed on this matter. Did he lie in 1971 interviews and Congressional testimony or did he commit war crimes?

Either way he is unfit for the Presidency.

Lying to congress about our troops in a time of war is treason. It provided aid and comfort to the enemy and soured morale.

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