Even then I couldn't understand why anyone would make a big deal out of it. It was common knowledge. Diem instituted the policy way back before we ever got involved. We just carried on with it. There were relocation camps, so what? That was my attitude then. After villagers -- whom we suspected of supporting North Vietnamese forces -- were relocated, we destroyed the huts, the tunnels, the crops, etc., everything, to keep that stuff out of Viet Cong hands. It was a legitimate strategy, imo.
However, people WERE NOT slaughtered wholesale like Kerry implied; i.e., it WAS NOT DONE IN THE MANNER OF GHENGIS KHAN. The Mongol hordes killed everyone and everything if they couldn't take it with them.
I knew we weren't doing ANYTHING in the manner of Ghengis Khan, no matter how much leftist propaganda I had soaked up. In fact, Kerry's Senate testimony definitely played a role in getting me back on the right track (though it took forever). I KNEW he was lying. Those were gut-wrenching times, let me tell 'ya. (Though I think it might be worse today.)
Because when you first stated you'd seen the video my first reaction was, well, were you horrified?
You state you weren't and I'm a little relieved. Because I too came of age during the Vietnam war and I remember it being such a confusing time. Indeed I often used the argument that even the Vietnam Veterans were against the war in my unending arguments with my father. I imagine all across the land debates raged over kitchen tables. I was married and on my own, about 20 years old, but I didn't know what to think.
Now I'm 54 and find out that the VVAW was founded by John Kerry for his own political good and I'm bitter.
I remember seeing the body bags on the nightly news as they unloaded them from the airplanes. I remember all the noise about US behavior in Vietnam. There was Lt. Calley. And Jane Fonda, even then I hated the witch.
After a while it became that Americans just wanted that whole episode in our history to go away. Somehow the politicians made it happen.
Which is why now, I wanna know more! Because the truth is descending upon me as the scales fall from my eyes.
A politician like John Kerry could manipulate the news like a romance novel hero plays a willing maiden's body. And people like me were out there in la-la land trying to desperately understand it all.
I'm mad about it, frankly.