Letter to Kerry

[Rob67]

Someone sent this my way via email. Not claiming that these are all truths but I thought it was interesting. I don't have the time to research the validity of some of the claims but his reasoning seems grounded. Thought I would share it for our resident Kerry fans.

Rob

___________________________________

Open Letter to John Kerry:

My wife had rotator cuff surgery earlier this year, and the recovery is terribly painful. Then, she developed a staph-epi infection, and they had to cut the same scar open and operate on her again. Just thinking about the pain and anxiety of facing that painful surgery a second time in the same wound, makes me cringe. That experience, however pales in comparison to what I am going through right now, in my heart.

The old hurts are surfacing and the feelings of betrayal by fellow citizens, and their leader stirring them up, are breaking my heart again. I am being cut in the same scar. How did we who served in Vietnam suddenly become cold-blooded killers, torturers, and rapists, of the ilk of the Nazi SS or the Taliban? Most of us were American soldiers who grew up idolizing John Wayne, Roy Rogers, and all the other heroes. That was why I volunteered. But for political expediency, John Kerry has rewritten history, again. After spending only four months in the country of Vietnam, John Kerry testified before Congress in 1971 with these exact words about incidents he supposedly witnessed or heard about from other vets: "They personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, b! lown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam."

I was a green beret officer who volunteered for duty in Vietnam and fought in the thick of it in 1968 and 1969 on a Special Forces A-team on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, just for starters. We were the elite. We saw the most action. Everybody in the world knows that. But we did not just kill people, we built a church, a school, treated illnesses, passed out soap, food, and clothing, and had fun and loving interaction with the indigenous people of Vietnam, just like our boys did in Normandy, Baghdad, Saigon, and everywhere American soldiers ever served. We all gave away our candy bars and rations to kids. Our hearts to oppressed people all over the globe.

My children and grandchildren could read your words, and think those horrendous things about me, Mr. Kerry. You are a bold-faced, unprincipled liar, and a disgrace, and you have dishonored me and all my fellow Vietnam veterans. Sure, there were a couple bad-apples, but I saw none, and I saw it all, and if I did, as an army officer, it was my obligation to stop it, or at the very least report it. Why is there not a single record anywhere of you ever reporting any incidents like this or having the perpetrators arrested? The answer is simple. You are a liar. Your medals and mine are not a free pass for lifetime, Senator Kerry, to bypass character, integrity, and morality. I earn my green beret over and over daily in all aspects of my life.

Eight National Guard green berets, and other National Guard soldiers, have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, ! and you totally dishonored their widows and families by lumping National Guard service in with being a draft-dodger, conscientious objector, and deserter, just so you can try to sabotage the patriotism of our President who proudly served as an Air National Guard jet pilot. I have a son earning his green beret at Fort Bragg right now, and his wife serves honorably in the Air National Guard, just like President Bush did, and I am as proud of her as I am my son. I volunteered for Vietnam and have no problem whatsoever with President Bush being our Commander-In-Chief. In fact, I am proud of him as our leader.

John Kerry, you personally derailed the Vietnam Human rights Bill, HR2883, in 2001, after it had passed the House by a 411 to 1 vote, and thousands of pro-American Montagnard tribespeople in Vietnam died since then who could have been saved, by you. Earlier, as Chair of the Senate Select Committee on MIA/POW Affairs, you personally quashed the efforts of any and all veterans to report sightings of living POW's, when you held those reins in Congress. You have fought tooth and nail to push for the US to normalize relations with Vietnam for years. Why, Mr. Kerry? Simple, your first cousin C. Stewart Forbes, CEO, of Colliers International, recently signed a contract with Hanoi, worth BILLIONS of dollars for Collier's International to become the exclusive real estate representative for the country of Vietnam.

"Hanoi John," now that it works for you, you beat your chest about your Vietnam service, but to me, you are a phony, opportunistic, hypocrite. You are one of those politicians that is like a fertilizer machine: all that comes out of you is horse manure, and you are spreading it everywhere.

Medals do not make a man. Morals do.


Don Bendell
Canon City, Colorado

Don Bendell served as an officer in four Special Forces Groups, is a best-selling author with over 1,500,000 books in print, a 1995 inductee into the International Karate Hall of Fame, and owns karate schools in southern Colorado.

[dissention]

Those are the experiences of one man. The fact is that American soldiers brutalized and killed women, children, and the elderly during the Vietnam war. They took glee in torturing them and used the excuse that they *might* have been enemies. If he wants to write such a letter, the first thing he must do is acknowledge that those actions took place. Then, he must look at Kerry's comments and use them in the context in which they were orignally used, not morph them to fit his agenda.

[dissention]

Here is what he REALLY said:

"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." The term "Winter Soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.

We who have come here to Washington have come here because we f eel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out."

He was referring to a select group of 150 soldiers.

[Sugar]

I put that quote into Google and found this:

Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement by John Kerry to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations

April 23, 1971

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I would like to talk on behalf of 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. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit - the emotions in the room and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told stories that 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 Ghengis 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. The term Winter Soldier is a play on words of Thomas Paine's in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriots and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.

We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out....

In our opinion and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.

We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.

We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American.

We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search and destroy missions, as well as by Viet Cong terrorism - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.

We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.

We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.

We watched the United States falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings." We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater. We watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese. We watched pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point, and so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 81s and Fire Base 6s, and so many others.

Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.

Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?....We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country - the question of racism which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions such as the use of weapons; the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything.

An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation of Alcatraz put it to me very succinctly. He told me how as a boy on an Indian reservation he had watched television and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped in Vietnam and he said, "my God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people," and he stopped. And that is what we are trying to say, that we think this thing has to end.

We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country....

We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission - to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so when thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.


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This text is made available by the Sixties Project, sponsored by Viet Nam Generation Inc. and the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. The Sixties Project is a collective of humanities scholars working together on the Internet to use electronic resources to provide routes of collaboration and make available primary and secondary sources for researchers, students, teachers, writers and librarians interested in the 1960s.

[strandinthewind]

I gotta cry foul on this. It is well proven and very sad that Amercian and other soldiers performed autrocities in Nam. Just because this guy did not see it or will not admit he saw it does not mean Kerry and the 1,000 of others' did not see it. Also, if he is saying Kerry did not behave heroically in Nam, every person that was with Kerry disproves that and this guy was not there. Finally, what the hell does any of this have to do with Bush stupidly and unnecessarily exaggerating/tweaking/whatever WMD information to justify what has turned out to be apparently his unnecessary war in Iraq (Again, W and crew said they "knew" where the weapons were and that SH was getting ready to or could sell them, use them, whatever - now we find out he does not have them and probably has not had them in a long time ).

Moreover, this smacks of the slanted and mostly untrue crap my dad sends me all of the time almost all of which turns out to be false a la the one where Target refused to give the local vets charity, the one where Hillary refused to meet with a charitable organization, etc.

In this case, I think I'll let his website speak for him

http://www.donbendell.com/

[dissention]

Originally posted by strandinthewind
I gotta cry foul on this.

Good lord, put it in your sig already.

[CarneVaca]

The evil GOP distortion machine is going full blast already. t

[Rob67]

Originally posted by CarneVaca
The evil GOP distortion machine is going full blast already. t

"Evil GOP distortion" machine? Or, just a guy who finds hypocrisy with John Kerry? Hmmmm....

Rob

[gldstwmn]

Originally posted by Rob67
Someone sent this my way via email. Not claiming that these are all truths but I thought it was interesting. I don't have the time to research the validity of some of the claims but his reasoning seems grounded.

Then please don't post a bunch of **** that you have no idea is the truth.

[gldstwmn]

Originally posted by CarneVaca
The evil GOP distortion machine is going full blast already. t

No doubt. This is the biggest load of crap I've seen come out of the $200 million propaganda pig yet. It's only going to get worse.

[strandinthewind]

I wonder if W and his people had a hand in this. I mean it looks like it is just some guy posting his opinion on his site. If that is the case, he is entitled to his opinion no matter how wrong I think he is. He probably sent this letter to all of his far right friends and they sent it to all of their frineds, etc. I cannot imagine the White House would want this in any way traced back to them.

Note: this does not mean I do not think that both camps are actively at work with crap similar to this. Polictics is just sleazy

[gldstwmn]

Originally posted by strandinthewind
I wonder if W and his people had a hand in this. I mean it looks like it is just some guy posting his opinion on his site. If that is the case, he is entitled to his opinion no matter how wrong I think he is. He probably sent this letter to all of his far right friends and they sent it to all of their frineds, etc. I cannot imagine the White House would want this in any way traced back to them.

You're probably right Strand. I can't believe people are stupid enough to fall for this kind of ****.

[strandinthewind]

Originally posted by gldstwmn
You're probably right Strand. I can't believe people are stupid enough to fall for this kind of ****.

That is how the Hillary Clinton thing got started. Here is the site with a link to the organization's site http://hoaxinfo.com/goldstar.htm

The Target one

http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/target.asp

[gldstwmn]

There is no progressive thought or discussion intended to come out of this thread. It's meant to start a flame war. It should be locked.

[strandinthewind]

Here is the skinny on the fat given to W:

POLITICAL POINTS | 2.26 5:10 PM
Enron Overtaken as Bush's Top Financial Supporter
By GLEN JUSTICE

Enron is dropping in the rankings, if not from the rhetoric, in this year's presidential race.

The bankrupt energy trader has lost its standing as the top campaign contributor in President Bush's political career, a position it held for years, as company executives gave Mr. Bush $602,625 throughout his tenure as Texas governor and his days in the White House, according to the Center for Public Integrity.

Enron fell to second place in January behind the MBNA, a leading issuer of credit cards. MBNA took the top spot, with its employees giving more than $603,000 to Mr. Bush.

Campaign finance experts say the change symbolizes a continuing shift in the president's financial support, moving away from his usual backers like oil and gas companies and toward financial-services companies that have become increasingly supportive.

``The financial types have been closing fast and they did it: they overwhelmed Enron,'' said Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, which tracks the top contributors to presidential candidates over the course of their careers.

Brokerages, credit and accounting companies account for 7 of Mr. Bush's top 10 career contributors through Jan. 31, according to the center. In a similar study during the 2000 election, no major financial-services companies were listed among the top 10.

Mr. Bush has championed several initiatives that were applauded by the financial community, including cuts in the taxes on stock dividends and capital gains.

Among those companies that made Mr. Bush's list in January are Merrill Lynch at about $586,000, PricewaterhouseCoopers at $576,000; UBS AG Inc. at $488,500, Credit Suisse at $485,000, Ernst & Young at $426,000 and Goldman Sachs. The totals count money contributed by company employees and political action committees.

In several cases, company leaders also raised money for Mr. Bush. Several chief executives - Henry M. Paulson of Goldman Sachs, John J. Mack of Credit Suisse First Boston and Stanley O'Neal of Merrill Lynch - were among Mr. Bush's elite six-figure fund-raisers.

Executives at Enron continued to give to Mr. Bush in small amounts, despite the company's bankruptcy filing. The president received $3,000 in 2003 from four people who listed Enron as their employer, according to the center. Enron's collapse amid an accounting scandal gave rise to corporate accountability measures and helped pass the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation in 2002. The company was a sore spot for Mr. Bush, who was friends with the company's chief executive, Kenneth L. Lay.

Democrats, including the presidential candidates, have not been shy about trying to connect the company to the president - criticism that is likely to continue. An aide at the Bush campaign declined to comment on the company's change on Mr. Bush's rankings.

``If I'm the White House, I'm really happy,'' Mr. Lewis said. If Enron is your top patron, that's got to be embarrassing.''


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Here is another site on this topic

http://www.publicintegrity.org/dtaweb/home.asp