Vietnam Veterans, What is your oppinion of Kerry?

Amen, Fellow Brother in Christ.

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I think I have my answer.
Swift boat vets answered this question with there ad.

Kerry is who I thought he was. JOHN F(ONDA) KERRY.

He comitted warcrimes, admitted to congress and then implicated thousands of others in Vietnam as to doing worse then he.
He put in for his own purple hearts, for minor wounds, with total sick days of 2.(for 3 wounds)
He then rallied with Fonda's pals to turn public opinnon against the troops(not the war)

He also admitted to going to talk peace with the vietcong while the U.S. was at war, an act of treason if not directed by a government body.

So his record:
120 days in country(war)
3 purple heart scratches
numerous war crimes.
treason against the U.S. government(negotiating with foriegn powers when at war with them)
Abandoning of POW's
abandoning of the military.(voting against every spending measure for new equipment)
Abandoning inteligence(the CIA,FBI,) offered bill to cut intel spending by 5 bbbbbillion dollars.

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If you haven't had enough, vote for Obama, I'm pretty sure we haven't hit Bar-rock bottom...yet.
6 trillion more debt, What would it have been if the Congress of "NO" was alittle more agreeable?

is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced.(but) in my hometown of Chicago, there’s an awful lot of violence, and they’re not using AK-47s, they’re using cheap handguns.”
Obama makes it known, he will work to ban assault weapons and handguns.

To VVAWINC

posted on VVAW's website


http://www.vvaw.org/commentary/?id=449

=========================================

Defending VVAW Against Swift Boat Vets Lies
By Keith Nolan



There exists a website (wintersoldier.com) whose sole purpose is to bash
VVAW. Keith Nolan, author of ten books on the Vietnam War, took offense
at the tactics used at wintersoldier.com and attempted to post a message
at the website's message board. The administrator refused to post
Nolan's message. Nolan's message, and the administrator's response follow.

NOLAN TO WINTERSOLDIER:
Please consider this letter a protest against the one-sided arguments
and underhanded tactics deployed at this website in order to bash John
Kerry and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

It is one thing to disagree with the political philosophy of the VVAW,
or to argue that the organization drew false conclusions about
genocide-as-policy based on the isolated war crimes its members saw in
Vietnam.

It is another thing entirely, however, to defame those combat veterans
who joined the VVAW as misfits, frauds, liars, traitors, and dupes of
the KGB. What rubbish. You would never know from this website that
General David Shoup, USMC (Ret), who earned the Medal of Honor in WWII,
publicly supported John Kerry and the VVAW in 1971.

Every veterans organization attracts a certain fringe element, and I
don't doubt, as is charged here, that a charlatan like Mark Lane
included false testimony in his book about Vietnam. It is also charged
here, however, that numerous phonies gave false testimony at the VVAW's
Winter Soldiers Investigation in Detroit, and that only about
thirty-percent of the men who participated in Operation Dewey Canyon III
were genuine veterans of the Vietnam War. This I very much doubt, and I
have searched this website in vain for even a shred of proof to back up
these very serious charges.

All this website really has to offer are the personal opinions of
historians Burkett and Lewy, who seem to have had no personal contact
with VVAW members and are instead relying on information from the Nixon
Whitehouse. For obvious political reasons, the Nixon administration did
its best in 1971 to discredit Kerry and the VVAW. They came up with one
VVAW leader (Al Hubbard) who had lied about his rank and exaggerated his
military service. And that was it. They did not identify any other phony
veterans, nor did they identify by name a single fraud who provided
testimony in Detroit.

Who were all the liars and frauds in the VVAW? No one seems to know. And
what exactly were they lying about in Detroit? One or two possibly
exaggerated stories aside, the great majority of those who testified in
Detroit described the exact same kind of abuses and atrocities that show
up in the court-martial record of the war, in memoirs written by Vietnam
veterans, and in histories written by academics. I don't understand how
this website can so blithely dismiss the Detroit testimony when the
stories told in Detroit mirror the documented war crimes committed at
places like My Lai, My Khe, and Son Thang, and the documented illegal
behavior of units like Task Force Barker and the Tiger Force of the
1-327th Airborne Infantry.

I've personally heard the same kind of stories about burned villages,
mistreated civilians, and summarily executed prisoners dozens of times
over from Vietnam veterans who have no political sympathy for the
left-wing politics of the VVAW. Wars produce atrocities. Frustrating
guerrilla wars produce a particularly horrific number of atrocities.
That some individual soldiers and certain units responded with excessive
brutality in Vietnam shouldn't really surprise anyone. I know many good
men who stayed true to their moral compass in Vietnam and served with
distinction and honor. I also know many good men who have spent their
lives regretting the things they did under the pressure of combat back
when they were nineteen- and twenty-year-old grunts in Vietnam.

And why the desire at this website to whitewash the counterproductive
brutality of General Westmoreland's search-and-destroy strategy? As has
been noted by many disgusted infantry officers, Westmoreland's
search-and-destroy strategy resulted in thousands of destroyed villages,
tens of thousands of civilian casualties, hundreds of thousands of
refugees, and drove the rural population of Vietnam into the arms of the
Viet Cong. Kerry was only speaking the truth when he said that "We
rationalized destroying villages in order to save them."

Good men are allowed to disagree on something as tragic as the Vietnam
War without one side condemning those on the other side of the political
line as being liars and frauds. Too bad that VVAW members like Barry
Romo, James Duffy, Mark Lenix, Nathan Hale, Charles Stephens, Gary
Keyes, Michael Hunter, Mike McCusker, Scott Moore, Donald Duncan, Steve
Pitkin, and Kenneth Ruth aren't here to defend themselves against the
charge that they never served in combat and invented their stories about
Vietnam.

Keith Nolan
(author of RIPCORD, OPERATION BUFFALO, SAPPERS IN THE WIRE, etc.)

Here's the response I got from the website administrator:

WINTERSOLDIER TO NOLAN:
Sorry, but we feel no obligation to provide space for those who wish to
denigrate and marginalize what we're trying to accomplish. Consider
writing your own web site. Admin

Keith W. Nolan has been interviewing Vietnam veterans and writing about
their experiences since 1978. He is author of ten books on the war,
including RIPCORD, OPERATION BUFFALO, SAPPERS IN THE WIRE, and THE
MAGNIFICENT *******S. He lives near St. Louis, Missouri.

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"Back in 2000 a Republican friend warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we'd lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what? I did vote for Gore, he did win, and I'll be shocked if all those things didn't come true!" --James Carville

A major theme of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) in 1971 involved sending representatives to Paris and to Hanoi to meet with communist leaders.

John Kerry has admitted to meeting in 1970 in Paris with Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, the Foreign Minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, the "waiting-in-the-wings government" ready to take over South Vietnam once the Communists won. The Viet Cong operated as the military arm of the PRG. Kerry also met with representatives of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the official name of the North Vietnamese communist government in Hanoi. North Vietnam's lead delegate at that time was Le Duc Tho, who along with Ho Chi Minh was one of the original founders of the Communist Party of Indochina and one of North Vietnam's chief strategists.

On June 16, 1971, the communist Daily World newspaper quoted Kerry as planning a month-long trip to South Vietnam in July to report on "what is really happening" to the American soldiers over there. Newly released FBI files on the VVAW also report that John Kerry made a second trip to Paris in the summer of 1971 to meet again with the Vietnamese communist peace delegations and try to arrange a prisoner release.

The national VVAW leadership gathered in Kansas City from Friday, November 12, through Sunday, November 14 for a raucous meeting. Sparks started flying a couple of hours into the meeting when Steering Committee member Al Hubbard arrived from the airport by taxicab. Hubbard, a former Black Panther and the man who had appointed John Kerry to the VVAW leadership in the summer of 1970, had just returned from Paris where he had met with the Vietnamese communist delegations to the Paris Peace Talks. Hubbard reported that he had just concluded negotiations with the Vietnamese Communists and they were ready to release a group of American POWs to the VVAW, provided that the VVAW would send a delegation to Hanoi around Christmas. Hubbard told the group that the Communist Party USA had paid for his trip.

John Kerry, also a member of the 5-man Steering Committee, had long had a contentious relationship with Hubbard. After sharing an appearance on the NBC television show, "Meet the Press," on April 18, 1971 Kerry learned that Hubbard had not been an Air Force captain as he claimed, but only a sergeant. Later investigations showed that despite his stories of being wounded flying in combat, Hubbard had never been a pilot, and in fact had never been assigned to Vietnam.

Now, according to the FBI files, Kerry made a motion to remove Hubbard from the Steering Committee -- a motion that was voted down. Kerry then stated that he intended to resign from the VVAW Steering Committee for "personal reasons," but agreed to remain on the Steering Committee until a replacement had been selected.

VVAW national staff member Joe Urgo was up next. According to an FBI report filed on November 24, 1971, Urgo reported that he had traveled to Hanoi in August 1971 to work directly with North Vietnamese leaders. Urgo brought home proposals for the VVAW to: (1) create tapes to be sent to North Vietnam for broadcast over Radio Hanoi urging US servicemen to stop fighting in Vietnam, and (2) send a delegation to Hanoi to negotiate the release of American POWs, a proposal that echoed Hubbard's report from Paris.

The now public FBI record clearly indicates that the VVAW of November 1971 had come under communist influence and was acting directly with the enemy to work against US military objectives in the war. Not only was the VVAW continuing to undermine support for the war in the United States through its false claims of war crimes and atrocities, but now the VVAW was negotiating with America's enemies to effect the release of POWs to enhance their credibility as an organization, and actively encouraging soldiers in the field to refuse orders to engage the enemy in combat.

This appears to violate US Code 18 USC 953, which directly forbids US citizens from negotiating with foreign powers, as well as Article III, Section 3 of the US Constitution, which defines treason as giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war. The record reflects John Kerry's decision to tender his resignation from the VVAW Steering Committee, but that resignation was not to be effective immediately, nor did John Kerry stop acting as the group's public spokesperson.

Remainder of text

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Fairfax, VA-After several weeks of mounting pressure by Conservative groups, Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry will finally release partial military reports to the public.

Although Senator Kerry promised to post all military records on his campaign website by today, he continues to withhold some documentation from public viewing. These reports include evaluations by his Navy commanding officers, as well as medical records resulting in his first Purple Heart. Kerry has yet to promise the release of his FBI files.

The Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty began a campaign in early February, demanding Senator Kerry come clean on all records relating to his military service, medical treatment, as well as FBI files on his anti-American protests of the Vietnam War.

These FBI files are the most important, as they outline Kerry's alliance to North Vietnamese Communists during the Vietnam War. The Patrick Henry Center leads the charge and will keep tight pressure on Senator Kerry until he provides the American public with all necessary information about his background.

Gary Aldrich, President of The Patrick Henry Center, responded to Kerry's partial-release this way: "Senator Kerry has taken baby steps, in an attempt to mollify those people who want the truth. But we won't be satisfied until we get the whole story. Senator Kerry must release his FBI records to the voters."

Text from Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty

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The Nuanced Hero


It truly hurt and I so swore
About that grievous scratch I bore,
From tense and darkened nighttime battle,
So fierce that it might surely rattle
Those who failed to see my deeds
And could sense not my future needs
For medals to lob o’er a fence
Then boast of in elections hence.
So thus it fell alone to me
To swear to what they didn’t see,
And gain myself a Purple Heart,
So they could soon see me depart.

I knew the rules and knew that three
Were all it took to spring me free
From that despised and desperate land
So I devised my nuanced plan,
To cry of wounds that hurt me naught,
But got me out before things got hot.
And thus I laid my lifetime track,
March in the front duck out the back.
So don’t expect the least contrition
When ere I boast about my mission,
And without shame brag every day
Of the medals I won in that fray.

Some vets may say they cannot see
How I could turn my back and flee
The oath I swore and my duty station
To fly back to a war-torn nation,
Where my deceiving perverse word
Was widely through the country heard,
And to forever falsely damn
Those left behind in Vietnam,
All branded by my condemnation
As villains to their saddened nation,
All while my pseudo hero throng
Gave succor to the Viet Cong.

But come now can you truly doubt
Because I got three hearts and out,
Abandoned combat and my mates
To run back early to the states,
Had any other goal in life
Than politics and richened wife?
To all you lesser men I say,
But in my subtle nuanced way,
So what I scorned you once before?
Put that behind you I implore,
Forget those slights and any others,


And join those fools in my band of brothers.

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Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com



Friday, Feb. 13, 2004

Editor’s note: This is Part 1 in a series revealing the Democratic front-runner’s track record on the important issues of the day.





Putative presidential nominee Sen. John Forbes Kerry, D-Mass., began his involvement with the nation’s painful POW/MIA drama long before entering the hallowed halls of American political power.

In April 1971, when as a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War he gave his infamous war-bashing testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry did not stop at declaring that he and many other veterans of that conflict were war criminals.

Pointedly, Kerry also insisted that the United States had a definite obligation to make extensive economic reparations to the people of Vietnam.

Specifically, the newly discharged Navy veteran was an advocate of the so-called “People’s Peace Treaty,” a tome reportedly drafted in communist East Germany. Its nine points closely followed the enemy Viet Cong’s proposals being touted at the Paris peace talks as a quid pro quo for ending the fighting.

What rankles many Vietnam veterans today is that Kerry’s blatant advocacy of the enemy's position occurred while hundreds of captured American fighting men suffered and languished as prisoners of war in North Vietnamese prisons.

Keep the POWs Hostage
Until the Communists Get Their Way

A key provision of the enemy platform supported by Kerry:



“The Vietnamese pledge that as soon as the U.S. government publicly sets a date for total withdrawal [from Vietnam], they will enter discussion to secure the release of all American prisoners, including pilots captured while bombing North Vietnam.”

In the end, of course, the American leadership wanted nothing to do with a sham proposition that called for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Vietnam first, followed later by negotiations for the release of prisoners.

Some observers suggest that the perfidy of the youthful Kerry had not much tempered by the time, when as a U.S. senator, he was frocked as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs in 1992.

To many, Kerry's agenda as chairman appeared to be more about racing to the normalization of relations with Vietnam than ending the miseries of POW/MIA survivors thirsting for definitive answers as to what happened to their men.

Visiting Vietnam, Kerry repeatedly angered the homefolk by praising his former enemy for being open and reporting that he was convinced they were not holding American POWs.

In the end, Kerry and his committee determined in a 500-page final report that American POWs were left alive in Vietnam after the war but felt none were still alive. It made no attempt to identify those left behind, how they died, who killed them or where their remains might be located.

Many POW/MIA families simply didn’t believe him, and they were soon given more to ruminate on as to what could have driven Kerry to such unsatisfying and incomplete conclusions.

Multimillion-dollar Incentive to 'Reward Vietnam'

Shortly after Kerry declared to the world, “President Bush should reward Vietnam within a month for its increased cooperation in accounting for American MIAs,” Vietnam announced it had granted Colliers International, based in Boston, a contract worth millions.

Designating Colliers International as the exclusive real estate agent representing Vietnam, the communist regime positioned the company to rake in tens of millions of dollars in future contracts to upgrade Vietnam’s ports, railroads and other infrastructure.

C. Stewart Forbes, chief executive officer of Colliers International, is John Forbes Kerry’s cousin.

The saga, however, does not end there. There remains the nettlesome matter of the document shredding.

John F. McCreary, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst assigned to Kerry’s committee, is a member of the Virginia State Bar and consequently saw an obligation to report what he suspected was misconduct by Kerry, also an attorney governed by the lawyers’ ethics code.

McCreary felt duty-bound to report knowledge of Kerry’s document shredding – specifically, the intelligence briefing text - to Vice Chairman Bob Smith.

Kerry: Destroy All Copies



A memorandum by McCreary: “Sen. John Kerry ... told the Select Committee members that ‘all copies’ would be destroyed. This statement was made in the presence of the undersigned and of the Staff Chief Counsel who offered no protest.”

On April 9, 1992, McCreary verified that the original document was destroyed, as well as 14 copies.

The McCreary memo continued: “On 15 April 1992, the Staff Chief Counsel, J. William Codinha ... ridiculed the Staff members for expressing their concerns; and replied, in response to questions about the potential consequences, ‘Who’s the injured party,’ and ‘How are they going to find out because its classified.’”

To defuse the growing crisis, on April 16 Kerry stated that the original documents had remained in the Office of Senate Security all along, so nothing wrong had been done.

But according to McCreary: “The Staff Director had deposited a copy of the intelligence briefing text in the Office of Senate Security at 1307 on 16 April.”

Kerry had, according to McCreary, ordered a non-original copy of the document entered into the Office of Senate Security, but only after protests from staff caused him to rethink complete destruction of the documents.

Cover-up



As McCreary stated at the time, this “constituted an act to cover up the destruction.”

Ironically, the Kerry campaign's Web site states: “When John Kerry returned home from Vietnam, he joined his fellow veterans in vowing never to abandon future veterans of America’s wars. Kerry’s commitment to veterans has never wavered and stands strong to this day.”



Part 2: Defense



Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

B.G. Burkett - Stolen Valor

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Ouch! Man, you have the best pictures.

My wife asked her brother (career Navy currently in SKorea) who he would like to see as President.

1. GWB
2. His spiteful ex-wife
3. Kerry

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Before God we are equally wise, and equally foolish - Albert Einstein

A government brave enough to restrict the rights of one religion, is dangerous enough to restrict the rights of them all.

America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength - tested, but not weary - we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom. - GWB

The greatest tragedy is not death... but a life without purpose.

unfortunately the Vietnam war "atrocities" did occur on a regular basis. The military would disquise much of these by labeling any and all vietnamese killed as viet cong. The lines were blurry in the war, but our lack of restraint when destroying villages and villagers is largely inexcusable. We should come to terms with how we fought that war as a nation if we are ever going to move forward with any kind of moral leg to stand on. Bob Kerry's forced revelations a couple years ago only further proves the case. The political reasons for that war may have been just on a very superficial level, i.e. communism is a represive form of goverinment, but our understanding of the region, its people, and how our influence would be percieved there is truly reprehensable. 3-4 million civilians died in that conflict. A huge number. We were very arrogent in our foreign policy concerning Vietnam dating back into the 50s. We owe it to ourselves, our veterens, and the veitnamese to do our best to clean up the damage we left in vietnam in unexploaded ordinence, and the after effects of agent orange. We also need to honor our veterens, give them the health care they need, and give them the repect they diserve for serving when called. Whatever feelings I have about the conflict, I would not punish the vets for the American policies I disagree with. Those are what I believe are the christian things to do.

Kerry's testimony before congress was brave, honorable, and unfortunetly more accurate then not, if a bit exagerated.

Kerry's book cover photo was disgracful, in bad taste and nasty.

Kerry's endorcment of the North Vietnamese regime, was niave and short cited.

Kerry, and to a larger extent our government as a whole, urge to move past POWs in vietnam is terrible. A great book called 'Inside Delta Force', by Eric Haney, describes in good detail one of his first missions as a founding member of that elite army unit. Rescuing the left over POWs in Vietnam in the late 70s, early 80s. The mission was purposely sabotaged by our own military to shield itself from critism and save face. Dont take my word for it, read the book. Its a great read, written by somone obviously pro-military, but honest about his experiences. A good story teller.

I will be voting for kerry this November, and I consider myself independent.