[techweenie]

It wasn't what's been portrayed here several dozen times by the Swifties, slimers and haters...

The whole thing is too big to paste, but here's the salient stuff:

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...I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of the group of 1,000 which is a small representation of a very much larger group of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table they would be here and have the same kind of testimony....

WINTER SOLDIER INVESTIGATION

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 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, 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.

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So did you see a blanket condemnation of US soldiers? I didn't. What Kerry actually said is that brutal acts did happen, they weren't rare, and that they were seemingly condoned.

The young'uns here need to read up on Lt. William Calley who was prosecuted for actions similar to those committed by many, many other soldiers. The key difference in the My Lai massacre is not how or why it happened, but that one of the soldiers spoke up about it being wrong.

The other Kerry, Bob, eventually needed to purge as well and discussed his personal involvement in acts he was not proud of. But you can read up on that eleswhere.

It's not only anecdotal, either, in one highly praised action, the 9th Division in Kien Hoa province killed 11,000 and recovered 748 weapons.