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Kerry's Military Slap Recalls Vietnam
Sen. John Kerry responded to criticism of his remarks suggesting U.S. troops in Iraq are uneducated and not "smart” by asserting that he would never attack American servicemen.
Perhaps Kerry has forgotten statements he made as a spokesperson for Vietnam Veterans Against the War more than three decades ago.
Kerry touched off a storm of protest when he told a college audience on Monday that "if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”
He tried to deflect outraged calls for an apology to U.S. troops on Tuesday by maintaining that his comments were a "botched joke,” adding: "If anybody thinks that a veteran would somehow criticize more than 140,000 troops serving in Iraq and not the president and his people who put them there, they’re crazy.”
He said later: "And for them to suggest that somebody who served their country, as I did, and has a record like I have in the United States Congress of standing up and fighting for the troops would ever, ever insult the troops is an insult in and of itself.”
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But in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, Kerry referred to soldiers in Vietnam who "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 a 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.”
Some have sought to defend Kerry by asserting that he was merely quoting reports from other soldiers, but it was Kerry himself who introduced those reports before the Committee.
And Kerry was not quoting other GIs when he testified: "We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Vietcong . . .
"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.” He also alleged that "the torture of prisoners” was "accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam.”
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Inside Cover Stories
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