Ghost war

The Swift Boat Vets say John Kerry's testimony about American atrocities in Vietnam is offensive. But they don't say it's false, because the record backs Kerry's account.

By Todd Gitlin

Aug 24, 2004 | William Faulkner got it right: The past is not dead, it is not even past. In a rancid and ghostly way, the Vietnam War churns on. So does the White House slime machine, though that runs more smoothly today -- George W. Bush's plumbers don't operate out of a Nixonian Committee to Re-elect the President.

Today's stench of lies about John Kerry is a stale remnant of the old lies about the war Kerry fought in. As the nation fights another botched war, today's purveyors of war lies are ghastly descendants of the last generation's unpunished deceivers. Indeed, John O'Neill of the outrageously named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (and every TV talk show within reach) is the very same -- the young man recruited by Charles Colson to do Richard Nixon's dirty work against the young Kerry in 1971.

How we got to this month's twisted replay of war lies can be easily outlined. Bush, who blew off the terror threat before Sept. 11 and then launched a backfiring bait-and-switch war against Iraq, campaigns as commander in chief. Kerry counter-campaigns as a man who has known actual command and knows how to choose his wars. Enter Bush's surrogate smear artists to impugn Kerry's command and everything else that touches on what he did both in the war and against it.

The current smears against the John Kerry of 1969 and 1971 are, of course, a massive distraction from the question of which American agenda is to prevail from January 2005 through January 2009. In another way, though, the smears are not an utterly irrelevant surrogate for everything that divides America now. Watch the players maneuver, watch carefully, and you will see who they are. Talk about character! Obscured by the obliviousness of "objective" journalists and talking-head blowhards, Bush avails himself of the smears he is too dishonest to condemn forthrightly. Once again, those who supported a dishonest war continue to do it dishonestly.

As everyone must know by now, the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has run two commercials in the battleground states of Ohio, West Virginia and Wisconsin -- and thanks to the TV channels that offer themselves for hijacking to the most scurrilous bidder, the majority of Americans are at least dimly aware of them. They may or may not be aware that the charges against John Kerry in wartime are (1) unsupported by contemporaneous military documents; (2) put forward by veterans who have in more than one case changed their stories since 1969; and (3) in the case of the battles that resulted in Kerry's medals, rejected by the crewmen on Kerry's boat.

Then this week, the same smear artists opened up with their bigger -- as it were -- guns. The second SBVFT commercial includes clips from Kerry's April 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "They had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads ... randomly shot at civilians ... cut off limbs, blown up bodies ... razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan ... crimes committed on a day-to-day basis ... ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam."

What happens during those ellipses is SBVFT members talking about Kerry's accusations in these terms: "Just devastating." "It hurt me." "John Kerry gave the enemy for free what I and many of my comrades in the North Vietnamese prison camps took torture to avoid saying. It demoralized us." "Betrayed us." "Dishonored his country and more importantly the people he served with. He just sold them out."

Note well: These bait-and-switch artists don't dare say that Kerry's statements were false. The anti-Kerry crusaders issue classic non-denial denials. The subtext of their outrage against Kerry is simple: They are still averse to facing the awfulness of the Vietnam War. What they are really saying with their slanders is that the truth hurts.

Take a close look at what Kerry said to the Senate committee. He was summarizing testimony given publicly at the so-called Winter Soldier Investigation of Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 1971, presented by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, in Detroit. One hundred five Vietnam veterans testified there. Seventy-one of them said they were eyewitnesses to war crimes of the sort Kerry later mentioned. Thirteen said that they themselves had committed war crimes.

These veterans testified to rape; to torture and the killing of prisoners; to the torching of Vietnamese homes and whole villages. In sickening detail they filled in the blanks -- as the Pentagon was itself unwilling to do -- to put to work this sentence from a U.S. Army field manual: "Every violation of the law of war is a war crime."

It is to the Winter Soldier testimony specifically that Kerry was alluding. It was these chronicles of mayhem that he was summarizing. To judge the truth of Kerry's Senate testimony, read some excerpts from the Detroit testimony.

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