Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971, Kerry claimed that U.S. soldiers had “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, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.”
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 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,
From His Offical Website
that snapshot, intended as private, reminding, of esprit d corps, used later, for political gain, in fact 2004 election, had many images that were intedned as not quite news, private photos as public, in addition to the obv photoshop jobs...
this from snopes:
2nd Action, Vietnam Veterans Against The war, need to date it, but you cant even get to the top of the Statue of Liberty these days, it just isnt going to happen...and it seems that the ability to get the audience of the Media, etc in one large, iconic gesture, has been a game of diminishing returns... (abu gharib perhaps the last example, cannot think of a protesting, pacifist event that put itself in such a position) (i want to talk a bit here, about the events of 9/11, and later events in mumbai, london and spain as a media creation, as an act of theater--but i dont want to conflate the non violent, peaceful protest of VVAW with islams, just as im worried i have goodwinned jerekai(sp)'s foto below)
(im sorting here, slowly, how media was dissemaited in veitnam, because it seems to be the foundation of the rest of the essay)
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