Naomi Craine
Charlotte, North Carolina
Kerrey and Vietnam War
The Militant coverage of the massacre of Vietnamese civilians by a Navy SEALs unit under command of former Senator Robert Kerrey was right on the mark. A communist response to the revelations is exactly what is needed to make sense of the continued attacks by the big business media and U.S. government against the Vietnamese nation and their manipulative apologies for American military atrocities.
I was in Vietnam from April 1967 to May 1968 with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. Responses by co-workers and veterans I spoke with about the revelations ranged from, "He's not a hero, he's a murderer" to "We have no right to judge him, we were are all guilty of some criminal conduct over there." A few veterans thought that if there were a trial over war crimes, it should start with Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger, otherwise the real big criminals will get away.
Still another veteran stated, "All our special weapons and modern technology only served to prolong the inevitable. If we had fought, armed with the same weapons as they had, the war would have been over in six months. Only courage makes you face the weapons we had."
I and other veterans I spoke with recognized Kerrey's mission as very similar to, if not part of, the infamous Phoenix Program, a secret CIA extermination operation designed to eliminate opponents of the Saigon regime and then blame the deaths on Vietnamese liberation fighters.
Rick Trujillo
San Jose, California
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