[Marxism] Counterpunch expose on Kerry's real record in Vietnam

["M. Junaid Alam" <junaidalam@xxxxxxxxxx>]

A must read:


 Hail, the Conquering War Criminal Comes!


 What Kerry Really Did in Vietnam

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

In his senior year at Yale in 1966 John Kerry enlisted in the US Navy,
with his actual induction scheduled for the summer, after his
graduation. Already notorious among his contemporaries for his political
ambition, he'd maneuvered himself into the top slot at the Yale
political union, while also winning admission to Skull and Bones.

While Bush, two years behind Kerry, was seeking commercial opportunity
at Yale by selling ounce bags of cocaine, (so one contemporary has
recalled) Kerry was keeping a vigilant eye on the political temperature
and duly noted a contradiction between his personal commitment to go to
war and the growing antiwar sentiment among the masses, some of whom he
hoped would vote for him at a not too distant time.

It was a season for important decisions and Kerry pondered his options
amid the delights of a Skull and Bones retreat on an island in the St
Lawrence river. He duly decided to junk his speech on the theme of "life
after graduation" and opted for a fiery denunciation of the war and of
an LBJ. The speech was well received by the students and some
professors. Most parents were aghast, though not Kerry's own mother and
father.

Unlike Bill Clinton and George Bush, Kerry duly presented himself for
military service. After a year's training he was assigned to the USS
Gridley, deployed to the Pacific, probably carrying nuclear missiles.
Beset by boredom, Kerry received the news that once of his best friends,
Dickie Pershing, grandson of "Black Jack" Pershing had been killed in
Vietnam. Kerry seethed with rage and yearned, as he put it years later
to his biographer Douglas Brinkley, for vengeance. (Brinkley's recently
published and highly admiring bio, A Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the
Vietnam War, offers many telling vignettes to an assiduous reader. It's
based almost entirely on Kerry's diaries and letters of the time.)

Kerry engineered reassignment to the Swift boat patrol. In Vietnam the
Tet offensive had prompted a terrible series of search and destroy
missions by the US, plus the assassination program known as Phoenix. As
part of the US Navy's slice of the action, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt and his
sidekick Captain Roy "Latch" Hoffman had devised "Operation Sea Lords",
in which the Swift boats would patrol the canals and secondary streams
of the Mekong Delta, with particular emphasis on the areas near the
Cambodian border. The basic plan, explicitly acknowledged by many Swift
boat veterans, was to terrorize the peasants into turning against the
National Liberation Front, aka Viet Cong. The entire area, except for
certain designated "friendly villages", was a free fire zone, meaning
the Americans could shoot at will and count anyone they killed as VC.

http://counterpunch.org/

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