This was posted at Kerry/Edwards forum by AmericaNeedsChanging at Today, 04:30 PM
http://forum.johnkerry.com/index.php?showtopic=93059&hl=I Was In 'NAM & Saw Evidence-1000's Of Atrocities, Kerry Told The Truth About Atrocities
I joined the Army, knowing I would probably be sent to Vietnam.
I thought I was doing something for my country.
I worked at the US Army Mortuary, Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam during 1968-69 at the height of the war, the year the most American's died.
Almost every soldier killed in Vietnam came through our mortuary to be shipped home. Although we didn't do all the body preparation and embalming, there was a smaller Mortuary In Da Nang and The Tan Son Nhut Mortuary processed probably 70% or so of the K.I.A.'s (American's Killed In Action) from across Vietnam.
Part of my job was to sort through all the personal property of K.I.A.'s. While doing this function I saw many, many thousands of pictures that were obviously atrocities committed by American Soldiers. Such as the rape of children, women and men; and even pictures of G.I.'s having sex with corpses. Also summary executions by a pistol or M-14 or M-16 and also people being stabbed and beaten with things that most likely killed them. Whether those individuals who were stabbed or beaten with various objects lived or died; I don't know for some of them; but I do know that just the act of stabbing them or beating them with some heavy blunt object was an atrocity. And some of them were on the ground appearing to be dead in other pictures. I saw pictures of what appeared to be living human beings, since they were sometimes sitting up or standing; having body parts cut off, like ears, noses, fingers, toes and even genitalia. Yes, while the person seemed to be alive and screaming about it. Sometimes there were "before" and "after" pictures and certainly the people having their body parts chopped off were not looking good in the "after" pictures; and many appeared to have been shot or murdered in one fashion or another after they had their body part(s) cut off in excruciating pain. Many soldiers had pictures of their "trophy" collection, large number of ears, fingers, etc that they obviously had taken off a high number of people that they killed to get them. I saw pictures of a single soldier shooting groups of people and sometimes more than one G.I. firing into groups of people that were sometimes standing clumped together, sometimes sitting on the ground. Including groups of children, groups of women, some of mostly men and many mixed groups of children, women and men; including people of obvious grandfather/grandmother age. Then I saw the pictures of the same groups of people laying dead on the ground. And often the Lyndie England thumbs up pose by one or more American Soldiers in the pictures. Or there would be "trophies" taken from the dead lying on the ground.
Some of the dead American Soldiers had only a few pictures of such atrocities, some had many hundreds. Sometimes there appeared only one or two or a few guys showing in the pictures of atrocites, sometimes it appear to be a whole squad or major parts of a company. One guy I processed seemed to have the job of digging mass graves for the people we killed in the area whereever he was. He had a couple hundred of pictures of him on his bulldozer digging long trenches, and then the trenches would be full of bodies; many of them children, women, old men, old women, babies; so it was obvious that they weren't "combatants".... He looked so young and healthy, always had his shirt off smiling. Corn-fed farm looking boy. Then someone shot him and I got the job of sorting through his personal property and seeing these pictures of the results of our mass killings. So much obvious tragedy. So much of it dealt by America to innocent civilians. I heard many people brag about killing Vietnamese in cold blood out of rage or numbness or boredom or as "sport." The atmosphere in a war zone is like stepping onto an alien world. American Soldiers went off the deep end as a routine occurence, either quietly or not; the stress of seeing your buddies die and seeing your buddies killing innocent people or killing combatants led to a sort of mass psychosis. People would do crazy stuff on a daily basis; and it just made you go into another dimension of yourself to even cope with it. And many times that other dimension was not a happy camper, it was an angry violent part of our personalities.
When I first encountered these type pictures, I brought them to the attention of various staff and they all told me the same thing: there's nothing to be done about it; discard them because we can't send them home with their personal property, it would traumatize their family and loved ones.... and I'm sure that's true. There were many pictures of American Soldiers with their Vietnamese "girlfriends"; even lots of married guys and pictures of group sex, all kinds of unusual activities, including gay sex w/Vietnamese and among some soldiers. I discarded all those pictures too. I talked to a chaplain about it and he had the same attitude, discard them and forget about it. I did discard them, but I sure couldn't forget about them anymore than I could forget the 8,000 or so dead American Soldiers that were always passing through the mortuary in the year I was there. Some with tiny holes so small I couldn't believe they wouldn't get up off the embalming table, they looked so alive, some blown to bits and when we'd open a body bag they'd be just chunks of flesh and bone. Some swollen blue-green from exposure to water; and their skin would pull off as you tried to move them around. Some just swollen huge from being exposed to the high humidity and heat of Vietnam. It happened quickly, within a couple of days of being exposed to the high heat and humidity. Some piles of melted human beings; melted together like plastic melts from the high heat of a fire after a plane or chopper crash or APC or tank got hit and burnt everybody inside up. And if the bodies weren't brought out of the field quickly they'd be home to a multitude of bugs and insects and we'd have to kill them w/chloroform. We had such a voracious bug population at times we had to get trucks w/insecticides to back in the mortuary and spray to knock the population back some.
We pulled cutoff body parts out of American Soldier's footlockers on a daily basis. Many many skulls, that seemed to be a popular "trophy"; but also regularly... finger bones, hands, toes, feet, some arms and legs, jawbones, spinal bones, dried up fleshy parts, including male genitalia and some female too. Little shriveled up things that look like eye balls, ears, tongues, nose cartlidge, every part of the body seemed of interest to somebody at times. Someone in the mortuary set up a "footlocker recoveries" trophy case where we'd put different things we found in footlockers in the case for a while, then replace them with something else coming thru. A reminder to everyone of how strange the war made us Americans act.
With every dead soldier came a report about the cause of death; usually one paragraph and sometimes two; and there were Vietnamese atrocities against American's too; usually it would be a short capture period and then execution; they'd capture an American and execute him near where they captured him. That was horrible and immoral too. It didn't show up as the cause of death very often; but it did happen. The pilots they caught up North seemed to get the most torture and abuse. Most deaths they caused came in combat or being shot out of the air or something violent and quick; whereas the torture and abuse things we were doing to them en masse was astoundingly vicious. And I'm talking about what we did to civilians. Soldiers we captured were subjected to horrendous torture many times, then many got summary execution. The fourth or 5th day I was there, I had arrived from Cam Rhan Bay to the headquarters unit that many of the Mortuary Personnel were assigned to; it was a 3 story hotel and I was up on the roof where they had set up tables and a place to drink a beer. It was right on the road, and absentmindedly I saw a 3/4 ton American Truck come by with a couple of American Soldiers in the back w/a prisoner, don't know if he was VC or NVA or innocent. I do know that one of the American Soldiers had his foot planted firmly on the back of this guy's head; he was laying face down on the metal bed, the roads there were one endless pothole; and I could hear the smack of this guy's face bouncing up with every pothole and smacking back down because the G.I. has his boot on the back of the guy's head. Very loud noise that everyone on the roof could hear, even though the street was crammed with vehicles and noise. The guys face was a bloody mess and I had of course, never seen anything like that, and there was a sargeant major right beside me and I looked at him in astonishment; he said "they're questioning him don't worry about it"; he saw my shock and just laughed it off.
As a 19 year old I knew I was in a war zone but didn't know what that meant really, until that moment.
The same day they took me over to the mortuary and as a low-ranking Pvt E2 they gave me the tour of the mortuary and watched me turn green and then laughed when i puked my guts out. Most newbies did the same thing and they had a ritual of doing it to all the newbies. I wasn't Graves Registration they just picked me out of the blue randomly when they needed a body for the low man on the totem pole work. I had never seen a dead body until i walked in that huge cavern full of bodies in all states. After i finished puking they put me to working assisting the morticians, bringing bodies in and out of the walk-in coolers, cleaning the mess up of blood and human body fluids and tissue, cleaning the tables, cleaning tools, washing the blood and tissue right down the drain that ran out to a ditch right behind the mortuary. It always stank of blood and rotting tissue and formaldehyde and chloroform; there were no environmental controls and anybody anywhere near the mortuary got a big dose of some horrible human plus toxic chemicals to smell. Agent Orange was sprayed almost daily around the whole airbase, we'd play football in the areas that were still wet from spray; they told us it was safe; now many of my peers are dead and dying from it. By dumping directly on the Vietnamese we've caused generations of widespread birthdefects; the ground where we dumped hundreds of millions of gallons on the Vietnamese is still unfit to use to this day.
I think whoever thinks that American Soldiers didn't commit many, many thousands of atrocities and war crimes in Vietnam is either Naive and doesn't know or want to know the truth; or telling lies; because I and most honest Vietnam Soldiers know what went on there was horrible on both sides; but we were killing them 100 to 1; and 50 of those 100 were innocent civilians who were just trying to plant their rice and vegetables and stay out of the way of both sides.
We didn't give them that option. We took their lives, knowingly.
Napalm, Bombs, Ground Assaults, Artillery, Agent Orange dumped directly on civilian villages.
We knew what we were doing, everyone up the whole chain of command knew we were killing high numbers of civilians;
it was Standard Operating Procedure.
The command structure encouraged the de-humanizing; calling them "gooks, slanteyes, rice eaters, dinks" and many other bad things that made
them non-humans to be murdered at will.
The same thing is happening in Iraq, where we kill the "camel-jocks, sheep "expletive deleted"ers, ragheads" in their beds in their civilians neighborhoods; or holding their children in their arms walking to the market; and think nothing of it. They weren't Americans and wouldn't be voting for Bush anyway.
Over 10,000 Innocent Civilians we've killed, at a minimum and probably many more.
Something's wrong with our system.
Bad wrong.
The people who say it's okay to kill all the innocent Vietnamese and Iraqi's have something wrong in them.
Racism is a big part of their rationalizing.
The rest is something bad inside them that has turned them numb; something that let's them discount the lives of human beings who just happen to live in a different land, speak a different language and have a different culture from us.
Something's wrong with our society that we turn out so many of these numb hate-filled people.
Something's bad wrong.
It was wrong in Vietnam, it's wrong in Iraq.
Ron Taylor
US Army Mortuary Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam
1968-69
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