>Did he or did he not call the U.S. soldiers genocidal murderers?
I can find nothing definitive as to that statement. Did he call those U.S. soldiers still in Nam murderers?
Kerry in his own words: "WINTER SOLDIER INVESTIGATION
I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit,
we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command....They told the stories at times they had personally 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 in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
We call this investigation the "Winter Soldier Investigation." The term "Winter Soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.
We who have come here to Washington have come here because we f eel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.
>And did not Kerry go to Nam knowing full well the reasons behind the protests in the United States? Why did he have to go to Nam to figure out they were right?
Your version of events would be convenient to compare to the Dean supporters characterization of Kerry on the Iraq war. Being able to say that Kerry has a history of ignoring protests and supporting war anyway, only to finally accept the protests of the many. But the facts are against you. Kerry joined the military in 1966. Way before the protests to the Vietnam war had roared up. He did what many rich kids of his time did not do. Like GWB. GWB joined the guard in 1968. He knew then that protesters opposed the war and made the decision to avoid taking a stand in the matter by protecting the skies of Texas. When the protests of Vietnam were at their height, Kerry was on a boat in the Mekong Delta.
>This is why Kerry does not impress me. Flame away. I'm from a military family and have Vietnam Vets as good friends who aren't impressed by Kerry either.
I come from a family of Vets too and from a family of war protesters. They are impressed. They remember him. They appreciate what he did. My guess is that if you are a republican and a vet you don't like Kerry. If you are a Democrat, you like him. Politics as usual. I can live with that. But Kerry will change minds. I believe his presidency will bring a much needed opportunity to heal from the wounds inflicted in Vietnam for many people in this country. I pray for that.
I will leave you with Kerry'sw answer to your question. The answer he gave 30 years ago.
"In response to Senator Symington's inquiry about American men and women still in Vietnam and their attitude toward opposition to the war within Congress, Kerry offered the following comments.
...I don't want to get into the game of saying I represent everybody over there, but let me try to say as straightforwardly as I can, we had an advertisement, ran full page, to show you what the troops read. It ran in Playboy and the response to it within two and a half weeks from Vietnam was 1,200 members. We received initially about 50 to 80 letters a day from troops arriving at our New York office. Some of these letters -- and I wanted to bring some down, I didn't know we were going to be testifying here and I can make them available to you -- are very, very moving, some of them written by hospital corpsmen on things, on casualty report sheets which say, you know, "Get us out of here." "You are the only hope he have got." "You have got to get us back; it is crazy." We received recently 80 members of the 101st Airborne signed up in one letter. Forty members from a helicopter assault squadron, crash and rescue mission signed up in another one.
I think they are expressing, some of these troops, solidarity with us, right now by wearing black arm bands and Vietnam Veterans Against the War buttons. They want to come out and I think they are looking at the people who want to try to get them out as a help.
However, I do recognize there are some men who are in the military for life. The job in the military is to fight wars. When they have a war to fight, they are just as happy in a sense, and I am sure that these men feel they are being stabbed in the back. But, at the same time, I think to most of them the realization of the emptiness, the hollowness, the absurdity of Vietnam has finally hit home, and I feel is they did come home the recrimination would certainly not come from the right, from the military. I don't think there would be that problem.."
http://www.richmond.edu/~ebolt/history398/JohnKerryTestimony.html