John Kerry's 1971 Senate Testimony

Description

The Pacifica Radio Archives is the audio respository with the most complete, unedited recordings of Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry’s testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on April 22, 1971.

Segments of this tape has been featured on Pacifica’s Democracy Now!, C-SPAN’s “Road to the White House”, MSNBC’s “Hardball” and “Deborah Norville Tonight," and numerous other media outlets around the world.

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Excerpt from John Kerry’s 1971 Senate Testimony:

"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.

"It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

"They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape 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 country side 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 feel 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, no reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.

"I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped."

Series: Washington Report, No. 10.

Broadcast date

05/03/1971

Broadcast station

WBAI

Program Length

35 minutes

Archive number

BC0019.10

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