For anyone who hasn't read it yet, please take a look at this account of a former 5-year POW at the Hanoi Hilton. It will break your heart. Kerry's anti-war propaganda tour was definitely used by the Vietnamese at the Hanoi Hilton, not just to "taunt" the prisoners but to justify horrific torture to force them to sign admissions to things they never did. I don't know how these guys went on to have a normal life after what they went through as POWs.
I am crying after reading that testimony to torture. It confirms what I always suspected as a kid watching Vietnam happen from my TV. Somehow I guess you can instinctively know that those men suffered through hell to stay alive, unless of course, you're John Kerry. Then you simply don't care about what happened to your fellow countrymen.
Excerpt: "The body is first to give up. You cannot keep yourself from passing out, throwing up, screaming. I discovered that the more the body convulsed involuntarily, the more I could observe it as though it belonged to someone else. I found I could intellectualize pain, which allowed me to take a quantum leap in my tolerance of it. Sometimes, though, the problem was staying in touch with reality enough to keep alive. Detaching oneself too much has an insidious narcotic effect that invades one's reason and dulls normal danger signals. This is probably the way nature helps us die without being all tensed up."
And the young, safely Stateside Lieutenant John Kerry handed the Viet Cong more tools.
How does a released POW come home and stomach John Kerry?