Del. veteran sues over anti-Kerry film (and another Winter Soldier confirms war crimes)

Vietnam veteran who teaches at the University of Delaware filed a lawsuit Monday in Philadelphia against the makers of an anti-John Kerry documentary about the Vietnam War, claiming the film suggests he and another veteran fabricated details of wartime atrocities.

In the lawsuit, Kenneth J. Campbell, a UD associate professor of political science and director of the International Relations program there, said the footage of his 33-year-old conversation with a fellow Vietnam veteran about the massacre of a Vietnamese village by American soldiers was purposely taken out of context.

"He got a clip from an old documentary I was in" and misrepresented what happened, Campbell said.

In the footage, Campbell is talking with fellow veteran Scott Camil about the massacre at Quang Tri, a village near the border of North Vietnam. The massacre occurred in October 1967.

Both Campbell and Camil were members of an artillery unit, Alpha Battery First Battalion 11th Marines, in Vietnam. Campbell served in Vietnam after Camil, from February 1968 through March 1969; Camil served from March 1966 through November 1967, and left only a month after the massacre.

Camil, reached at his home in Gainesville, Fla., said he participated in the massacre.

Of his conversation with Campbell, Camil said, "Campbell came up to me and asked me, 'Hey, we're looking for someone who knew about an incident, about what happened in Quang Tri. Did you know about it?' " Camil said he had forgotten about it, then remembered it as he was speaking with Campbell.

"That was our discussion," Camil said. "They're trying to use that to say to the effect that we colluded together to tell a lie."

According to the lawsuit, the narration over the conversation between Campbell and Camil implies they were making up the incident: "Their lurid fantasies of butchery in Vietnam were seized upon by John Kerry to help him organize the so-called 'Winter-Soldiers Investigation' - the template he would use to brand all Vietnam veterans," the narrator says.

Campbell said the original scene "comes off quite credibly and moving, but the way Sherwood spliced it and narrated it, it appears as if I'm prodding Scott about a fabrication," he said.

Campbell said he attended the three-day conference in 1971 because he was disillusioned by the war. "We were supposed to be there for the South Vietnamese, but most of the population were peasants in villages," he said. "When you got out there, they were skeptical or mistrusted you, or they were flat-out aiding the enemy."

Camil said that his initial forgetting of the massacre may sound cruel, but the context of the massacre must be understood. "The hardest thing for people to understand is how I could forget about wiping out a village," he said.

He said his and his fellow Marines' job in Vietnam was "to walk around in the jungle and hunt for people to kill." His company measured success through body counts, the killing of everyone within "free-fire zones" on search-and-destroy missions where no one could be trusted, including women and children.

"We went into an area, in a free-fire zone, searched for the enemy and destroyed them, and that included the people, the crops, we poisoned the wells that were the source of their water. Those were things I did, and I did them because that was my job."

Quang Tri was the target of a mission his unit carried out in October 1967, Camil said. The area was part of a free-fire zone. "When we got there, we went on patrol and started scouting the area for people to kill," he said. "We burned the village down and killed everyone."

Here is Camile's Winter Soldier transcript:

CAMILE. I was in the 1st Battalion, 11th Marines, attached to the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines.

MODERATOR. You have some testimony here on the burning of villages, cutting off of ears, cutting off of heads, calling in artillery on villages for games, women raped, napalm on villages, all sorts of testimony of crimes against the civilians. Could you go into just a few of these to let the people know how you treat the Vietnamese civilian?

CAMILE. All right. The calling in of artillery for games, the way it was worked would be the mortar forward observers would pick out certain houses in villages, friendly villages, and the mortar forward observers would call in mortars until they destroyed that house and then the artillery forward observer would call in artillery until he destroyed another house and whoever used the least amount of artillery, they won. And when we got back someone would have to buy someone else beers. The cutting off of heads--on Operation Stone--there was a Lt. Colonel there and two people had their heads cut off and put on stakes and stuck in the middle of the field. And we were notified that there was press covering the operation and that we couldn't do that anymore. Before we went out on the operation we were told not to waste our heat tablets on food but to save them for the villages because we were going to destroy all the villages and we didn't give the people any time to get out of the villages. We just went in and burned them and if people were in the villages yelling and screaming, we didn't help them. We just burned the houses as we went.

MODERATOR. Why did you use the heat tabs? Did you just light off the villages with matches or just throw the heat tabs in so it would keep burning?

CAMILE. We'd throw the heat tabs in because it was quicker and they'd keep burning. They couldn't put the heat tabs out. We'd throw them on top of the houses. People cut off ears and when they'd come back in off of an operation you'd make deals before you'd go out and like for every ear you cut off someone would buy you two beers, so people cut off ears. The torturing of prisoners was done with beatings and I saw one case where there were two prisoners. One prisoner was staked out on the ground and he was cut open while he was alive and part of his insides were cut out and they told the other prisoner if he didn't tell them what they wanted to know they would kill him. And I don't know what he said because he spoke in Vietnamese but then they killed him after that anyway.

MODERATOR. Were these primarily civilians or do you believe that they were, or do you know that they were actual NVA?

CAMILE. The way that we distinguished between civilians and VC, VC had weapons and civilians didn't and anybody that was dead was considered a VC. If you killed someone they said, "How do you know he's a VC?" and the general reply would be, "He's dead," and that was sufficient. When we went through the villages and searched people the women would have all their clothes taken off and the men would use their penises to probe them to make sure they didn't have anything hidden anywhere and this was raping but it was done as searching.

MODERATOR. As searching. Were there officers present there?

CAMILE. Yes, there were.

MODERATOR. Was this on a company level?

CAMILE. Company level.

MODERATOR. The company commander was around when this happened?

CAMILE. Right.

MODERATOR. Did he approve of it or did he look the other way or...

CAMILE. He never said not to or never said anything about it. The main thing was that if an operation was covered by the press there were certain things we weren't supposed to do, but if there was no press there, it was okay. I saw one case where a woman was shot by a sniper, one of our snipers. When we got up to her she was asking for water. And the Lt. said to kill her. So he ripped off her clothes, they stabbed her in both breasts, they spread-eagled her and shoved an E- tool up her vagina, an entrenching tool, and she was still asking for water. And then they took that out and they used a tree limb and then she was shot.

MODERATOR. Did the men in your outfit, or when you witnessed these things, did they seem to think that it was all right to do anything to the Vietnamese?

CAMILE. It wasn't like they were humans. We were conditioned to believe that this was for the good of the nation, the good of our country, and anything we did was okay. And when you shot someone you didn't think you were shooting at a human. They were a gook or a Commie and it was okay. And anything you did to them was okay because, like, they would tell you they'd do it to you if they had the chance.

MODERATOR. This was told you all through your training, then, in boot camp, in advanced training, and so forth and it was followed on then, right on through it?

CAMILE. Definitely.

MODERATOR. Mr. Campbell, you were, I believe, in the same unit that Mr. Camile was. There was a period of perhaps two months separating the time that he left and the time you came. Was this same unit type policy, was this carried on?

http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_04_1Marine.html

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