[chellis]

STOLEN VALOR
How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of its Heroes and its History

by B.G. Burkett/Glenna Whitley

In April 1971, the VVAW staged a demonstration it called Dewey Canyon III , a "limited incursion into the country of Congress." ....


page 135

After a man who said his son died in Vietnam blew taps, the soldiers began flinging their war medals over a high wire fence in front of the Capitol: Purple Hearts, Bronze Star Medals, Silver Stars - bits of ribbon and metal hurled in the face of the government that had so betrayed them. Some, after throwing away what had cost them so dearly, broke down and cried.

One of those was John Kerry , Vietnam Navy veteran and aspiring politician who had been among those who organized the protest. Kerry flung a handful of medals - he had received the Silver Star, a Bronze Star Medal, and three Purple Hearts - over the fence. Kerry spoke later that week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, putting a face on the antiwar movement far different from the one seen before - the scruffy hippie or wild-eyed activist .Kerry represented the All-American boy, mentally twisted by being asked to do terrible things, then abandoned by his government .

From start to finish, the public took Dewey Canyon III at face value, not understanding that they were watching brilliant political theater. Kerry , a Kennedy protege with white-hot political aspirations , ascended center stage as both a war hero and as an antiwar hero throwing away his combat decorations. His speech, apparently off the cuff, was eloquent, impassioned.


But years later, after his election to the Senate ,Kerry's medals turned up on the wall of his Capitol Hill office. When a reporter noticed them, Kerry admitted that the medals he had thrown that day were not his .[see footnote #209] And Kerry's emotional, from-the-heart speech had been carefully crafted by a speechwriter for Robert Kennedy named Adam Walinsky, who also tutored him on how to present it. TV reporters totally ignored another Vietnam veteran , Melville L. Stephens, a former aide to Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, chief of Naval Operations, who that same day urged the Senate not to abandon America's allies in South Vietnam.

"Peace for us must not come at the cost of their lives,"

Stephens said in a speech he wrote himself. ...


page 136

How many of the other participants in Dewey Canyon threw away "props" ? How many were really Vietnam veterans ?

[pave palestine]

A Washington Times column from 1/5/03 is repeated here: The Crucifixtion of Vietnam's Montagnards: Christmas 2002 (copy-protected). At the bottom it explains that John Kerry blocked passage of the Vietnam Human Rights Act in the Senate. This bill passed the House 410-1.