I realized that I hadn't seen any American pillagers, either at Operation Hawthorne or subsequently at the various firebase threads.
Poodle Boy wouldn't LIE to us, would he?
Wouldn't, say, throw his medals away yet NOT throw his medals away?
And we're looking into how he acquired those medals, whether any attention was paid to established criteria--
Or was it merely, three Band-Aids and you're out, and, oh, for shooting a corpse, a Silver Star.
That would be a war crime.
Much of Kerry's speech before Congress painted his fellow GIs as so brutal that, today, they could easily be mistaken for Saddam Hussein's Fedayeen killers.
He reported to Congress that U.S. soldiers 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, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam."
By the following day, April 24, the publicity from the 22nd and 23rd helped draw at least 250,000 demonstrators to the Mall in a massive protest.
Kerry, wearing his combat jacket, addressed the rally from the Capitol steps.
In less than a week, Kerry was transformed from little-known former swift boat skipper to a national icon for a movement that advocated against U.S. involvement in Vietnam and for the communist Vietnamese.