http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_45_1Infantry.html http://avoc.info/info/article.php?article=858 http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/elections/sns-2004election-kerryprofile,0,53345.story?coll=bal-election-storyutil Some 150 sweat-soaked members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War ended their three-day trek at Valley Forge, Pa., on Sept. 7, 1970. Huddled around a flatbed truck, they listened to remarks by Jane Fonda and a reading from Donald Sutherland.
Between the main acts came a floppy-haired former Navy lieutenant who had won a fistful of medals on the bloody canals of the Mekong Delta. Tall and self-assured, 27-year-old Yale graduate John Kerry read from a rumpled sheaf of papers in the ringing voice that had commanded men on gunships.
Condemning the tactics and morality of the war, Kerry was "brilliant," Fonda says today. He looked like Abe Lincoln and sounded like John F. Kennedy. "He was our ragtag commander at Valley Forge," says veterans organizer Joe Bangert.
Over the next 14 months, Kerry became the VVAW's spokesman and a key leader. With a knack for raising money and organizing people, able to straddle the divide between angry protesters and the nation's uncertain majority, he helped transform the motley band of anti-war veterans into a potent political force. In soaring, eloquent speeches, Kerry channeled the rage of returning soldiers, pled their case before Congress and captured the attention of a war-torn nation.
http://www.tms.tribune.com/htmlmail/consumer/profiles/payne.htm Kerry and his veterans did not desert but returned home to tell America what they had committed in the false name of national security. "We could be quiet," Kerry testified. "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, not reds, and not redcoats, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out."
The prime indictment of the Winter Soldiers was that Vietnam was indeed a war waged under false pretenses. "There is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America," Kerry said. "And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart."
http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-2004election-kerryprofile,0,4048777.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines Some 150 sweat-soaked members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War ended their three-day trek at Valley Forge, Pa., on Sept. 7, 1970. Huddled around a flatbed truck, they listened to remarks by Jane Fonda and a reading from Donald Sutherland.
Between the main acts came a floppy-haired former Navy lieutenant who had won a fistful of medals on the bloody canals of the Mekong Delta. Tall and self-assured, 27-year-old Yale graduate John Kerry read from a rumpled sheaf of papers in the ringing voice that had commanded men on gunships.
Condemning the tactics and morality of the war, Kerry was "brilliant," Fonda says today. He looked like Abe Lincoln and sounded like John F. Kennedy. "He was our ragtag commander at Valley Forge," says veterans organizer Joe Bangert.
Some 150 sweat-soaked members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War ended their three-day trek at Valley Forge, Pa., on Sept. 7, 1970. Huddled around a flatbed truck, they listened to remarks by Jane Fonda and a reading from Donald Sutherland.
Between the main acts came a floppy-haired former Navy lieutenant who had won a fistful of medals on the bloody canals of the Mekong Delta. Tall and self-assured, 27-year-old Yale graduate John Kerry read from a rumpled sheaf of papers in the ringing voice that had commanded men on gunships.
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Condemning the tactics and morality of the war, Kerry was "brilliant," Fonda says today. He looked like Abe Lincoln and sounded like John F. Kennedy. "He was our ragtag commander at Valley Forge," says veterans organizer Joe Bangert.
