Free Republic

“Vietnam veterans will not be intimidated by John Kerry,” retired Air Force Colonel George “Bud” Day said in response to the Massachusetts Senator’s newly created legal expense trust fund to finance his court battles against a group of highly-decorated Vietnam War veterans. Col. Day added, “Why one of the wealthiest men in the Senate would expect others to pay his lawyers and use questionable Senate privileges against veterans is shameful.” Col. Day is chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation (VVLF), a group of Vietnam combat veterans who sued Sen. Kerry for “conspiracy and defamation.” Day is the most decorated...

MARINE CORPS LOGISTICS BASE BARSTOW, Calif. (Feb. 9, 2006) -- A Marine walks through a village in Vietnam while carrying out a mission of extreme importance. The day is warm and muggy and the villagers cower away whenever the Marine walks pass them. Suddenly, shots ring out in the distance and rounds impact around his location. His platoon sergeant goes down with the onslaught of bullets. The Marine reaches for his platoon sergeant's body to drag him away from the danger, but the wounded sergeant orders the other Marine to run and get his rifle. At that moment a warm...

For over 30 years I -- like many Vietnam veterans -- seldom spoke of Vietnam, except with other veterans, when training soldiers, and in public speeches. These past five years I have joined the hundreds of thousands who believe it is high time the truth be told about the Vietnam War and the people who served there. It's time the American people learn that the United States military did not lose the War, and that a surprisingly high number of people who claim to have served there, in fact DID NOT. As Americans support the men and women involved in...

Anybody see CBS Cold Case tonight? One of the characters in this show was suspected of a murder that supposedly happened in the 1960s. He was a Viet Nam vet who was in a wheelchair. He said his wounds came from a little kid who shot him after he and his unit had locked parents and grandparents in a shed and threw in a granade. Sorry I don't have more info on this dispicable show. It really bothers me that this show can slander vets on Christmas day and nobody questions it.

Vietnam Veterans Bare Their Souls In a Searing '72 Documentary See "Winter Soldier." This extraordinary documentary, made in 1972 and having its first theatrical release, not only revisits events during the Vietnam War that have uncanny resonance today but also stands as a riveting example of pure filmic storytelling. An unadorned, black-and-white record of a three-day gathering held in Detroit in 1971, "Winter Soldier" turns the camera on the testimony of former soldiers invited by Vietnam Veterans Against the War to share accounts of atrocities they committed or witnessed. The result is a spellbinding film that achieves impressive power through...

Alright, here's the deal. I'm going to have to lead a small university seminar on the public perception of the Vietnam war for one of my history classes. However, I would like to force the participants to see this from a fair perspective (both a bird's eye view and from the ground), rather than the superficial pop-cultural view of Vietnam that most are likely to have (we are university undergraduates after all). Specifically, given how often Vietnam Vets get ignored or passed over, I want the participants to understand the perspective of the grunts, sailors and airmen who participated. So...

WASHINGTON, (Army News Service, Nov. 14, 2005) – More than 200 veterans of Vietnam’s battle of Pleiku-Ia Drang reunited at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Nov. 11. This week marks the 40th anniversary of the battle of Pleiku-Ia Drang. On Nov. 6, 1965, 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lt. Col. Hal Moore, were dropped by helicopters in the Ia Drang Valley and were immediately surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Three days later, only two and a half miles away, a sister battalion was destroyed. Together, these two events were among the most savage...

Last week, co-author of Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation was Robbed of its Heroes and its History B.G. Burkett, shed light on wide-spread and completely false misconceptions surrounding the Vietnam War. While trying to raise funds for a Texas Vietnam memorial, he realized that the media's influence and false coverage had altered the memory of Vietnam for the worse. Correlating Burkett's lecture and the Vietnam War with something the UD core esteems, Thomas G. West, politics professor, drew upon Plato's image of the cave in his introduction. "We here at UD read Plato's Republic and are shown Plato's cave,...

November 11, 2005, 8:55 a.m. Generations of Valor Fathers and sons at war. By Anne Morse "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!" exulted President George H. W. Bush after America's swift and smashing victory over Iraq during the Gulf War of 1991. It was a reference to how deeply the debacle that was Vietnam — then some 16 years in the past — had scarred the American psyche. Vietnam had, by all accounts, also scarred the veterans who served in it. Everyone "knew" that Vietnam veterans were drug-addicted, alcohol-addled losers who killed babies when they...

God Bless and keep all who serve in our military, have served in our military, and who have made the unltimate sacrifice. We recognize the supreme sacrifices of the spouses, children, and extended family of every military person who has served. The American Fire Service holds dear to its heart the efforts and sacrifices made by our military to win, secure, and maintain our freedom. Those like myself will honor your sacrifice by respecting, utilizing, and defending those freedoms that are so precious and have cost so very much. Here is a special tribute to our Vietnam Vets who unfortunately...

FORT HUACHUCA — America’s heroes were honored at a special event on Wednesday, including the many who now live in this community. The annual Bring A Vet To Lunch, presented by the Greater Sierra Vista Area Chamber of Commerce and its Military Affairs Committee, saw more than 180 people fill the Thunder Mountain Activity Center. Among them were veterans aged 80-plus, as well as active-duty soldiers still in their teens, and community and military leaders. But the special guest was retired Lt. Col. Barry Bridger, an Air Force veteran who spent more than six years as a prisoner of war...

This coming Thursday at 11:00am Eastern, G. Gordon Liddy will host leaders of the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation (VVLF) on his radio show. The VVLF recently filed a conspiracy lawsuit against John Kerry in federal court. During the program, excerpts from both "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal" and Kerry's libelous 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will be broadcast. Here are short bios of Liddy's guests, all of whom also appeared in the devastating Swift Vets and POWs for Truth TV ad campaign: Col. George E. "Bud" Day, USAF (Ret.) President of Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation Shot...

Oct 5, 2005 13:00 ET Former Vietnam POWs Sue John Kerry PHILADELPHIA, Oct. 5 -- Sen. John Kerry and a top DNC campaign official have been sued for conspiracy and defamation in Federal District Court in Philadelphia by the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation (VVLF), which is led by a group of former Vietnam combat veterans, including several POWs, and the wife of a POW. The legal action comes just weeks after the group of highly decorated veterans, which includes a Medal of Honor recipient, was itself sued twice by Kerry campaign supporters who were once his fellow antiwar activists. All...

A Vietnam veteran can write about Vietnam from a number of perspectives. He can write specifically about his own experiences in whatever role(s) he played, in whatever location(s) he served. His writing can address the personalities and characters of people he knew, served with, saw killed or wounded, and so on. For such a project he needs essentially no corroboration or statistical validation because he is describing real events as he saw them at the time. Movies have been made, relating to several wars, which center around the experiences and adventures of small groups, such as squads or platoons. The...

Yes, we have their play book. Over 6 million Veterans served in Vietnam 58,000 of the names are on the black wall in D.C. Now is the time to restore the honor of the 6 million by correcting the wrongful depictions of our Vietnam Veterans. This will happen as we rally in defense of this generation of troops. Then we will go after the educrats who have perpetuated the 1971 Kerry lie. We will find all the text books that wrongfully depict our Vietnam hero's and replace them with the correct accounting of what happened. And then we will go...

THEY fought in some of the bloodiest battles of war and returned to scorn. But most now have learned to accept, if not forget, the psychological battles of Vietnam, according to Townsville's only member of D company, 6 Royal Australian Regiment, which fought in the now famous Battle of Long Tan. "We got kicked in the guts when we came home - paint was thrown on us," former infantry man and now Hervey Range resident Stan Hodder said yesterday. "Some blokes were refused membership of the RSL because it was not a declared war. "We've got to avoid falling into...

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 8 - Like a live hand grenade brought home from a distant battlefield, the 34-year-old antiwar documentary "Winter Soldier" has been handled for decades as if it could explode at any moment. Now, the 95-minute film - which has circulated like 16-millimeter samizdat on college campuses for decades but has never been accessible to a wide audience - is about to get its first significant theatrical release in the United States, beginning on Friday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. (Other bookings, including Chicago, Detroit, Hartford and Minneapolis, can be found at www.wintersoldierfilm.com.) Its distributors say...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Still in his Army greens, William Tallerdy barely had both feet back on American soil when a man came up to him, demanding to know if he was returning from Vietnam. Then, right there in the airport, the heckler punched the veteran in the face. Tallerdy exploded. The police and his relatives had to restrain him. Soon after, he threw out his war ribbons. That was 1967. "I was always proud of my military service," said Tallerdy, who is now 57 and lives in Cheyenne, Wyo. "It was just that people made me feel like scum." Tallerdy...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - William Tallerdy arrived back from Vietnam in 1967, still wearing his Army-issued green uniform, and was met by a heckler in a New York City airport who asked if he was returning from the war - then struck him in the face.Tallerdy recalls raging against the man, beating him in the terminal before being restrained by relatives and the police. Soon after, he threw out his war ribbons. "I was always proud of my military service," said Tallerdy, who is now 57 and lives in Cheyenne, Wyo. "It was just that people made me feel like scum."

<p>Before dawn, the pilots digest their intelligence briefing with coffee. The sun rises as they start preflight checks. Just after 7:30, they start rotors turning on their UH-60A Black Hawk, and ease it smoothly into the desert sky.</p> <p>Chief Warrant Officers DeWayne Browning and Randy Weatherhead will take off and land a dozen times this hot day, ferrying infantry troops battling Iraq's insurgents in the Sunni Muslim heartland that Saddam Hussein calls home.</p>