Senator John Kerry
218 Russell Bldg.
Second Floor
Washington D.C. 20510
November 11, 2011
Dear Senator Kerry,
I've spent the last three nights watching the History Channel's HD documentary on the Vietnam War. Tonight, I was struck by the footage of your comments before Congress in April of 1971, as a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). During your address to the congressional committee, you said:
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read carefully the President's last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says and says clearly:
But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the Communists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people.
But the point is they are not a free people now under us. They are not a free people, and we cannot fight communism all over the world, and I think we should have learned that lesson by now....
It is now 2011. The Vietnam war is ancient history to many in this country. While WWII veterans have mostly left this realm, many of your band of brothers from Vietnam still deal with the war every day.
November 11th is designated as the day that America honors its veterans of all military service. Yet I believe that too many members of our national leadership, including yourself, forget or conveniently displace the horrors of war, regardless of the theater or the national origin.
Tonight I ask one thing of you. When I re-watch the video of your career, Going Upriver, and recall why I came to support you so strongly in 2004, I am reminded of your words before congress in 1971:
We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.
We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.
We watched the U.S. falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings," with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater or let us say a non-third-world people theater, and so we watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the high for the reoccupation by the North Vietnamese because we watched pride allow the most unimportant of battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point. And so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 881's and Fire Base 6's and so many others.
President Obama has recently committed to removing all combat troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. While this is cause for great relief, for both the troops in theater and their families stateside, it does little to address the overall toll of U.S. military occupation and projection in global regions far removed from our shores.
This year alone, more U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan since the original engagement of the U.S. military in 2001, over 10 years after the start of the conflict. It is time for the carnage to cease, particularly in a country that is arguably more corrupt and dependent on U.S. support than the RVNA was in the early 1970s. The people of Afghanistan seek stability - however that looks - rather than a U.S. enforced "democratization" of the country.
If you were providing your 1971 congressional testimony today, I think that you would agree that your testimony might include the following words:
We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a Fallujah and Abu Ghraib in Iraq, a Kandahar and Bagram in Afghanistan, a Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and yet refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.
In the latter stages of your senatorial career, I ask you to consider where you came from. The time that you spent in Vietnam shaped you as a man, and a politician. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, many of us (including veterans such as myself) cringed when you intoned, "I'm John Kerry, reporting for duty."
Yet we supported you, knowing your personal history perhaps much better than you even remembered yourself.
Today, your duty and legacy is clear: It is time for the United States to honorably exit a military theater in Afghanistan that is as much of a no-win situation as were the end days in Vietnam. When you spoke before congress regarding the fallacy of Vietnamization, you said:
Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doen'st have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say they we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."
(Painting credit: "Reflections", by Lee Teeter)
The U.S. didn't lose that war - in the end, the leadership of our country finally (even if grudgingly) acknowledged the sense and sensibilities of nearly everyone in America, including her troops who were fighting for an apparition of a cause that never justified the extreme sacrifice. And today, Senator Kerry, the same government that you personally fought against in Vietnam is a preferred trading partner of the United States.
It is time - long past time - to bring our armed forces home from Afghanistan. With the execution of Osama bin-Laden earlier this year, the goal set by the previous administration, and continued by the current administration, has been met. As a country, America can no longer justify the expenditure of one more drop of blood, nor one more dollar of support for the corrupt regime that leads Afghanistan.
To paraphrase your own remarks, how do you ask a man (or woman) to be the last American to die in Afghanistan?
America will always face challenges. It's the nature of our history, and the destiny of our future. But always - always - leadership has arisen that took the course to resolving our conflicts.
What I am asking you today is to look into your past as a leader of the movement that helped to bring a conclusion to the endless war and carnage, from Khe Sanh to the Mekong Delta. It is time that a national leader such as yourself seized the opportunity to change the narrative, and lend your considerable experience to ending U.S. involvement in another war with no end, that will have no good ending.
On Veteran's Day 2011, there is no greater support that could be given to honor the troops and families who are still engaged in this conflict. There is no greater vocation nor higher calling than being a man who seeks peace.
Thank you, sir, for your service. (It took over 30 years for me to hear those six words for the first time.) You are in a very unique position to influence the outcome. I ask you to revisit where your heart was in 1971, and invite you to allow that same spirit to guide you today.
Sincere regards,
Richard