I know it's late in the game, but if you haven't seen it I think you should check it out.
Here is a link.
It's incredibly inspiring, and I would think it should clear up any doubts about Kerry's competence to lead the nation. Keep in mind, he was only 26 when he said this stuff to some of the most powerful people in the United States of America. It's particularly striking because it seems nobody would be better suited to handling Bush's Vietnam than John F. Kerry.
They told the stories at times they 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 in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
We call this investigation the "Winter Soldier Investigation." The term "Winter Soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.
We who have come here to Washington have come here because we f eel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; 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.
...
In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. 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
Dying for freedom. John Kerry saw through that ugly piece of rhetoric in 1971 and I'm sure he sees through it today.
We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone on peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Vietcong, North Vietnamese, or American.
We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how money from American taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.
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.
Americans dying without support from their allies. A populace whose enthusiasm for the "liberation" varies between apathy and hostility. Destruction of land and property by both sides, but a stubborn unwillingness to admit it. Racial disparities in the Armed Forces. Americans choosing to ignore a major breach of human rights (Abu Ghraib wasn't exactly My Lai, but the response was the same: ignore it).
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese....
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."
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....
Communism. Human rights-abusing autocracies. John Kerry had it right when he was 26. He nailed it. And I think he knows it today, even if he knows the political realities too well to say it.
We are also here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We are here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatric, and so many others. Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded.
The Marines say they never leave even their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They have left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching begin them in the sun in this country....
Rumsfeld, Powell, Cheney, Rice. Let their reputations begin the bleaching already.
Sometimes America is lucky enough to find a person who perfectly matches the political moment. Sometimes we get a leader who, among all 300 million of us, is uniquely suited to handling the grim tasks the nation faces. Lincoln-- with his strong vision of centralized government coming to bear on the insane federalism of the Confederates-- was one. FDR, with his strong belief in the power of government action to mitigate human costs when capitalism faltered, was another. I truly believe that John Kerry can be another. Kerry has been building his whole life to this moment, to exorcise the ghosts of Nixon in a far more substantive way than George HW Bush ever could. We need to give him that opportunity next Tuesday.