A visit to
John O'Neill's Swift Boat website makes clear that the source of O'Neill's bitterness and many of the other Vets is that they believe Kerry has
falsely accused them of war crimes and atrocities. The website makes available
a transcript for a debate that took place between Kerry and O'Neill on the Dick Cavett show in 1971. The transcript shows that O'Neill has consistently misrepresented the specific charges Kerry made about his own service and therefore the Swift Boat crews. What follows is an illuminating exchange between the two:
MR. O'NEILL: ...
I think that, clearly, the biggest question we're going to have to deal with is the moral question of war crimes. There's quite a difference between coming back to this country and putting on a sack and saying, confessing, "I committed war crimes" and running for the Congress of the United States from Massachusetts and saying, "Well, all three million of us committed war crimes," and I suggest that that's the question that Mr. Kerry and I should be talking about because that's precisely and exactly what he said.
MR. CAVETT: Well, let's talk about that. Did you see war crimes committed and -
MR. KERRY: Well, I have often talked about this subject. I personally didn't see personal atrocities in the sense that I saw somebody cut a head off or something like that. However, I did take part in free fire zones and I did take part in harassment interdiction fire. I did take part in search-and-destroy missions in which the houses of noncombatants were burned to the ground. And all of these, I find out later on, these acts are contrary to the Hague and Geneva Conventions and to the laws of warfare. So in that sense, anybody who took part in those, if you carry out the applications of the Nuremberg principles, is in fact guilty.
But we're not trying to find war criminals. That's not our purpose. It never has been. I have a letter here which I could read to you which we wrote to Washington D.C. in an effort to try and solve the problem of these war crimes, and we sent it to Senator Stennis, and we said, "On behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, we're writing to ask that the Senate Armed Services Committee immediately convene public hearings to examine the testimony presented by these veterans." May I go on?
Among the questions raised were charges. What we're looking for is an examination of our policy by people in this country, particularly by the leaders before they take young men who are the objects of that policy and try them rather than examine the policy at the highest level where it was in fact promulgated.
...
So the question of war crimes and atrocities looms very large for O'Neill. But Kerry has made clear that his interest in war crimes is not that such things call for prosecution of soldiers but for squaring face up to the leadership and institutions that put soldiers in a situation where such things could happen. Mr. Kerry also clarifies what should have been obvious to anyone reading his congressional testimony, that he is NOT speaking for all veterans as O'Neill continually alleges. He is not even accusing everyone of being responsible for war crimes and atrocities. But let's go on.
MR. KERRY: ...
Now, when we talk about something like war crimes, we're not throwing this term out lightly. The Hague Convention, the Geneva Conventions, history has laid down certain laws of warfare. Hague Convention, I believe, Article Four, states that you are not allowed to bombard uninhabited villages or villages that are not occupied by defendants. We have done that constantly in Vietnam.
MR. O'NEILL: [Unintelligible] John. Can you tell me about any war crimes that occurred in that unit, Coastal Division 11? And a second question: Why didn't you attempt to get out of the unit or submit a request when you were there if you saw anything that shocked a normal man?
Note that O'Neill does not even bother to deny Kerry's very specific charge of an endemic behavior that his and other units participated in throughout Vietnam.
Here are the recorded statements of many vets speaking before the Winter Soldier investigation in Detroit that are consistent with Kerry's broad catagorization. O'Neill also ignores Kerry's earlier statement that he learned about the details of the Geneva Conventions only upon returning from the war. Finally, the question of whether war crimes would "shock a normal man" is also a dodge. Of course, Vietnam proved to be a shock to almost all normal men who went (and many abnormal ones as well).
MR. KERRY: We - Well, I'll come back to the question.
MR. O'NEILL: I'd like you to answer that question, if you would. You obviously are quite good on the polished rhetoric, but I did serve in the same place you did, and not for four months but for 18 months, and I never saw anything, and I'd like you to tell me about the war crimes you saw committed there, and also why you didn't do something about them, although [unintelligible].
MR. KERRY: Did you serve in a free fire zone?
MR. O'NEILL: I certainly did serve in a free fire zone.
MR. KERRY: [Reading] "Free fire zone, in which we kill anything that moves - man, woman or child. This practice suspends the distinction between combatant and non-combatant and contravenes Geneva Convention Article 3.1."
MR. O'NEILL: Where is that from, John?
MR. KERRY: Geneva Conventions. You've heard about the Geneva Conventions.
MR. O'NEILL: I suggest - I suggest -
MR. KERRY: May I complete my statement?
MR. O'NEILL: Sure, go ahead.
MR. KERRY: Thank you. Yes, we did participate in war crimes in Coastal Division 11 because as I said earlier, we took part in free fire zones, harassment, interdiction fire, and search-and-destroy missions. The concept of operations, I gather, changed somewhat from the time when I was there and the time when you were there later on. And I believe that we moved into operations called Silver Mace II and some others in which we were not quite involved in as -
But I know that there's no way in the world you can say that you didn't ride through the Ku Alon River or the Bodie River [phonetic spellings] and see huts along the sides of the rivers that were totally destroyed. Did you see them destroyed?
MR. O'NEILL: I think -
MR. KERRY: Were they destroyed?
MR. O'NEILL: May I answer the question?
MR. KERRY: Were they destroyed?
MR. O'NEILL: I'd like to answer that question very fully. On those particular raids, as you and I both know, John -
MR. KERRY: How do you know? Were you on them? Were you on them?
MR. O'NEILL: Yes, I was on the -
MR. KERRY: Sealords?
MR. O'NEILL: Absolutely correct.
MR. KERRY: Sealords raids.
MR. O'NEILL: That's absolutely correct.
MR. KERRY: And you never burned a village?
MR. O'NEILL: I'd like to continue with my statement, if I may. No, we never - I never - I never burned a village, that's absolutely correct.
Note how O'Neill dodges the question and modifies to say he, personally, never burned a village. He does not deny seeing burned villages which, as Kerry notes, would have been an absurd claim. Here is a
photo essay that depicts the burning of a village in a VC area near where Kerry was stationed. Whether O'Neill personally burned a village to the ground is not the point and O'Neill knows this. Instead, he justifies the tactics:
MR. O'NEILL: On those particular raids, as you know, from the time you came into the Ku Alon River to the time you left the Bodie, you're receiving almost continuous fire the entire time. If you went on a little further - and I had the experience of being there after you, which is fortunate - you would have seen that right there on the Ku Alon River at the present time there's a village of 10,000 people that came out from that entire area, refugees - refugees not from us, but refugees from the Viet Cong.
People who came there just to have their own type of government and just to be free, and I think we all realize that, as honorable men, we'd never - I don't' know the semantics, perhaps, as well as you, but we all realize that we'd never do anything dishonorable. And I think that you must realize that, that you would have done something about it then. I think it was only the fact that a fellow changes when he runs for congressman from Massachusetts. That's what's - accounts for [unintelligible].
He doesn't deny that villages were burned. Instead he falls back upon saying "we'd never do anything dishonorable." Kerry is not saying that anyone behaved dishonorably. As to whether O'Neill would do anything dishonorable the reader is referred to John McCain.
John McCain has characterized O'Neill's ad as both dishonest and dishonorable.
MR. KERRY: If I could - First of all, first of all, we did -
...
MR. KERRY: ...
The fact of the matter is that the members of Coastal Division 11 and Coastal Division 13 when I was in Vietnam were fighting the policy very, very hard, to the point that many of the members were refusing to carry out orders on some of their missions; to the point where the crews started to in fact mutiny, say, "I would not go back on the rivers again;" the point where my commanding officer was relieved of duty because he pressed our objections to what we were doing with the captain in command of the entire operation.
MR. CAVETT: The man above you was relieved of duty?
MR. KERRY: That is correct. The man above me was finally relieved of duty.
To the point that we had a continual rotation going on of new officers coming from the divisions that were not in this to try and replenish our spirit. To the point that the commanding admiral of all forces in Vietnam and General Abrams himself flew us to Saigon - completely stopped the war, put us in an airplane, we put on our khakis and went up there and were briefed for an entire day and told how what we were doing was writing Navy legends and how we were writing a new kind of history in the war, and so on and so on. And then we returned to go back into the rivers to do the same thing.
....
MR. O'NEILL: I'd like to respond to both of those points. The first point is I served in Coastal Division 11 for 12 months, not four. I never saw any moral protest there. I think that the story Mr. Kerry has told, if you take a look at it and talk to the people involved, including that admiral who is now the chief of naval operations, is in large measure prevarication. The reason they were brought to Saigon wasn't - and here I'm not speaking from first person knowledge, but there are a number of people I know that could. The reason they were brought there was that they had taken such severe casualties, and the great majority of people in that coastal division weren't opposed to the war.
O'Neill makes a claim and then says he has no firsthand knowledge of the meeting or the nature of the objections. Evidently, Kerry suggests that sailors are disturbed about the strategy being used. O'Neill claims that the concerns are not out of any moral qualms about burning hooches or free fire zones, he says that people were concerned about casualties. He says that the great majority of people in his division were not opposed to the war. Well, Kerry isn't claiming that a majority opposed the war only that there was widespread concern about the tactics being used to prosecute the war. Kerry claims that those concerns included moral ones. He doesn't claim that a majority had those concerns. Only that some did, including his commanding officer. O'Neill does not refute that claim.
No doubt both Kerry and O'Neill participated in the war honorably and even heroically. But the legacy of Vietnam tarnishes both (even as the stain sweeps out to cover those who chose to avoid service). Kerry's approach to the Vietnam war was to acknowledge the stain even as he touted the service of those who were there including himself. O'Neill's approach is to accept only the honor without the stain. For O'Neill, as for many on the right, evil is not something that lurks in one's own breast but is carried by outsiders from Kerry, to Jane Fonda, to liberals to the VC.
In his opening statement O'Neill misquotes Oscar Wilde:
Every man kills the thing he loves. By each let this be told: The brave man does it with the sword; the coward with the word.
The original quote from Wilde reads thus:
Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word. The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!
One suspects that the quote about killing what one loves is about as close to introspection as it gets with Mr. O'Neill. One wishes that he might have meditated on the quote a bit more before undertaking his character assassination of Kerry.