Reply #4: VVAW Smear Rebuttal

[sandnsea]

Because lord knows they'll be coming.

"...It is also charged here, however, that numerous phonies gave false testimony at the VVAW's Winter Soldiers Investigation in Detroit, and that only about thirty-percent of the men who participated in Operation Dewey Canyon III were genuine veterans of the Vietnam War. This I very much doubt, and I have searched this website in vain for even a shred of proof to back up these very serious charges.

All this website really has to offer are the personal opinions of historians Burkett and Lewy, who seem to have had no personal contact with VVAW members and are instead relying on information from the Nixon Whitehouse. For obvious political reasons, the Nixon administration did its best in 1971 to discredit Kerry and the VVAW. They came up with one VVAW leader (Al Hubbard) who had lied about his rank and exaggerated his military service. And that was it. They did not identify any other phony veterans, nor did they identify by name a single fraud who provided testimony in Detroit.

Who were all the liars and frauds in the VVAW? No one seems to know. And what exactly were they lying about in Detroit? One or two possibly exaggerated stories aside, the great majority of those who testified in Detroit described the exact same kind of abuses and atrocities that show up in the court-martial record of the war, in memoirs written by Vietnam veterans, and in histories written by academics. I don't understand how this website can so blithely dismiss the Detroit testimony when the stories told in Detroit mirror the documented war crimes committed at places like My Lai, My Khe, and Son Thang, and the documented illegal behavior of units like Task Force Barker and the Tiger Force of the 1-327th Airborne Infantry..."

http://www.vvaw.org/commentary/?id=449