WASHINGTON – John Kerry’s war didn’t end when he left Vietnam, and his antiwar actions in the ensuing years are under increased scrutiny as Kerry closes in on the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

As a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1971, Kerry publicly detailed atrocities allegedly committed by American servicemen in Vietnam and called for the United States to pay reparations to Vietnam. That – and much more – is now being used against the Massachusetts senator by political opponents on talk shows and the Internet. They circulate fliers and pictures – one of them doctored – showing Kerry speaking at antiwar rallies that also featured actress Jane Fonda, whose more radical antiwar activities still arouse anger.

Most damning, they accuse Kerry – who won a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts in combat – of betraying his fellow veterans by castigating his fellow soldiers while some of them were still in combat or in prison camps.

Kerry, who surrounds himself with veterans at nearly every campaign appearance, has defended his antiwar activities by saying he was indicting American leaders, not American soldiers.

The record suggests that the truth is more complex than either side admits.

For instance, by the time Fonda made her infamous 1972 trip to the enemy capital of Hanoi, Kerry had left Vietnam Veterans Against the War, uncomfortable with its radical drift. There’s no evidence that he ever worked closely with her.

More significant, while Kerry did say war crimes were “committed on a day-to-day basis” in Vietnam, angering many Vietnam veterans then and now, talk of atrocities was only a small part of Kerry’s rhetoric, much of which was in the mainstream of antiwar thought in an era when public opinion had turned against the war.

Like many other Vietnam veteran’s Kerry spoke more in anguish than in anger. Many grew disillusioned and angry because, as Kerry told the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, “they have to face what they did in Vietnam, and then they come back and find the indifference of a country that doesn’t really care, that doesn’t really care.”

Kerry’s now-famous testimony decrying the war before the Foreign Relations Committee, during a week of veteran-led protests in Washington, captures what all sides see in Kerry.

Kerry’s campaign video excerpts one dramatic part of that testimony: Kerry, then 27, dressed in green fatigues, his hair shaggy but his face clean-shaven, demanding of his elders in a Boston Brahmin accent, “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?”

Kerry’s opponents highlight the beginning of his testimony, when he gave details of the VVAW’s Winter Soldier investigation, a 1971 meeting at a Howard Johnson’s in Detroit where 150 veterans discussed atrocities they said they’d committed or witnessed in Vietnam.

“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,” Kerry testified.

Those words are at the heart of the outrage that many veterans feel toward Kerry, even though it’s clear in the testimony that Kerry is relaying what other veterans reported they’d done and seen.


Richard DeMarco, a retired Ohio ironworker and a Marine who served in Vietnam, said in a recent interview that Kerry stigmatized returning soldiers as killers and torturers, creating an impression that took years to overcome.

“John Kerry is the one that fostered that image in the people’s minds and (is) causing veterans the loss of their honor,” DeMarco said.

Rep. Sam Johnson, a Texas Republican who spent nearly seven years in North Vietnamese prisons after his plane was shot down in 1966, called Kerry “two-faced” and said he doubted that the atrocities Kerry discussed occurred.

Others have tried to discredit the VVAW’s Winter Soldier investigation and Kerry’s testimony, saying none of the alleged atrocities were independently confirmed and questioning whether some of the participants were even veterans.

Yet Gerald Nicosia, who wrote “Home to War,” a history of Vietnam veterans, said that because previous attempts to catalog war atrocities had been discredited, Winter Soldier organizers carefully checked attendees’ credentials. They inspected discharge papers and conducted intense interviews to ensure that the veterans had been where they said they’d been.

“If guys couldn’t come up with the answers, they were out the door,” Nicosia said.


Kerry stands by what he heard in Detroit, calling it “highly documented and very disturbing” in a recent interview with Knight Ridder.

“I did in my heart what I thought was correct to help people understand what was going on,” Kerry said. “I honor completely everybody’s service. I always honored the service of people over there. I never insinuated that everybody fell into one pot. I was looking forward to telling the truth about some of the things that were happening.”

Days before he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry implicated himself on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” saying: “I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed, in that I took part in shootings in free-fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. … I took part in search-and-destroy missions, in the burning of villages. … All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare.”

By that time, Americans were well acquainted with atrocities in Vietnam. A month earlier, U.S. Army Lt. William Calley was convicted of ordering the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which American soldiers murdered 347 Vietnamese civilians. A survey of 244 returning American soldiers in 1971 found that 38 percent of them had direct personal knowledge of at least some incidents similar to the one at My Lai.

Kerry, in his Senate testimony, diverted blame from Calley, instead chiding those far up the chain of command who encouraged a system in which My Lais could occur.

“Americans … have allowed the bodies which were once used by a president for statistics to prove that we were winning that war, to be used as evidence against a man who followed orders and who interpreted those orders no differently than hundreds of other men in Vietnam,” Kerry said of Calley.

While talk of alleged atrocities has garnered much attention, Kerry’s testimony – and much of his anti-war focus – was directed at leaders he said had “deserted their troops” and at the treatment of returning veterans.

“We are angry because we feel we have been used in the worst fashion by the administration of this country,” Kerry said.

Kerry called for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam, calling the war “the biggest nothing in history.”


At the time Kerry spoke, the unemployment rate for veterans between the ages of 20 and 29 was 10.2 percent, 2 percentage points higher than the rate for non-veterans in the same age group – and it was rising 50 percent faster. A congressional report found that between 10 percent and 15 percent of U.S. troops in Vietnam were addicted to heroin, but Veterans Administration treatment programs had lengthy waiting lists and President Nixon had vetoed a $105 million budget increase for VA hospitals.


By then, public opinion had hardened against the war. A Harris poll taken at about the time Kerry testified found that 73 percent favored withdrawing all U.S. troops from Vietnam by the end of the year, 1971. A Harris poll taken the next month found that 58 percent thought the war was morally wrong.

“By the time you get to that period, the public is all fed up,” said Stanley Karnow, the author of a definitive history of the war.


Even so, Vietnam Veterans Against the War never counted more than several thousand members out of millions of Vietnam-era veterans. Historian George Herring said the group reflected the concerns of society rather than creating them.

“It’s one thing to have hippies out there marching,” Herring said. “But to have veterans out there says something about the war.”

If he’s the Democratic candidate, Kerry’s antiwar work probably won’t affect many votes come Election Day, according to the Annenberg Public Policy Center. In a poll of 1,759 people taken earlier this month, 44 percent disapproved of Kerry’s antiwar activities and 40 percent approved. But only 17 percent said it would make a difference to their votes, and those voters were four times more likely to be Republicans than Democrats were.

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