Flower+Power+of+the+1960's+Day+Two!

First “Television War” vs. the War in Iraq

The Vietnam War: Anti-war Protests Letter from Vietnam Sources on the War in Iraq

Imagine you are a Vietnamese **civilian** during the war…

Primary Source:  Winter Soldier Investigation.Testimony given in Detroit, Michigan, on January 31, 1971, February 1 & 2, 1971. Sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Inc. =25TH INFANTRY DIVISION AND PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICE: Part I =

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“My name's Patrick Ostrenga and I am currently a student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I was a medic with the 25th Division, Second Battalion, Twelfth Infantry, and attached to "D" Company. My unit operated around Dau Tieng, which is about forty miles north of Saigon. My testimony concerns mistreatment of Vietnamese civilians, mistreatment of prisoners, and murder of Vietnamese civilians… …We came across a village of women, young kids, and old men--no young men. We surrounded the village, then we forced all the civilians out to an open field and we called in a Chinook, a large helicopter. At gunpoint we held these people until the Chinook arrived. Then we forced all of them onto the chopper to be taken to Saigon, I believe, and then we destroyed all of their hootches, we dumped all the rice down in their wells, killed all the fowl and the livestock, and left the place a real scorched earth…

…Well, one of the things I saw was one Vietnamese civilian, a pretty old man, was riding down a road with a bicycle. The lieutenant that was with us took out his M-16 and aimed it at the guy and shot one round and well, killed the guy. We went up to the guy, and he had a South Vietnamese ID card. Common practice in my unit was, if you killed a civilian with an ID card, you take his ID card and tear it up. The lieutenant's comment on this was, "Well, I guess I'm still a pretty good shot." We took some prisoners one time, and one of them was wounded. The guy had a pretty big gash in his arm, some frag from some artillery. I went up to treat him, and as I was putting on the bandage, the guy was pulled away from me and the commanding officer, a captain, told me not to waste anything on the gooks except bullets. And there were also some civilians that were wounded another time from some of our own artillery fire. I tried to treat some of them but I was told not to waste anything on them because they're not worth anything: they're just gooks. It's a very racist war…”

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Primary Source: Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement. Testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. April 23, 1971.

By John Kerry

I would like to talk on behalf of all those veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit -- the emotions in the room and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told stories that 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 Ghengis 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 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 in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, 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 firsthand how monies from American taxes were 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 the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search and destroy missions, as well as by Viet Cong terrorism - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong…

<span style="color: #6711eb; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">…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 United States 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…” <span style="color: #6711eb; display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace; text-align: center;">(…)

The War in Iraq: Vietnam All Over Again…or Not?

= Primary Source: // Eight Sketches from Kuwait & Iraq //. Sgt J. D. Garner, USMC. =

==== Background Information: <span style="color: #ff00de; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Sgt Garner served as a corporal in Operation Iraqi Freedom as part of Marine Logistics Command (MLC), augmented from the 2nd Force Service Support Group out of Camp Lejeune, NC. He and his unit were flown over to Kuwait on February 14th, 2003, and he returned with a detachment on August 15th 2003, just about six months later. During that time Sgt Garner volunteered for convoy security duty with Marine Security Detachment 1 (MSD-1) based at Camp Coyote and running to all points in Kuwait and many in Iraq. What follows are various essays which he wrote while in country -- soon after the events described -- prior to, during, and just after the war itself. ====

<span style="display: block; font-family: Jokerman; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; text-align: center;">
===<span style="display: block; font-family: Jokerman; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; text-align: center;">May 2003: Shortly after the declared end of major hostilities, Camp Viper, near Nasiriyah. ===

= <span style="color: #ff00de; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">(…) =

<span style="color: #ff00de; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">…My Pakistani driver decided he hates Iraqi kids. As we drove through Safwan, he spotted a kid waving at us from the side of the road and smiling. With an evil look, the driver swerved to hit the kid, a young boy. I shouted at the kid to get back and then shouted at the driver that he was a dickhead and not to do that again. His response went something like "ooloolooloolooloo!" and a dismissive wave at me. Less than a minute later we ran across a similar young boy, and this driver did the same thing all over again, swerving to hit. I was starting to get pissed off at this point because, frankly, I felt sorry for these kids and this jacka** had no right to threaten them with his truck. He had even less of a right to get me involved by ignoring what I told him. I pointed in the driver's face and flatly threatened him (in words he didn't understand of course) that he needs to stop and he was making me mad. Once again his response was a bunch of irate Hindi gibberish and a dismissive wave.

<span style="color: #ff00de; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Apparently he didn't fear the American.

<span style="color: #ff00de; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Well I got to thinking because I expected him to repeat the performance and try to hit another kid, and the Rules of Engagement specifically authorized me to use force in the protection of US and British personnel, as well as all civilians. These kids were civilians, so I was authorized by the ROE to protect these kids from this smelly Haji.

<span style="color: #ff00de; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Naturally he did what I thought and swerved to hit one more boy, this one looking to be about thirteen maybe, although it's hard to tell as malnourished as they all are…

<span style="color: #ff00de; display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace; text-align: center;">(…)

=<span style="color: windowtext; display: block; font-family: Jokerman; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 6.05pt; text-align: center;">“A Grim Portrait of Civilian Deaths in Iraq”﻿ =

<span style="color: #169a42; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">By Sabrina Tavernise and Andrew W. Lehren. Published: October 22, 2010
<span style="color: #169a42; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">(…)

<span style="color: #169a42; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace; line-height: 17.6pt; margin-bottom: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">The reports make it clear that most civilians, by far, were killed by other Iraqis. Two of the worst days of the war came on Aug. 31, 2005, when a stampede on a bridge in Baghdad killed more than 950 people after several earlier attacks panicked a huge crowd, and on Aug. 14, 2007, when truck bombs killed more than 500 people in a rural area near the border with Syria. <span style="color: #169a42; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">But it was systematic sectarian cleansing that drove the killing to its most frenzied point, making December 2006 the worst month of the war, according to the reports, with about 3,800 civilians killed, roughly equal to the past seven years of murders in New York City. A total of about 1,300 police officers, insurgents and coalition soldiers were also killed in that month.

<span style="color: #169a42; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">The documents also reveal many previously unreported instances in which American soldiers killed civilians — at checkpoints, from helicopters, in operations. Such killings are a central reason Iraqis turned against the American presence in their country, a situation that is now being repeated in Afghanistan.

<span style="color: #169a42; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">The archive contains reports on at least four cases of lethal shootings from helicopters. In the bloodiest, on July 16, 2007, as many as 26 Iraqis were killed, about half of them civilians. However, the tally was called in by two different people, and it is possible that the deaths were counted twice.

<span style="color: #169a42; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">In another case, in February 2007, an Apache helicopter shot and killed two Iraqi men believed to have been firing mortars, even though they made surrendering motions, because, according to a military lawyer cited in the report, “they cannot surrender to aircraft, and are still valid targets.”

<span style="color: #169a42; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">...It was not clear why the total — 76,939 Iraqi civilians and members of the security forces killed between January 2004 and August 2008 — was significantly less than the sum of the archive’s death count…The reports were only as good as the soldiers calling them in. One of the most infamous episodes of killings by American soldiers, the shootings of at least 15 Iraqi civilians, including women and children in the western city of Haditha, is misrepresented in the archives…Civilians have borne the brunt of modern warfare, with 10 civilians dying for every soldier in wars fought since the mid-20th century, compared with 9 soldiers killed for every civilian in World War I, according to a 2001 study by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

<span style="color: #ff00d1; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Lesson Ending Questions:

<span style="color: #ff00d1; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 1.75in; tabstops: list 1.75in; tabstops: list 1.75in; text-indent: -1.75in;">1. What types of experiences did many civilians endure during the Vietnam War? During the War in Iraq?

<span style="color: #ff00d1; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 1.75in; tabstops: list 1.75in; tabstops: list 1.75in; text-indent: -1.75in;">2. Has this situation improved since the mid 1960’s and early 1970’s?

<span style="color: #ff00d1; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 1.75in; tabstops: list 1.75in; tabstops: list 1.75in; text-indent: -1.75in;">3. Why did so many people participate in anti-war protests in the U.S. during the time of the Vietnam War? <span style="color: #ff00d1; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 1.75in; tabstops: list 1.75in; tabstops: list 1.75in; text-indent: -1.75in;">War in Iraq?

<span style="color: #ff00d1; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 1.75in; tabstops: list 1.75in; tabstops: list 1.75in; text-indent: -1.75in;">4. Why might the media’s effect on the public’s perception and support of the war be so profound?

<span style="color: #ff00d1; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 1.75in; tabstops: list 1.75in; tabstops: list 1.75in; text-indent: -1.75in;">5. What questions do you have?