Vietnam and War Archive
 H O M E |
 |
Vietnam Memorial Addition Denounced |
DNA Test Identifies Berkeley MIA |
Prof's Phony Vietnam Record Unmasked |
My Lai: The Seventh SEAL |
San Francisco to Get Vietnam War Memorial |
Vietnamese Witnesses Say Kerry's Squad Initiated Killing in '69 Raid |
Vietnam Woman Veteran Receives Soldier's Medal |
Obituary: Trinh Cong Son, Vietnam-era Antiwar Singer |
Wandering Vet Comes Home |
What Names Belong on the Wall? |
Heroes Return to My Lai |
US Vets Build Peace Park at Vietnam Massacre Site |
Blind Albert Sings of "11 Bravo... Viet Nam" |
Stamp Features Berkeley Vet |
Clinton Pardons Viet Vet in Drug Case |
E-commerce Mogul Bankrolls Vietnam Landmine Cleanup |
25 Years After the Vietnam War, Time Has Come to Rid Mall of Shacks | Pentagon To Reveal Names of 60s Biowarfare Test Subjects | CNN War Correspondent Speaks Out | 30th Anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium |Bobby Ross Launches New CD, Greyhound Tour |
Perseverance Pays Off for Conscientious Objector Author | The Painful Search for 300,000 Vietnamese MIAs | General Moorer's Testimony on Use of Sarin and Killing American Deserters
Vietnamese Women Since the War | Group Seeks Flower Donations to Honor 8,000 Korea MIAs | Viet General Who Whipped US Speaks Out | Babylift Orphans Observe Anniversary of Plane Crash | War Crimes Panel Examines Sex Case | Japanese American Memorial Debate Opens Old Wounds | Novelty Of Females Aboard Gone As Ike Returns To Sea | VVAW Update on Vieques | The Gypsies in Kosovo | "The War is Over" | Veterans' History On Display in Berkeley | A Poem | Landmines: The Vietnam Experience | Chechen Women During the War | Keeping Track of the CIA | Veterans Support Vieques! | "Healing Wall:" An Education for Younger Generation | Rod Kane, an Obituary | Not So Fond-a Jane, an exchange | Vietnam Veterans Against the War statement, 10/7/99 | Cold War Recognition by Mail! | Trent Anger's book on the hero of My Lai: a review | Bill Ehrhart's book on Vietnam
Vietnam Memorial Addition Denounced
Stephanie Nazzaro WASHINGTON - The man who led the effort to honor Vietnam veterans on the National Mall says he doesn't like a proposed addition to the memorial. On Thursday, Jan F. Scruggs, president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, criticized as ``amateurish'' a plaque that would honor veterans who died long after the war ended. Last year, Congress directed the American Battle Monuments Commission to add a plaque to the existing Vietnam Veterans Memorial -- which now includes the Memorial Wall, two statues, and a commemorative flagpole. The plaque would acknowledge those who died from illnesses brought on by their time in Vietnam, such as cancers resulting from Agent Orange or deaths related to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The plaque would rest on a black granite pedestal and would read: ``In memory of American Veterans whose postwar deaths are attributed to their Vietnam War service.'' Scruggs dismissed the inscription as ``less than noteworthy'' and said the word ``attributed'' smacked of legalese. ``We want this plaque to be beautiful, we want this plaque to be appropriate. We certainly owe this to our friends being honored,'' Scruggs said. Scruggs and others also say more thought must be given to the proposed plaque location, which would be nearest the Lincoln Memorial entrance. An architect who works with the Memorial Fund says the placement gives the false impression that the plaque is the official dedication for the Monument Wall. In response to the criticism, the commission pledged to work more closely with the Memorial Fund on a new design. ``We want to get this right,'' said Executive Director Ken Pond. Supporters hope to dedicate the plaque next Memorial Day.
DNA Test Identifies Berkeley MIA
Benjamin Pimentel For the family of Winfield Wade Sisson of Berkeley, the painful mystery of the Marine captain's disappearance in Vietnam more than three decades is finally resolved. Two months ago, the family learned the truth with the help of DNA technology: the 28-year-old pilot was killed when his plane crashed into a mountain in October 1965. Pentagon officials released the identification this week. "It puts a chapter to rest," his cousin, Kim Sisson of Grand Rapids, Mich., said yesterday. "War is hell on families and people. He's always been in our minds. We didn't know what happened to him. We thought he was a prisoner all these years. It's been a big question mark in our life." The answer came after the U.S. military used DNA technology to determine the identities of human remains found more than 25 years after the crash. On Oct. 18, 1965, Sisson and Maj. Harley Pyles had completed a reconnaissance flight near Da Nang Air Base when their Cessna airplane ran into bad weather and crashed. Their unidentified remains were recovered in 1992 by a local resident who turned them over to U.S. military officials. It took almost nine years for the Pentagon to make a positive identification of both men with the help of DNA technology, which the military began using to identify missing servicemen only in 1995, said Larry Greer, a Defense Department spokesman on prisoners of war issues. Such testing is commonly used in confirming the identities of suspects in criminal cases. Today, DNA technology also helps verify the identities of about 40 percent of 200 to 300 missing servicemen every year, Greer said. Veterans rights advocate Michael Blecker of San Francisco said the new technology helps relatives of missing servicemen heal. About 1,900 U.S. servicemen are listed as missing in action in Vietnam, according to the Pentagon. More than 58,000 Americans died in the war. For years, Sisson's family struggled to find out what happened to him. His father, Winfield Wilbur Sisson, himself a former military officer who taught mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley, traveled frequently to Washington, D.C., hoping to get information. The elder Sisson later joined relatives of other missing servicemen who opposed the U.S. government's reclassification of their loved ones from missing to killed in action. Greer said the move was standard practice to allow the families of missing servicemen certain benefits, such as government insurance. But he said the Pentagon never stops looking for missing personnel. Sisson's father, who lived in Berkeley, died in 1995. His brother, Dr. Keith Sisson of Grand Rapids, received the younger Sisson's remains. Winfield Wade Sisson, who was later conferred the rank of colonel, will be buried at Arlington Cemetery next month. "I can remember my brother and this hope that he had that his son would walk through that door someday," Keith Sisson said. "Arlington would be very fitting." Winfield Wade Sisson was honored in his hometown six years ago when Berkeley city officials and folksinger Country Joe McDonald paid tribute to the city's 22 casualties whose names were inscribed on a plaque. Their stories are posted on a Web site, www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/vvm/ . "It must have been terrible for his father to endure this," McDonald, a former antiwar protester, said. "War injuries never seem to end. The sacrifices people make have repercussions that go on and on. This is a perfect example." E-mail Benjamin Pimentel at bpimentel@sfchronicle.com.
Prof's Phony Vietnam Record Unmasked
Associated Press SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. - A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian apologized for distorting his past, including claiming falsely that he served in Vietnam. ``I deeply regret having let stand and later confirming the assumption that I went to Vietnam,'' Joseph J. Ellis wrote in a statement released Monday evening. ``For this and any other distortions about my personal life, I want to apologize to my family, friends, colleagues and students. Beyond that circle, however, I shall have no further comment.'' Ellis, 57, became a popular professor at Mount Holyoke College in part by sharing his experiences in Vietnam - but he never went overseas, The Boston Globe reported Monday. Ellisalso embellished his involvement in the anti-war and civil rights movements, the Globe reported. The Globe did not question the historical integrity of Ellis' books. He won the 2001 Pulitzer for history for his best-seller ``Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation.'' Among his other books are ``Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams'' and ``American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson,'' which won the National Book Award in 1997. Mount Holyoke's administration stood firmly behind Ellis, and his colleagues responded with surprise to the report. Jeremy King, an assistant professor of history who has worked with Ellis for about five years, called him ``a man of the highest integrity.'' In an interview with the Globe last year, Ellis said he went to Vietnam in 1965 as a platoon leader and paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division. In the same interview, he said his Vietnam service also included duty in Saigon on the staff of Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the American commander in Vietnam. After reviewing public records and interviewing some of Ellis' friends and colleagues, the Globe reported that the account was not true. The newspaper found he was commissioned an Army second lieutenant when he graduated from college in 1965, but his active duty was deferred four years while he was in graduate school. He then did his Army service by teaching at West Point from 1969 until 1972, the year he joined the Mount Holyoke faculty. Mount Holyoke President Joanne Creighton questioned the Globe's motivation and said the school is ``proud to have him on our faculty.''
My Lai: The Seventh SEAL
Nat Hentoff In view of the conflicting accounts of Bob Kerrey's Raiders allegedly killing unarmed civilians in Vietnam, CBS News' 60 Minutes rebroadcast, on May 6, a March 1998 program titled "Back to My Lai." Mike Wallace went back to Vietnam with gunner Larry Colburn and pilot Hugh Thompson, who, in a helicopter over My Lai in 1968, saw the massacre of civilians by American troops, and landing, threatened to open fire on those GIs to prevent any further murders. A third soldier, Glenn Andreotta, was also with them but was killed three weeks later. The leader of those war crimes on the ground was Lieutenant William Calley -- later convicted and sentenced to life in prison after Thompson and Colburn testified against him. After only three days in the stockade, Calley was placed under house arrest by President Nixon, who paroled him three years later. But, Mike Wallace recalled, "around the country, many Americans treated him like a hero." Wallace described, on-camera, what was happening before Thompson and Colburn intervened. The American troops, "who'd been told My Lai was an empty stronghold . . . burned down huts with their Zippo lighters." They marched 170 people into a ditch -- women, old men, babies -- and "gunned them down in cold blood." As Colburn said, "There were no weapons captured. . . . They were civilians." The Army tried to cover up My Lai, but Sy Hersh broke the story. On returning to My Lai in 1998, Hugh Thompson was approached by a woman who had been dumped into that ditch and survived, shielded by the bodies of the dying and the dead. She asked Thompson why he was different from those other Americans. Thompson -- who had a sidearm during the massacre, but took a chance and didn't draw it when he ordered the soldiers to stop the killing -- said to the survivor: "I saved the people because I wasn't taught to murder and kill." This year, after the story broke about what happened under Bob Kerrey's command in the village of Thanh Phong, Hugh Thompson appeared on the O'Reilly Factor on the Fox News Network. Bill O'Reilly asked Thompson: "What went through your mind when you saw what was happening on the ground at My Lai?" "Hitler," Thompson said. But, with regard to Kerrey's Seven SEALs, couldn't Thompson understand why, under such stress and fear, these soldiers, in the dark in a free-fire zone, would have snapped? "Yes," Thompson answered, "without proper leadership." In 1998, when Thompson and Colburn were back at My Lai, Mike Wallace asked Colburn, "Why did it happen? Why did these guys lose it?" "I think," said Colburn, "they had some inept, incompetent leaders on the ground that day." He added: "There's a big difference between killing in war and murder, cold-blooded murder." My Lai was clearly a war crime. But what about the civilians killed by Kerrey's Raiders? Answering that question posed by Bill O'Reilly this year, Hugh Thompson referred to the one member of Kerrey's team, Gerhard Klann, who says that in the village of Thanh Phong, he and the rest of Kerrey's Raiders also slaughtered civilians -- some 15 women and children (last week I erred in saying they were only children). "If Gerhard Klann's story of what happened at Thanh Phong is true," Hugh Thompson said, "that is no way to treat prisoners of war. It would be a war crime." For his own role in stopping a war crime, Thompson received death threats from veterans who didn't want the story told. On the night of 60 Minutes' rebroadcast of "Back to My Lai," Andy Rooney, who still believes Kerrey is a hero because he "risked his life for his country in Vietnam," nonetheless honestly admitted that when Dan Rather interviewed Kerrey on the May 1 60 Minutes II, "I was on Kerrey's side, but it didn't seem to me he was always telling the whole truth." It didn't seem that way to me either. And it was clear to me that Gerhard Klann was telling the truth. Not only the way he looked throughout his testimony, but the fact that he was voluntarily incriminating himself as a participant in an atrocity that may well have been a war crime. But five of the Kerrey Raiders, after years of silence, did sign a statement supporting Kerrey's account -- and not Klann's. On April 30, the New York Post reported that Kerrey had those five members transported to New York "from all over the United States." The five SEALs on that raid (along with staffers from "a PR agency . . . doing damage control for Kerrey") were put up, said the Post, at an East Side hotel. Later, at Kerrey's home, "the group met until 2 a.m., thrashing out a consensus of what they say happened" that night in 1969. "By late Saturday afternoon [before the Times and 60 Minutes stories broke], Kerrey was emboldened," the Post continued, "to claim that sections of the media were involved in a conspiracy against him." Kerrey's exact words to the Associated Press: "The Vietnamese government likes to routinely say how terrible Americans were. The Times and CBS are now collaborating in that effort." That sure sounds like a public relations press release. The high-powered PR star, John Scanlon, who died suddenly of a heart attack recently, told a friend that he was "giving advice" to Kerrey. The May 7 Time magazine also reported that on April 27, the five Navy SEALs "dined at Kerrey's house and talked the raid over for the very first time." The next evening, they issued "a statement of facts." It should be noted that Gerhard Klann, who works in a steel mill in Butler, Pennsylvania, could not have afforded a public relations adviser. The gathering of the five Kerrey's Raiders, and their subsequent unanimous statement affirming their leader's story, reminded me of New York City's 48-hour rule, by which whenever one or more cops are accused of a particularly brutal action, they're given 48 hours during which they don't have to speak to anyone -- including Internal Affairs investigators from the police department. That grace period allows the accused to orchestrate a common explanation of what they will say happened. It doesn't look as if the Pentagon will investigate what did happen that night in Thanh Phong. But I believe the report of the Seventh SEAL.
San Francisco to Get Vietnam War Memorial
Louis Freedberg
More than a quarter-century after it ended, San Francisco will finally get its own memorial to the Vietnam War: a simple 24-inch by 48-inch bronze plaque listing the names of 163 San Franciscans who died in a miserable, uncelebrated war. The plaque will be unveiled tomorrow at 12:30 p.m. in Justin Herman Plaza at the foot of Market Street. Mayor Willie Brown will be there. He is expected to apologize for the city's delay in honoring its war dead.
The time it has taken to erect the plaque, as well as its modest proportions, reflect the cross currents of emotions that swirled around the war while it was taking place, and still haunt those who served in it and suffered because of it. Most other cities have been able to move beyond the passions of the time, and have found a way to memorialize what happened a generation ago. There's the granite wall of names, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, splitting the earth between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. There is an elaborate memorial on the State Capitol grounds in Sacramento. Even Berkeley has gotten it together to put up a memorial. But not San Francisco. "We decided that it was indecent nothing was being done," said Michael Blecker, director of Swords to Plowshares, a San Francisco social service agency that works with homeless Vietnam veterans and other troubled veterans of the war. The group raised $4,000 to cast the plaque. Most war memorials are inscribed with tributes "in honor of those who died serving their country." They usually make some reference to how fallen GIs "gave their lives to achieve freedom and liberty." In San Francisco, life and death are not so simple. Coming up with the exact wording on the plaque required rehashing all the arguments for and against the war. Blecker and some of his fellow vets didn't want the monument to give the impression that the war "served" the United States in any way. "We wanted to make sure we were honoring the people who fought the war, not the war itself," he said. Some vets pushed for the monument to express their unabated disgust with the war. But phrases like "These young men were used as cannon folder in a shameful war" were ruled out as inappropriate. "It was important for us," Blecker said, "to separate our feelings about the war from our feelings about the warriors who were caught in that bloody business. We wanted the memorial to be a healing force." At the same time, memorial organizers rejected making any reference to San Francisco's native sons dying in the struggle for "freedom." "The war did not achieve freedom and liberty for anyone," Blecker said. After much back and forth, the veterans agreed on the following carefully chosen statement: "In honor and remembrance of San Franciscans who served our country and who died in the Vietnam War." Blecker, who went to Vietnam as an infantryman in the 101st Airborne in 1968, said the debate over the wording touched on unresolved questions about the war: "Do we commemorate it? Are we angry about it? Are we responsible for the bloodshed?" He said his organization has been too busy -- providing counseling, education services and housing to Vietnam veterans -- to think about erecting a monument to the war until recently. "Ours was a living monument," said Blecker. "Every day we see 60 to 80 guys from the war, and their lives are wrecks. I'm not saying it was all due to the war, but the war certainly didn't help." For decades, families and friends of the victims of Vietnam have suffered mostly in silence, and in isolation. So far, memorial organizers have only been able to track down the relatives of eight of the 163 GIs whose names appear on the San Francisco plaque. Where and who are the others? Compare their invisibility to the public embrace of the relatives of victims of the TWA plane crash, the Oklahoma City bombing or the Columbine shootings. For the families of our Vietnam dead, there were no stirring memorial services, no consoling words from the president on the White House lawn, no appearances on Oprah or Nightline. It is time to urge the families of the war dead to come out of the shadows, and for us to embrace them and to honor their continuing sacrifices. The modest memorial in Justin Herman Plaza provides that long overdue opportunity.
For more information on the memorial, call 415-252-4787 ext. 343.
Vietnamese Witnesses Say Kerry's Squad Initiated Killing in '69 Raid
Rajiv Chandrasekaran THANH PHONG, Vietnam -- The underground bunker, once wide and long enough to sleep two dozen people, has collapsed and filled with dirt. A copse of banana trees and the household debris from two nearby huts cover the Hula-Hoop-size hole through which peasants in this tiny Mekong Delta village would slither to hide from U.S. or South Vietnamese troops. No sign or plaque notes the carnage that occurred here on a February night 32 years ago, when a seven-member Navy SEAL team, led by Lt. Bob Kerrey, crept into Thanh Phong to raid a meeting of local Viet Cong leaders. They never found the meeting, but by the time the elite commandos left the hamlet, more than a dozen unarmed women and children lay dead near the entrance to the bunker. More dead fell nearby. Former senator Kerrey, who was awarded a Bronze Star on the basis of a false report that his squad killed 21 Viet Cong in the attack, has recently acknowledged that his unit killed women and children that night in a confluence of events he has called "an atrocity." Kerrey and five of his team members have maintained, however, that they shot at the villagers, who were about 100 yards away, only after receiving enemy fire. A former Viet Cong fighter who lives in the village told The Washington Post on Saturday that there were Communist officials in Thanh Phong that night, including a local leader who presumably was the target of the SEAL mission. But the former fighter, and two women who claim to have witnessed portions of the operation, described in interviews on Saturday a version of events very different from Kerrey's, although their stories have some inconsistencies. One of the witnesses, Bui Thi Luom, who was 12 at the time, said the Americans ordered her and the 15 other people who were in the bunker to crawl out and sit together on the ground. Then, after admonishing a woman not to cough, the commandos opened fire from close range on the group, which included her grandmother, a pregnant aunt and three younger siblings, Luom said. "I thought they would let us go after they saw we were only women and children," said Luom, who said she managed to slip back into the bunker just as the shooting began. "But they shot at us like animals." Luom said nobody fired on the Americans before they initiated the fatal barrage. She and another woman in the village who said they saw part of the attack insisted that there was no Viet Cong activity in Thanh Phong that night. The former Viet Cong guerrilla, Tran Van Rung, said in a separate interview that about five local Viet Cong officials were there, gathered in a bunker about a quarter-mile from Luom's. Rung said the members of the group, which included the senior Viet Cong leader in Thanh Phong who likely was the target of Kerrey's mission, were sleeping when they heard gunfire. Rung, 53, who spoke to a foreign journalist for the first time on Saturday, said he was one of 11 guerrillas assigned to protect the leaders. He insisted that all the Viet Cong fighters in the village were stationed in and around the leader's bunker and that none of them fired on the SEALs. "We didn't leave the bunker," he said, sipping green tea in front of a neighbor's house. "We didn't provoke the Americans." Armed only with bolt-action rifles and a few grenades, Rung said, the 11 fighters did not attempt to respond to the gunfire because they believed they would have been "no match for the Americans." A spokesman for Kerrey, Michael Powell, said yesterday that "the fact that he said there were Viet Cong in that village that night merely confirms what Kerrey and his SEAL teammates have been saying all along: that this was a dangerous mission. Their intent was to take out those Viet Cong, not the people who were ultimately killed." The killing of civilians by Kerrey's unit was first reported by the New York Times and the CBS News program "60 Minutes II," which jointly conducted a 2 1/2-year investigation into the incident. The Times and CBS interviewed a member of Kerrey's team, Gerhard Klann, whose recollection of the raid is similar to the accounts of the two Vietnamese women. Kerrey, 57, a Nebraska Democrat who left the Senate in January after two terms and now is president of the New School University in New York, has vehemently denied Klann's description. "No one else in the squad has that memory," Kerrey said. In response to questions from The Post yesterday, Powell added that "Bob never gave an order to round up villagers and execute them. That would have been a war crime." In a speech to ROTC candidates at Virginia Military Institute last month, however, Kerrey acknowledged using "lethal procedures when there was doubt." "It was a tragedy, and I had ordered it," he said. "Though it could be justified militarily, I could never make my own peace with what happened that night. I have been haunted by it for 32 years." An Elusive Enemy Kerrey, who arrived in Vietnam as a 25-year-old lieutenant, was fond of telling people that he wanted to serve with "a knife in my teeth." His SEAL team, unofficially dubbed Kerrey's Raiders, was inexperienced but eager, embarking on the Thanh Phong raid after just a month in the country. SEALs (which stands for Sea, Air and Land units) are the Navy's best of the best, the toughest of the toughest, trained to spend hours underwater and operate covertly behind enemy lines. In Vietnam in the late 1960s, the commandos' task was to skulk through the rice paddies and dense woodlands of the Mekong Delta to kidnap and kill leaders of the National Liberation Front -- known as the Viet Cong -- the communist insurgency that sought to overthrow the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government. Although SEAL teams were small -- seven men were about average -- they carried an arsenal of firepower. Kerrey's unit, for instance, was armed with M-16 assault rifles, knives, 9mm handguns, grenades and grenade launchers, and disposable rocket launchers similar to bazookas. They used all those weapons that night in 1969. The Viet Cong were an elusive enemy. They wore the same black pajama-like garments as farmers. Their ranks included women and children. During the day, they would join other peasants toiling in rice paddies. At night, they would silently troll through the jungle, hiding in an extensive network of tunnels and bunkers from where they would launch pinprick attacks on U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. For the SEALs in particular, gathering intelligence about the location of Viet Cong leaders they hoped to kill proved an extremely frustrating experience, with a high failure rate. "It was literally pin the tail on the donkey," said a former SEAL who served in the Mekong just before Kerrey arrived. "Half the time you ended up in the wrong place. And even if you got to the right place, it might have been the wrong time." Located about a mile from the South China Sea and even closer to one of the delta fingers of the mighty Mekong River, Thanh Phong was a strategic outpost for the Viet Cong. Beginning in 1964, it was a key delivery point for weapons and supplies from North Vietnam that were distributed along rivers and jungle trails to guerrillas across the South. The poor farmers and fishermen who lived in Thanh Phong, about 60 miles south of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, were mostly Viet Cong, according to residents here. The Americans and South Vietnamese made the entire area a "free fire zone," where U.S. and South Vietnamese troops were authorized to fire on anyone they encountered. This created a Wild West-like shooting gallery, which prompted many villagers, even those who were not active in the guerrilla movement, to dig bunkers near their bamboo-and-palm-frond huts. Kerrey's unit first came here on Feb. 13, 1969, to look for the senior Viet Cong leader in the area, known as the village secretary. At the time, the surrounding area was part of the U.S. 9th Infantry's Division's "Operation Speedy Express," designed to eliminate the entrenched Viet Cong. According to a 1972 investigation by Newsweek, thousands of civilians were killed in the operation. On that visit, Kerrey's team interrogated several residents about the secretary's whereabouts, but departed without gleaning much information. The squad returned on the night of the 25th, prompted by new intelligence reports indicating the secretary would be there. Arriving on a swift 50-foot, aluminum-sided boat from their base at the port of Vung Tau shortly before midnight, the SEALs crept toward the village. But as they neared Thanh Phong, they encountered a "hooch" -- a peasant hut -- that wasn't included in their intelligence report. Inconsistent Accounts Pham Thi Lanh said she climbed out of her bunker as soon as she heard the first scream. Lanh, who was 30, thought the noise came from an elderly couple's hut nearby. She said she gingerly approached and hid behind a clump of banana trees. From there, she said, she saw "the American troops" nearly decapitate the couple, Bui Van Vat and his wife, Luu Thi Canh. According to the headstones on their graves in the village cemetery, he was 65 and she was 62. "I saw the troops cut their necks," Lanh said. "They cut almost all the way through." Lanh said she then ran back to her bunker, where her four children were sleeping. She said she stuffed their mouths with cloth to keep them quiet. The elderly couple had been living with three young grandchildren, whom villagers found stabbed to death the next morning. Although Lanh earlier said she witnessed all five killings, she said on Saturday that she had seen only the first two. She contended, however, that she heard the grandchildren being stabbed. Lanh, who cuts wood for a living, told "60 Minutes II" that her late husband was a Viet Cong fighter, but she recanted that assertion in subsequent interviews. Government officials arranged the interviews with Lanh and others in Thanh Phong. They were attended by a provincial officer and a Foreign Ministry representative, who served as an interpreter. Lanh and Luom provided a similar account to a group of foreign journalists who were allowed to visit the village on April 28. Lanh's version of the killings at the hooch is similar to the one Klann provided to the Times, in which he said an older man, a woman about the same age and three children under 12 were stabbed to death. Kerrey, who has said that he did not look inside the hooch or participate in those first killings, said his team told him that there were five men in the hut -- all of whom were killed. He and his supporters question Lanh's account, noting her shifting story and the fact she initially said she was married to a Viet Cong fighter. Kerrey and the other squad members besides Klann issued a statement in which they said they worried that the hooch may have been a warning post, so they resorted to "lethal methods to keep our presence from being detected." After dispensing with the first hooch, the squad made its way to the center of the village. Everyone, including Kerrey, has given inconsistent accounts about what happened from then on. In the statement, Kerrey and the five other SEALs said they "took fire" from enemy forces. Kerrey has estimated that the team was about 100 yards from the hooches, at the village center, when the shooting started. But in one of his interviews with the Times, Kerrey said he could not be absolutely certain that shots were fired. "I don't know if it's noise," he said. According to an "after-action report" kept by the Naval Historical Office, presumably based on a report filed by Kerrey when he returned to base, the commandos returned fire, blasting 1,200 rounds from their M-16s, 12 rocket-propelled grenades and two bazooka shells in the direction from which the shots seemed to come. In his interview with the Times, Kerrey said he and his squad eventually made their way to the cluster of hooches. "I was expecting to find Viet Cong soldiers with weapons, dead," he said. "Instead I found women and children." But in the statement, the members of the group provided a different account, saying that they "withdrew" from the village "while continuing to fire." Kerrey has described the night as black and moonless, but witnesses said they remember dim moonlight that allowed for limited visibility. According to records kept by the U.S. Naval Observatory, a partial moon -- a 60 percent disk -- was out until 1:30 that morning, an hour after the squad reported leaving the village. The descriptions provided by Luom and Klann about how the women and children died are different, and both are markedly at odds with Kerrey's. Klann contends that the team rounded up women and children from a group of hooches on the fringes of the village and interrogated them about the whereabouts of the village secretary. Luom, however, said all the women and children who were killed came from one bunker. She said the SEALs ordered everyone to exit the shelter and sit in a tightly packed group near the entrance. Seeing that the SEALs were not about to let the villagers go, Luom said her grandmother began pleading for mercy. A few seconds later, she said, the firing began. The Americans were about three feet away when they started shooting, she said. Klann said Kerrey gave the order to shoot the women and children, and that the firing began with the soldiers standing between six and 10 feet away. Klann said the squad decided to kill the villagers because they felt they could not take them as prisoners and they worried that if they let them go, they might alert Viet Cong fighters before the team was safely on the boat. Kerrey and the other members of the unit have disputed Klann's account. Kerrey's spokesman, Powell, said yesterday that the team started shooting only after receiving fire from the village. Luom said she escaped being killed by jumping back into the bunker just before the shooting started. "I have no idea how I got down into the bunker so fast," she said. "Maybe God blessed me to be a survivor." Luom, who now lives in a nearby village, said she had not heard about the controversy over the killings until a week ago, when she met with foreign journalists. She said she does not read newspapers because she is illiterate and does not watch television because she spends most of her time working on a fishing boat. As a condition of the interview, the Vietnamese government required The Washington Post and the Associated Press to jointly pay for Luom's travel costs from her offshore fishing boat to Thanh Phong -- about $30. Today, this village is home to about 350 families, and is surrounded by verdant rice paddies, palms and banana trees. Most people grow rice or work on shrimp farms. Electricity came a few years ago, allowing a few prosperous families to install television sets. Until a week ago, nobody talked much about what happened in February 1969. "This sort of thing was very common during the war," said Vo Ngoc Chau, a fisherman and former Viet Cong guerrilla who still walks around with a green military helmet. "There were so many innocent people who were killed." No one here spoke angrily about the United States. "There was a time when I wanted to take revenge on Americans," Luom said. "I bore a lot of hatred toward them." Now, she said, she would just like an acknowledgment of responsibility. "They should admit what they did," she said. "And they should apologize to us." Staff writers Robert G. Kaiser and Michael Grunwald in Washington contributed to this report.
Vietnam Woman Veteran Receives Soldier's Medal
Noonie Fortin Karen Offutt was presented The Soldier's Medal today (Saturday 7 April 2001) at a ceremony in Edward Medard Park east of Tampa. She was taken totally by surprise. She was one of the scheduled speakers at the Women's Museum Tent. She showed up in the morning-thankfully-and listened to the morning speakers. Following a break for other park activities Karen was the first to speak during the afternoon session. She gave a marvelous rundown of her activities both in and out of Vietnam. And included her health problems as well as those of her children and grandchildren. When Karen finished speaking, Linda "Scooter" Watson approached her with a little dog tag pin and certificate of appreciation for being there today. BUT Scooter said, "I'm sorry Karen I made a mistake on your certificate spelling your name" and ripped it up. Karen was flabberghasted --then Scooter yelled out "Color Guard." Next thing to happen was a color guard from the DAV appeared out of nowhere-and Karen is still standing there looking like Scooter was crazy. To say the least the next thing that happened was a young Jr ROTC cadet came forward with a board of photos for Karen. Still she didn't realize what was happening. When Shirley from Congressman Bilirakis' office walked towards her-she finally noticed something was amiss. She broke into tears--as did most of the people in attendance. Scooter introduced Shirley to the audience and then Shirley turned to Karen. Shirley commented about what Karen had done in Vietnam to save several Vietnamese families from a fire in their building--never thinking of her own safety. How the hamlet chieftain wrote documents after talking to all the witnesses and those who were saved. He presented his documents to the US Army. A request for The Soldier's Medal was submitted through channels but denied. Reason being was that she was a woman and women didn't get awards for heroism. The request was downgraded to a Certificate of Achievement. That was in January 1970. Shirley reiterated all of this to the audience. Then she read the citation for the award of The Soldier's Medal. AND handed the Medal to Karen. The citation reads: Soldier's Medal Karen I. Offutt (Then) Specialist Five, United States Army For heroism not involving actual conflict with an armed enemy: Specialist Karen I. Offutt, Women's Army Corps, United States Army, assigned to Headquarters Military Assistance Command Vietnam, J47, distinguished herself by heroic action on 24 January 1970 while in an off-duty status. Observing a fire in Vietnamese dwellings near her quarters, she hurried to the scene to provide assistance. Without regard for her personal safety and in great danger of serious injury or death from smoke, flames, and falling debris, she assisted in rescuing several adults and children from the burning structures. Without protective clothing or shoes she repeatedly entered the buildings to lead children that had reentered their homes to safety. She continued to assist the Vietnamese residents in removing personal property and livestock, although danger increased until firefighting equipment and personnel arrived. Specialist Five Offutt's heroic action reflects great credit on herself, the United States Army, and the United States mission in Vietnam. Karen had absolutely no idea this was going to happen. She never noticed the TV cameras in the crowd. She was completely surprised. AND when it was pointed out that one of the men (Mike Castle) who worked so hard to get her the medal was part of the color guard she really lost it. He and his wife flew in from Minnesota just for the day. She began looking immediately for Joe Oliver who was also working to this end but sadly he couldn't get to Tampa. Some of us women and a few men knew this was going to happen today. We told a few folks but asked that they not tell Karen. Thank you for that. She absolutely had no idea. Even following the afternoon speakers program, Karen said I just can't believe this happened. She wanted to know how we kept it from her. It was hard. We nearly slipped several times but we did pull it off. I'm sure when she gets home many of her friends will hear from her. I spent time with her afterward and just kept saying I can't believe this really happened. She didn't think for one minute that the medal would be awarded to her for something that happened so long ago. Karen has been seen on television in several interviews. She has been written about in several books already. She is also in my next one (Women At Risk: We Also Served) and now I have an even better ending for the chapter I wrote about her. She has felt that it has become her mission to tell others that they need to pass on their history and health background to others to help them all understand about the problems our Vietnam Veterans are having. AND it's not just the male Veterans. I was proud to be a part of today's presentation. No, I didn't really take part in it but I was the first to be told by Joe Oliver that this was to happen today. I had to make arrangements with Scooter to get everything in place for the presentation to happen today. She did a good job of it too on such short notice. Mike Castle and his wife were flown in from Minnesota to take part. They had never met Karen before but had worked along with Joe Oliver to right a wrong. These two men need to be congratulated as well. You did good guys! More of the events of this week and weekend will be found in The Sarge section of Military Network. Copyright 2001 by Noonie Fortin. All rights reserved.
Obituary: Trinh Cong Son, Vietnam-era Antiwar Singer
Seth Mydans BANGKOK, April 4 Trinh Cong Son, an antiwar singer and songwriter whose melancholy music stirred Vietnamese on both sides of the war, died on Sunday and was buried today at a Buddhist temple near Ho Chi Minh City. He was 62. His family said he had diabetes after years of periodic hospital visits. Residents said thousands of mourners thronged his home, piling bouquets around it. With his focus on human emotions and his refusal to conform to official dogma, Mr. Son suffered pressure from both the government of South Vietnam, where he lived during the war, and the victorious Communists, who sentenced him to four years of farm labor and political education when the war ended. But his popularity won out and his music endured; in the last years of his life he was tolerated and even embraced by the government. His songs are widely performed both in Vietnam and among Vietnamese overseas. "Crying for Trinh Cong Son," read the headline over a full-page tribute in the daily youth newspaper Thanh Nien this week. "Truth, innocence and beauty in Son's songs surpassed all hostility," the newspaper said. In his last years he took up painting as well as songwriting and was a fixture, with his friends and his bottle of Scotch, at a cafe in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon. "Now, really, I have nothing to protest," said Mr. Son in an interview last April on the 25th anniversary of end of the war. "I continue to write songs, but they concern love, the human condition, nature. My songs have changed. They are more metaphysical now, because I am not young." Mr. Son's popularity was at its height during the war years in the 1960's and 1970's when his songs propelled the careers of some of the best-known South Vietnamese singers. He became known internationally as the Bob Dylan of Vietnam, singing of the sorrow of war and the longing for peace in a divided country. Almost everybody knew the words to songs like "Ngu Di Con" ("Lullaby"), about the pain of a mother mourning her soldier son: "Rest well my child, my child of the yellow race. Rock gently my child, I have done it twice. This body, which used to be so small, that I carried in my womb, that I held in my arms. Why do you rest at the age of 20 years?" Because of what it called "defeatist" sentiments like these, the South Vietnamese government tried to suppress Mr. Son's music which flourished underground and was also listened to clandestinely in the North. When the war ended in 1975, Mr. Son refused to flee like many other southern Vietnamese including most members of his family. Along with tens of thousands of other southern Vietnamese who remained, he was sentenced to a period of "re-education." Born the eldest of seven children and trained as a teacher, Mr. Son never married. His siblings fled to Canada and the United States after the war, and since the death of his mother a few years ago he has been the only one of his family in Vietnam.
Wandering Vet Comes Home
Kathleen Sullivan When John Clinton wrote home for the first time in 20 years, he didn't put a return address on the envelope. But he threw in a few clues, just in case his elderly parents -- or his three sisters and two brothers -- wanted to find him. "I live in a military barracks or officers quarters in a military base which is now a national park," he wrote. "I am getting medical care at a military hospital in the Bay Area. From my bedroom window I can see a lot of the Bay Area -- Marin County and the Golden Gate Bridge." Instead of a return address, Clinton, 58, wrote "Sweet Thing," a name he had jokingly adopted when he was young, and included on letters he wrote when he served on a Navy supply ship in the 1960s. "It is hard for me to write, so I print instead," he wrote in neat letters printed on lined paper. Clinton, a self-described loner, said time slipped away as he knocked around the country, working at one job and another. By the time he decided to write his family, two decades had passed. The letter arrived the day after Christmas at his childhood Kentucky home on Ash Street in Louisville. His parents no longer lived there, but his youngest sister, Rita Williams, had moved in with her family. Williams' husband plucked the letter out of the mailbox and called her at her sister's house, where she was visiting. "Sit down, I think I have some good news," he told her. "I have a letter in my hand. I think it's from Johnny. Do you want me to open it?" There was no salutation, just a quote from the James Dean movie "Rebel Without a Cause." "Don't scream, Don't cuss and Don't Faint," Clinton had written. Williams, 37, said tears came to her eyes as her husband read the letter, which was signed "Love For Ever, Sweet Thing." The next day, brother George Clinton, 57, sat down at a telephone with the "clues" and maps of the United States and San Francisco. "I just started calling people out there (in the Bay Area)," he said. "Each person gave me somebody else to call." He called the Veterans Affairs hospital in Palo Alto. Someone at the VA hospital in San Francisco suggested calling Swords to Plowshares, a veterans advocacy group on Market Street. A staff member there referred him to its Veterans Academy, a residential education and job-training program for homeless veterans in the Presidio, once an Army base, now a national park. That's where -- the same day the letter arrived in Louisville -- George Clinton found his big brother. "Is it possible you can get a message to him?" he asked Phu Nguyen, manager of the facility, which houses 100 veterans. HAPPY TO TAKE A MESSAGE Nguyen said he had seen John Clinton return to the academy only a short while earlier. He would be happy to deliver a message -- in person. "You mean he's there?" an incredulous George Clinton asked. "I couldn't believe it. After 20 years, he's there." Nguyen walked upstairs and knocked on the door of 318-B. "It wasn't five minutes later Johnny called," George Clinton said. Williams headed to the nursing home to tell their mother. She wasn't sure Iveta Clinton, who was suffering from Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, would understand -- though everyone knew she had long ached for word from her firstborn and spoke of him often as her condition worsened. "What would you say if I told you we found Johnny?" Williams asked her mother. "What would you want me to do -- smack him?" Her mother looked straight into Rita's eyes. She pointed a finger at Rita as if to say: Don't you dare. "Do you want me to hug him," Williams continued. Her mother smiled. "No," Iveta Clinton jokingly replied. "Kick him in the butt." "For that brief moment of time, she came out of that state she was in," Williams said. "Even though Mom wasn't there totally, she knew. If she had one last wish it would have been to see Johnny." Two days after talking to his brother on the phone, George Clinton boarded a Greyhound bus bound for San Francisco. When he arrived, he took his brother John back to Louisville for a two-week visit. "We had a good time coming home," George Clinton said. "They called us 'the brothers' on the train." A VISIT TO AGED MOTHER The prodigal son returned to his 76-year-old mother. During that January visit, John Clinton spent time with his father, now 84, who lives with Clinton's sister, Karen Johnston, and her family in a log cabin they built in the country. Clinton found out he was an uncle -- and a great-uncle. He found out his family had tried in vain to find him over the years. He also found out he had a home. "George told me: The whole top floor of my house is yours," Clinton said. Last week, a Clinton family delegation -- father John, brother George, sister Karen and brother-in-law William "Buddy" Johnston -- pulled up at the Veterans Academy in the Presidio in George Clinton's custom Ford van. They'd come to take him home. Clinton, who had moved into the academy soon after it opened in mid-August, will leave behind a few of his possessions -- a small table, two chairs and a tall black bookcase. He's donating them to the academy. "I love this place," he said, during a recent interview in the academy's dining room. "This is a place for people who want to get their act together and to get their life together. The counselors here will help you with just about anything they possibly can." Clinton said he needed to learn how to get along with people. "Basically, I've been a loner all my life," he said. "For exercise I read a lot and take walks along the bay," he had told his family in his letter. Clinton decided "out of the clear blue sky" to contact the family he had last seen at his parents' 40th anniversary party. LIFE OF A DRIFTER Years had drifted by as Clinton traveled around the country -- Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta, Nashville, St. Louis. He'd driven a taxi. Worked as a photographer's assistant. Trucked antiques to small-town shows. Worked in a warehouse. Cooked and cleaned in restaurants. "Everywhere I went, I worked," he said. "You don't have to starve. You don't have to go around without money in your pocket." In his letter, Clinton described some health problems he was facing. "Imagine my surprise when I was told I have osteoarthritis or joint decay of the knees, shoulders, fingers and lower back. "No more hiking in the mountains or panning for gold. Over a period of time it will probably get worse," he had written. "Sitting at round table panel meetings with veterans and doctors and case workers, I have discovered that a lot of problems in my past life were due to minor depression, which I'm also being treated for." In his letter, Clinton shared some insights he had gained into his own personality -- not to make excuses, he had written, but to explain what he had learned about himself. His family responded with concern, love and generosity. "They offered right away to send me money," Clinton recalled. "I said: 'No, no, no, no.' They wanted to take me out shopping. I said: 'No, I'm fine.' They didn't know I just got on disability. That they didn't know." Mary Ann Williams, a counselor at the academy, said the Clinton family's response demonstrates what is best about families. Even as she had worried about what the family's reaction might be, she had encouraged Clinton to write, knowing that it came from a deep desire to reconnect. "Hey John, nothing ventured, nothing gained," she remembered telling him. "You could spend the rest of your life sitting around wondering what they'd say. Do it. Then you've done your part." She said Clinton was "beside himself with joy" for weeks after he returned to the academy from Louisville. EMBRACED BY HIS FAMILY "That family embraced him," Williams said. "He was theirs." When Clinton gets home, he plans to start searching for his 29-year-old daughter, Karen Marie. She was born in San Francisco, and he hasn't seen her since she was 4. Rita Williams said she was surprised at how quickly her brother had opened his arms to the family he had kept so long at bay. They had two big gatherings during his visit earlier this year -- one in Louisville and another at his sister Karen's log cabin. "We weren't sure if it would be too much for him to get everybody together, " Williams said. "But he loved it." It may be the start of a new tradition in the Clinton family. "One thing Johnny said to me: 'I wish everybody would get together once or twice a month,' " George Clinton said. "That's exactly what he said. I guess because it's something that he missed out on all this time." Copyright 2001 SF Chronicle
What Names Belong on the Wall?
Reference Desk Most Americans too young to remember the Vietnam War have come to think of all the names listed on The Wall as being combat deaths. Only when researching the thousands of Americans eternally remembered on The Wall do younger Americans learn that many of those deaths were non-combat related. Some died of disease, suicide, accident, or health problems incurred before arriving in Vietnam. In recent years new names were added to The Wall, and each year the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund receives additional requests to add new names to The Wall. Most of these are Vietnam veterans who succumbed to medical problems derived from their Vietnam War service. In April 2001 seven American servicepersons aboard a Russion Mi-7l transport helicopter lost their lives while researching possible burial sites of Americans still missing from the Vietnam War. The helicopter crash has so far been ruled an accident. Some Vietnam veterans are recommending that the names of the seven recent Vietnam casualties be listed on The Wall since their deaths were Vietnam War related. Other Vietnam vets disagree, saying that The Wall should honor only those who died in Vietnam during the war, or later as a direct result of their war-related military service. While others say that a new memorial site, similar to the Three-Soldier and Women's statues, be built and established near The Wall to honor post-Vietnam War related casualties such as the April 2001 accident. Your thoughts are invited at URL... http://home.pacbell.net/veterans/thewall.htm -- Reference Desk
Vietnam War Resource Guide -- http://members.aol.com/veterans/warlib6v.htm
Heroes Return to My Lai
Rathavary Duong MY LAI, Vietnam (Reuters) - Do Ba is now 42, but to Larry Colburn he will always be the 9-year-old boy he saved from the most notorious massacre of the Vietnam War. And to Ba, Colburn will always be a second father. Friday, 33 years to the day after a company of U.S. soldiers ran amok in the central Vietnamese village of My Lai, killing some 500 people, the two shared an emotional day of reunion and remembrance. Ba was one of 11 Vietnamese villagers whom Colburn -- then 18 -- and two crewmates from a U.S. army helicopter risked their lives to save on March 16, 1968. A search-and-destroy mission by Charlie Company of the Americal Division had degenerated into a mass murder of civilians, 123 of them children under age 5. Colburn, from Canton, Georgia, and pilot Hugh Thompson, from Lafayette, Louisiana, were reunited with Do Thursday for the first time since 1968 when they shared the same flight en route to a commemoration ceremony at My Lai. "After 33 years of thinking of him every day, it's just extraordinary to see him again, truly extraordinary," said Colburn, who was with wife and his own 9-year-old son. "It's like my own boy, he was the same age as my little boy," he said. "I hoped in all those years that he would never remember what happened." During the rescue, Thompson landed his helicopter between a group of soldiers and the civilians they were about to shoot. He ordered Colburn, a door gunner at the time, to open fire on the marauding GIs if the massacre continued. Colburn said it was crew chief Glenn Andreotta who had got out into a ditch to look for survivors in a heap of bodies. "Glenn Andreotta went straight to the ditch and handed the boy to me," he said. "I held him on my lap until we got to the hospital. I thought he was only 4 or 5." Heroes In America And Vietnam Andreotta was killed in action three weeks later. Since the war, he, Colburn and Thompson have been hailed as heroes in the United States and Vietnam. Despite Colburn's hopes, Ba, whose mother and two younger sisters were killed in the massacre, still remembers clearly. "I was terrified," he said. "So I pretended I was dead when a man came and picked me up for the first time. But he did the same thing again, a second and third time and I thought he was trying to rescue me, so I moved." The My Lai veterans came back to the village to inaugurate a Peace Park sponsored by the Quakers of Madison, Wisconsin. Together they planted 50 trees leading to a memorial pagoda. Ba hugged Colburn frequently and clasped the hand of his son Connor. "I'm sad for all those people who died here, but it feels good to be here," Connor said. "Do Ba is like a big brother." Connor wants to learn Vietnamese so they can stay in touch. Thompson, 25 at the time of the massacre, said he was delighted to see Ba again. "I feel good to see he's doing well now. I always wondered what became of him. I had no idea what became of him after we left him in the hospital." The veterans had hoped to be reunited with Ba in 1998, but he was in jail at the time for petty theft. He now works as an electrician for a firm in Ho Chi Minh City and hopes to take up their invitation to visit the United States. "I will always be grateful to these two Americans who saved my life," he said. "I will remember them for ever. But I still feel hatred for those Americans who killed my family." Powell To Visit Charlie Company's commander, Lt. William Calley, was convicted and sentenced to life in jail. However, late U.S. president Richard Nixon intervened and he was freed after three years' house arrest. "I don't think it's fair," Colburn said. "I think he should face the music. It's a facade to appease the American people. It was just facade. "The U.S. should not be exempt from war crimes tribunals ... . It's important morally and historically." Thompson said he hoped Secretary of State Colin Powell, who joined the Americal Division in Vietnam after the massacre and is accused of helping cover up the first reports, would find some words of atonement during a first return visit he is expected to make later this year. "I hope that what he will say is personal and not political when he comes," he said. Colburn blamed politicians for horrors like My Lai. "I think the military were really trying to make the war less horrible," he said. "War is horrible and it happened on both sides. I think what happened was that it was untrained and new people, too ready to engage. Revenge is part of war, just like fear." Thompson added: "I hope that the Vietnamese people will understand that not everybody was crazy that day."
US Vets Build Peace Park at Vietnam Massacre Site
Reuters HANOI - U.S. veterans plan to dedicate a peace park at the Vietnamese village of My Lai next week on the 33rd anniversary of the Vietnam War's most notorious massacre. Project Director Mike Boehm said the park would be dedicated with a tree planting ceremony at the village just south of the central city of Danang next Friday. The veterans will also dedicate a school. "Construction has begun on the peace park and it's reached the point where it's now ready to have trees planted," he said. "It's a symbol of new life." As many as 500 civilians were killed at My Lai on March 16, 1968, when troops from Charlie Company of the U.S. Army's Americal Division ran amok during a search-and-destroy mission. Boehm, an intelligence officer during the Vietnam War, is directing the peace park project on behalf of the Quakers in Madison, Wisconsin. He said he expected the ceremony would be attended by the surviving crew of a U.S. helicopter who became heroes in the United States and Vietnam after risking their lives to save 11 civilians from the massacre. He said he was hoping pilot Hugh Thompson and door gunner Lawrence Colburn would be reunited during the ceremony with Do Hoa, now in his 40s, one of the people they rescued. An attempt to reunite them in 1998 was thwarted as Do Hoa was at the time in jail for petty theft. He was eight years old at the time of the massacre. "He turned into a juvenile delinquent, which is certainly understandable enough after what he had gone through," Boehm said. "His whole family was killed in the massacre at My Lai." The U.S. lieutenant blamed for the massacre, William Calley, was convicted and sentenced to life in jail. However, late U.S. President Richard Nixon later intervened and he was freed after three years house arrest. The Web site of the My Lai Peace Park is at www.mylaipeacepark.com. Addendum: March 9 at my show in Berkeley both Hugh Thompson and Larry Colburn came by on their way to My Lai. Hugh brought with him copies of Tent Angers book of his life titled The Forgotten Hero Of My Lai, The Hugh Thompson Story. Copies were autographed by both men and will be available from my web site store for $25.00. Also available is my new CD containing the Fred Greko's song "Warriors Of Humanity" written especially for Hugh Thompson, Lawrence Colburn and the third man in their helicopter Glenn Andreotta. I was asked by Hugh Thompson, Trent Angers and Fred Greko to make a recording of it in 1999 and did. All three men were presented with the Soldier's Medal, the military's highest medal for valor in war involving civilians, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC in 1998. Glenn Andreotta was killed two months after the My Lai massacre and was presented the medal posthumously. In addition to the Peace Park the men will be dedicating a third room to the school house that the veterans have built in the village. After receiving the medal Hugh Thompson took the medal to My Lai and it is on permanent display in the museum in the village. -- Country Joe McDonald
Blind Albert Sings of "11 Bravo... Viet Nam"
Dagney C. Ernest, Rockland
I can still hear the ringin' in my ears; ROCKLAND - Vince Gabriel, better known locally as Blind Albert, is a busy man. The full-time musician spends three days a week in gig mode, traveling to small clubs within three hours or so of the Midcoast to perform as a solo singer/songwriter and guitarist or with the three-piece Blind Albert Band. The rest of the time he divides his hours between home in Warren and his music studio in downtown Rockland. "I go on the road for three days, come home and pay the bills, then start all over again," Gabriel said last week in his third-floor studio. As he took a break from dubbing compact discs of music produced in the small room, people wandered up the stairs to say hello and check on their audio projects. In addition to music, Gabriel makes copies to CD or cassette of family recordings and does other personal-use transcriptions. "I have just about every format you could want here," he said, including the expected cassette and CD; turntable and reel-to-reel; and even an eight-track deck. With all this on his plate - plus four months to relocate from the building he has done business in for 10 years - Gabriel has another focus, one that springs from the heart rather than his well-honed business sense. "11 Bravo ... Viet Nam" is the name of Gabriel's latest project, a CD of 10 original songs about his combat experiences in 1968. The name stands for 11b40, the light weapons infantry. Gabriel served with "The Big Red 1" - the first infantry division. "I'd had some songs I'd written about being in Viet Nam and was trying to figure out what to do with them; I sort of needed a special reason to release them," he said. Gabriel found that reason in the Maine Disabled American Veterans and the Veterans Administration hospital in Togus. Fellow Viet Nam vet Jack Sharkey and Skip Workman got Gabriel in touch with the commander of the DAV. "I asked if they were interested in receiving money from the CD; it gave me a reason to do it," said Gabriel. Seventy-five percent of the CD's $15 price is earmarked for the DAV, with the rest going to cover expenses. Gabriel was drafted a year out of high school, a year he'd spent playing in his first band. He was a point man, one of the infantry's most dangerous jobs, during the Tet offensive. "Two or three or four guys would walk point, walking up front and making sure everything is clear for the others," said Gabriel. He refers to the dangerous work several times on "11 Bravo," particularly in the song "Spitzer and the Winemaker." "This guy named Spitzer took my place and ended up stepping on a booby trap," said Gabriel.
Now I hear the bomb go off,
"He was my friend and I didn't even know his first name," said Gabriel last week. The recent addition of a personal computer to the melange of equipment in the Blind Albert studio remedied that. He was able to find information about Spitzer and his other comrades on the Internet. The CD offers a lot of raw feeling about Gabriel's experience and the production values are a little raw too. He ended up releasing the demos for most of the songs, rather than the follow-up recordings. It was not an easy decision for the musician and audio technician, who says he is his own worst critic. Bass player Mike Chesk, violinist John Tercyak and drummer Bill Batty, who also helped design the CD's low-tech jacket, appear on several of the tracks. Most of "11 Bravo ... Viet Nam," however, is Gabriel, providing both lead and background vocals, guitar and bass, keyboards and percussion. "I really slapped the demos together," said Gabriel, shaking his head, "but the (session) recordings didn't have the same feeling." Despite his tendency to criticize his work and never really be satisfied with what he puts out to the public, Gabriel said, "I decided I just had to let this sucker go." So far, the response has been nothing but positive. Local music lovers sometime assume Gabriel and the Blind Albert Band are blues musicians and understandably so, since Gabriel has run sound on most of the local blues shows and the band is a perennial at the North Atlantic Blues Festival club crawl. His first love, however, is rock 'n' roll. "Some of the first blues I heard were done by the Rolling Stones," said Gabriel, who also counts Jimi Hendrix, Cream and Neil Young among his influences. He wrote reggae and calypso tunes while living in Jamaica and played Latin rhythms during a sojourn in Santa Barbara, Calif. This eclectic mix of styles is reflected in the CD's 10 songs, which share a sensibility of the music of the war's era. One of the tracks also incorporates the sounds of gunfire, tropical birds and other atmospheric touches. Stamped on the compact disc are the words "The 11 Bravo Project," an indication that the album is part of a evolving endeavor. "I have no idea how much money this will raise," said Gabriel, who puts together the CDs himself - from dub to shrink-wrap - as they are ordered. He considers "11 Bravo" a long-term project that probably will include at least one more album. The songs, some written recently and others closer to his tour of duty, are the reason Gabriel escapes nightmares about his war experience.
You know, people always ask me
Whether as a performer, producer or transcriber, Gabriel's business and personal philosophy is to always strive to do quality work and take care of the local people. "11 Bravo ... Viet Nam" allows him to care for those who were his locals in 1968, those who did not return from the war in the condition he did ... or at all. "I consider myself lucky," said Gabriel, who, when pressed, revealed he had taken a little shrapnel in his back during his time walking point. "I didn't even mention it; there were so many so much worse, I had nothing to complain about." Gabriel said the 11 Bravo Project has enabled him "to use what I have here in a meaningful way." Not that the studio work he produces by local musicians and his own band is unfulfilling ... and he is finding his transcription business very interesting as well. To all he applies a Blind Albert business principal gleaned during wartime. "I learned in Viet Nam to always have a backup," he said, "In fact, I always make two!"
The CD "11 Bravo ... Viet Nam" is
available at the following locations:
On the web at www.11bravoproject.org
KarmaRama Music Emporium (second
floor), 418 Main St., Rockland, Maine.
Or send 18.50US (15.00 + 3.50 S&H)
payable to:
©Courier Gazette 2001
Stamp Features Berkeley Vet
Tony Hicks When Linnie Darden walked into a post office in Hinesville, Ga., last month to buy a stamp and mail a letter, the former Berkeley resident got much more than his 33 cents' worth.
Front and center is the name Otis J. Darden, Linnie Darden's younger brother, who died in 1969 during a Vietnam firefight on his 21st birthday. "I thought, 'This couldn't be true -- that's my brother,'" Darden said by phone from Georgia. "There was a lady standing next to me and I said, 'Excuse me, but that's my brother.'" The youngest of 10 children, Otis Darden graduated from Berkeley High School in 1966. He was drafted into the Army in 1968 and wanted to serve, despite living in a hotbed of anti-war sentiment. His sister Charlene Darden Baker called it fitting that a Berkeley resident sits smack in the middle of a stamp illustrating the tragedy of war. "I just felt that he played a huge part in making history," said Darden Baker, an events coordinator at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall law school. "With the stamp, it's like a miracle for them to have chosen that portion of the wall. It's almost like his spirit wanted to stay." Dan DeMiglio, Bay Area spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service, said it was happenstance that the stamp's artist picked that small section of a memorial wall etched with 58,000 names. The stamp is part of the "Celebrate the Century" series, in which the Postal Service asked the public to vote on events and people worthy of stamps representing periods of the 20th century. DeMiglio said the stamp, released in January, is one of 15 representing the 1980s, and it carries a powerful message that resonates with many veterans and their families. The memorial wall was dedicated in 1982. "The voting for that stamp was overwhelming," DeMiglio said. "There was a real grass-roots campaign. It's revered, it's respected, and it has real genuine meaning." Darden Baker, 19 months older than her brother, remembers him as someone who loved to sing, cook and play Monopoly for hours. "We were the Monopoly kings of Berkeley," she said. Darden was taking general education classes at Peralta, hoping to become a chef, when he was drafted. He came home from boot camp, then quickly shipped out to Vietnam. "War was going on, and he was a brave soul," said Darden Baker, now 54 and living in Richmond. "He wasn't exactly excited about going, but he felt it was his duty. He took out insurance, hugged and kissed us, and said, 'Maybe I'll be back, but if I won't; it's for my country.' "I thought he was nuts. I said. 'Let someone else die for your country.'" Darden Baker was at her mother's house the day the uniformed men showed up with the folded flag and grave news. "She slumped down and couldn't move," Darden Baker said of her mother, who died in 1985. "They gave her the flag, and she threw it on the floor and said, 'I don't want the flag. I want him.'" The stamp may be available at post offices or by calling 800-782-6724 (800-STAMP24 ). To Darden Baker, it's an enduring tribute that rekindles mixed emotions. "It's almost like he's following me," she said. "It's like, 'We know what happened, why do you keep reminding me?' But the other side of me says, 'I'm glad you're still here.'" Tony Hicks covers Berkeley. Reach him at 510-262-2713 or thicks@cctimes.com.
Clinton Pardons Viet Vet in Drug Case
Joe Danborn Eighteen years after his high-profile drug trial in Mobile, Glen David Curry considers himself absolved at last, and he has a presidential signature to prove it. On Nov. 21, President Clinton issued a full pardon to Curry, who as a sociology professor at the University of South Alabama was convicted in 1982 of arranging cocaine deals for fellow Vietnam veterans. Clinton's rare move validated a difficult quest by Curry, whose conviction hinged on the testimony of an undercover agent who eventually was convicted of murder. Although the official certificate was still en route to him, the soft-spoken Curry, 51, who lives and teaches now in St. Louis, said the knowledge of the pardon had soothed his spirit. "The first thing I did was cry a lot," he said of his reaction to the telephone call from Washington, D.C., informing him of the pardon. Curry, a West Virginia native now bearded and graying, came to Mobile in the 1970s after finishing an Army tour of duty in Vietnam. He had led protests against the war long before he was drafted but didn't dodge service when his number came up. He pulled a two-year stint working counterintelligence and left the military with captain's bars. He said he also left with psychological wounds that have continued to plague him. Having earned advanced degrees, Curry began teaching sociology at USA, a relatively new university at that time. He stayed busy outside of class, helping fellow veterans who had drug addictions. Eventually, he took a leave of absence from his teaching post to head the Vietnam-Era Veterans Counseling Center in Mobile, an arm of the Veterans Administration. "This was back in the days when not too many people cared about Vietnam vets, and he did a lot of work with them," longtime USA faculty member Glenn Sebastian said in a recent interview. "I think that's where a lot of his problems began." Federal prosecutors in Mobile and Birmingham heard reports that VA employees at counseling centers in the two cities were using drugs in the course of their jobs and launched an investigation. Seeking an agent to infiltrate the centers, the government selected Grady Gibson, a Vietnam vet and an undercover officer for the Alabama Bureau of Investigation. According to court testimony and news accounts, Gibson entered the Birmingham center posing as a vet with a chemical-dependency problem. The pose wasn't much of a stretch, Curry and his co-defendants would claim later - they said Gibson did more drugs than anyone he was investigating, a charge Gibson denied. Gibson gained the confidence of Don Reed and Tom Ashby, two men who directed the Birmingham center, by suggesting he could help the clinics financially if they would just help him fight his abuse problem, according to testimony. Ashby began counseling Gibson and introduced him to Curry. Gibson soon asked Ashby and Curry to help get him get cocaine, a quarter of an ounce here, a half of an ounce there, witnesses said. As Gibson pressed Curry for more of the drug, Curry thought of Paul Charles Sierke, a student of his at USA. Sierke, a Mobile native who was in his early 20s, had come to admire the professor as a mentor. They'd also used cocaine together, both men have said. "It was just one of those relationships where we liked each other and became friends outside the classroom environment," Sierke, now 42, said. Gibson and Curry went out one night in February 1982 to Bojangles, a bar and restaurant on Azalea Road, according to testimony. After several rounds of drinks, Gibson persuaded Curry to take him to Sierke's house, unannounced. "It was so bizarre," Sierke said. "David kept calling and wanting to come over and wanting to bring this other guy with him. I didn't want any part of it." According to Curry and Sierke, they and Gibson snorted cocaine together at the house. Sierke and Curry later said that the agent consumed far more than either of them. "The guy was out of control," Sierke said in a recent interview. "He snorted up cocaine that night to beat the bell. ... You would not have had a clue that in actuality he was an undercover policeman." After the trial, Curry would plead for a federal judge to go easy on Sierke. Looking back, he said, "I'm really sorry I involved Chuck in it in any way. He was just a nice guy trying to do me a favor." As Gibson reported back to his superiors, the authorities closed in. The VA closed the clinic in Mobile and suspended Curry, Ashby and several other employees, who in turn felt they were being singled out by the Reagan administration for criticizing the government's treatment of Vietnam vets. Curry held a news conference on the steps of the federal courthouse to denounce the investigation as a political vendetta. Eventually, grand jurors in Mobile indicted the veterans' counselors and Sierke. Reed and others at the Birmingham center were convicted in a separate trial there. The Mobile trial "was a spectacle," as U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, who prosecuted the case as the U.S. attorney in Mobile, recalled the event. The defendants admitted taking part in transactions in which Gibson bought cocaine through them, but they disputed the government's charge of a conspiracy. Curry's lawyer, Arthur Madden, noted during the trial that the counselors never attempted to profit from arranging the deals. Midway through the trial, Sierke took his lawyer's advice and pleaded guilty to one count of cocaine possession. U.S. District Judge Brevard Hand sentenced him to five years in prison but suspended the sentence in favor of probation. Sierke did hundreds of hours of community service, and Hand eventually set aside the conviction, striking it from the record. "Judge Hand is a wise man. He did that for a reason," Sierke said. "I had never been in trouble before, and I've never been in trouble since." Jurors convicted Ashby and Curry of distributing cocaine and conspiring to distribute cocaine. Hand initially gave Ashby 30 years; Curry got 34. After a three-month psychiatric evaluation at a federal corrections center in Tallahassee, Fla., Curry and Ashby returned to Hand for resentencing. He gave them five years each, plus probation. Ashby went to a federal work camp at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery. Curry went to Chicago to do computer work at the University of Chicago for a year while he fought the conviction. When his appeal was denied, he was sent to a prison facility at Eglin Air Force Base in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., then to a prison in downtown Chicago. Curry and Ashby were paroled after serving about 14 months each. Gibson left the ABI some time after the trial. He went to California but came back to Alabama and found himself the lead suspect in the fatal beating and stabbing of the 19-year-old wife of a drug informant in Butler County. In 1987, Gibson was sentenced to life in prison - he could have received the death penalty - for killing the woman for insurance money. He remains in the custody of the Alabama Department of Corrections, according to the agency, which did not provide further details. Sessions, R-Mobile, said he has no regrets about the cocaine prosecution, regardless of Gibson's role. He pointed to other testimony and to wiretap recordings that implicated the defendants. Sierke, Ashby and Curry said in separate interviews that they felt some levels of resentment about the prosecution, but all said they have long since acknowledged poor judgment on their parts. After his court experience, Sierke tried to go back to school at USA, but he did not finish. Today, living in the Mobile area, he is a sales representative, husband and father of a son who's old enough to be thinking about college. "It certainly got me back on the right road," Sierke said of the trial. "I've always been brought up to tell the truth and be honest. I made a mistake and paid for it, and I've been a valuable person to the community and a good parent." Ashby went back to Tuscaloosa, his hometown. He, too, is married and a father. Today, he is a substitute teacher with the Tuscaloosa County school system. The Alabama Board of Education has not decided whether to certify him, he said, but the local board liked him well enough to fashion a waiver for him and allow him to work. As for Curry, he said his life since the trial has been defined by what he learned from it, as well as by his continued activism and his thirst for the university environment. He has served as a national board member for the Boys and Girls Club of America, as well as a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He published a book on Vietnam War deserters prior to his trial and wrote another a few years afterward dealing with youth violence. He has studied and taught criminology and sociology at four universities, including his current post at the University of Missouri's campus in St. Louis, where he resides with his second wife and the daughter they adopted. In some ways, Curry said, he is grateful for the trial. In part because of psychological analyses required by the courts, he was diagnosed with and began treatment for chronic depression. Recently, he was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and now gets treatment for that as well. The trial "actually helped me reconcile things a little bit," Curry said. "Up until that point, I had felt a bit guilty for the work I had done in the Army, investigating different Vietnamese and fellow military personnel. Actually, I've come to feel not as guilty as I once did about Vietnam." Curry began the pardon process about two years ago in the face of a high likelihood that his petition would never reach the president's desk. According to Roger Adams, the U.S. pardon attorney, Clinton pardoned fewer people - 53 - during his first four years than did any president this century. That pace has picked up somewhat - the recent additions of Curry and 10 others brought Clinton's eight-year total to 196, including 52 this year. But the number still constitutes a tiny fraction of the applicant pool. Typically, the president does not reveal his motives for granting or denying a pardon. Adams declined to comment specifically on Curry's case, citing federal policy. Adams' office, a tiny branch of the U.S. Department of Justice, handles more than 1,000 requests annually, summarily dismissing most. Curry said that as part of the process, he had to solicit character references from three fellow professors. In later stages, Curry said, FBI agents interviewed his neighbors and co-workers, telling them that Curry was being "considered for a position of high responsibility" - in other words, once again becoming a full-fledged citizen. Ashby said he was pleased to hear that Curry received the pardon but said he has not sought one and does not plan to. "I chose not to do it because it connotes guilt, and I'm not guilty" of any conspiracy, he said. "They offered us a deal early on, and I refused to take it." Sessions said he did not disagree with Clinton's choice to pardon Curry, although he saw political undertones. "I'm sure that since he was a war protester and all that, the Clinton Administration would be more favorable to him than they would have been otherwise," Sessions said. "But it's been 18 years, he's apparently done well since, and it wasn't a violent crime, so I don't object to this." Curry said he rests easier knowing that when the time is right for his 6-year-old daughter to know about her father's past, she will also know that he and the law have reconciled. "I wanted her to know that even if I had been totally guilty, I had been forgiven." © 2000 Mobile Register.
E-commerce Mogul Bankrolls Vietnam Landmine Cleanup
Jan Scruggs Thanks to the generosity of Chistos Cotsakos, CEO of ETRADE, The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, is now engaged in demining/ unexploded ordnance(UXO) removal in Quang Tri. I will be in Vietnam from December 1 through December 6th to begin a project to help coordinate the efforts of several Non Governmental Organizations with involvement by the Peoples Committee and Vietnam's Ministry of Defense. The project, if successful, will provide a model for UXO removal nationwide in Vietnam. Of course, everything is difficult in Vietnam, but we feel confident with our man on the ground there, Chuck Searcy. The CBS News did a piece last week mentioning the effort. UXO has ongoing economic and human impact. Some areas, particularly where we will operate in Dong Ha, are so infested that there can be no agricultural or other activities. In human terms two recent incidents say enough. In Dong Ha a father and daughter died while collecting mortar shells to sell as scrap metal. In Binh Dinh province five children were killed while toying with a 81MM mortar round. The Vietnamese claim 37,000 deaths since 1975 from UXO. As veterans, helping to remove this ordnance seems very much the right thing to do. President Clinton pledged on going support from the U.S. government during a speech to U.S. groups in Vietnam. We believe that our effort will be of value and attract further support. We will report on our trip. We appreciate your support. I intend to be very careful. Everyone owes Christos Cotsakos a hand for this opportunity to do some good in a place where we spent some time while young men. You can send thanks to Vietnam vet and good guy Cotsakos at:
Christos Cotsakos
25 Years After the Vietnam War, Time Has Come to Rid Mall of ShacksDavid G. YoungWashington Post October 5, 2000 The view down the national Mall from the Lincoln Memorial is stunning. Only the glistening white marble of the Washington Monument breaks a two-mile expanse of green reaching to the Capitol dome. These colors--as well as that of the blue sky on a nice fall day--shimmer in the expanse of the Reflecting Pool as the breeze gently stirs the water. But step just a few feet off of the center axis of the Mall and that view changes dramatically. Makeshift shacks of plywood and plastic sheeting mar the landscape, making it resemble a Third World shantytown. The vicinity has an ambiance akin to the favelas in the hills of urban Brazil or invaded farms on the plains of Zimbabwe. The shacks--manned by self-described Vietnam veterans--have stood at various locations near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial since the Wall was built 18 years ago. These shacks were founded as vigils to the hundreds of American soldiers unaccounted for at the end of the war, and served as a political outpost for what was then the widespread belief that Vietnam or other Communist countries still held American soldiers against their will. Today, only the most extreme zealots continue to hold this belief, yet a quarter-century after Saigon's fall, the shanties still stand. The time to remove them is long overdue. The National Park Service, which maintains the area, has permitted them on free-speech grounds in the same manner as it would a political demonstration. But the focus of these shacks has long since shifted from politics and now centers around commerce. Inside these makeshift structures, bearded, tattooed societal discontents sell books, pins, patches and any other paraphernalia remotely relating to the Vietnam War and veterans issues. Until three years ago, the ragamuffins also sold huge quantities of tacky souvenir T-shirts. It took a National Park Service regulation and a federal court ruling before the defiant squatters ended the practice. Today, the T-shirts are gone, but the sales of other souvenirs not covered by the ban continue. (Technically, these items are not for sale; they are given for a specific donation.) The operations run day and night during the tourist season. The serene environment is spoiled in the evening by the buzz of portable gas generators fueling the shanties' electricity. That the National Park Service would put up with such deplorable behavior in the shadow of important national monuments was understandable 20 years ago. The plight of the Vietnam veteran was then at its peak in the American consciousness. Having suffered the trauma of the war, the disrespect of a public that did not support it, then the economic crises of the late '70s and early '80s, the Park Service could not be faulted for cutting the down-on-their-luck veterans some slack. But much time has passed since then. It has been 25 years since the end of the war. After another 25 years, should we still expect to see aged men in frayed uniforms selling trinkets by America's greatest monuments? At some point it is reasonable to expect that everyone--Vietnam veterans included--should move on.
Pentagon To Reveal Names of 60s Biowarfare Test SubjectsCBS NewsSeptember 20, 2000 CBS News has learned that the names of servicemen who were sprayed with chemicals decades ago in U.S. military germ warfare tests will be turned over to the Department of Veterans Affairs. CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports that during the 1960s, the Pentagon conducted more than 100 secret biological warfare tests at sea. As CBS News first reported back in May, in two of those tests, code-named "Autumn Gold" and "Copper Head," more than a thousand U.S. sailors were sprayed with materials once thought to be harmless. Many of those sailors some of whom claim they were subjected to the test without their consent and were never told what it involved feel their health has been damaged. In addition to the names of those tested, the Pentagon also will provide a list of all the tests and the biological and chemical agents used. But according to a letter from the Dept. of Veterans Affairs (VA) to the Pentagon, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the VA requested a lot more, including classified medical records. The two departments are currently negotiating over what will be released. Federal officials Wednesday briefed veterans' groups about efforts to get the Pentagon to release more details of the tests. Veterans like Robert Bates, who has a variety of health problems, have repeatedly tried to get information about the experiments with no success. "I was told flat by the VA 'No, that never happened,'" he said. In 1996, Pentagon officials told the VA "they do not possess" any information about the tests. Two years later, they admitted having "15 bound volumes relating to Autumn Gold alone." The VA agreed to be interviewed for this story, then backed out, saying it didn't want to derail negotiations with the Pentagon. Officials who hope to check the sailors' claims called the deal a good first step but say it could be months before the VA has the names and can contact those veterans. "The veterans who participated need to be identified and located. They need to be tested and interviewed to see if they are suffering any health problems as a result of these tests," said Rep. Michael Thompson, D.-Calif. Autumn Gold took place off Hawaii in 1963. Copper Head was a similar operation off Newfoundland. According to a Pentagon briefing film about the tests, the goal was to test the vulnerability of Navy ships to germ warfare attack. Sailors were sprayed with BG, a bacteria considered harmless by the military that is used to simulate the deadly anthrax germ, and then with zinc cadmium sulfide. Zinc cadmium sulfide compound was thought to be safe, but the military later stopped outdoor spraying. Cadmium compounds are now known to be carcinogenic to humans. In large doses, BG can also be harmful: in rare cases, it has caused pneumonia, allergic reactions, nausea and vomiting. In 1988, an Army biologist recommended BG spraying "be discontinued" because the claim it "is not dangerous" is "patently erroneous." In documents previously obtained by CBS News, sailors on the "target ships" in the tests are called "test subjects." Only eight men wore gas masks. They were the "control group" in this experiment. Other crewmen were ordered to give throat swabs or gargle samples. In a written statement the Pentagon replied in May that the sailors "were not exposed to any harmful chemical and biological compound" and they all "were fully informed about the details of each test." Dozens of sailors interviewed dispute that. Medical corpsmen on vessels involved in one of the tests say and ships' logs indicate an upsurge in upper respiratory tract infections after the test and some cases of nausea, possibly a reaction to BG.
CNN War Correspondent Speaks OutSeptember 20, 2000This is the text of war correspondent Christiane Amanpour's speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association's recent convention. I remember the day I arrived at CNN with a suitcase, my bicycle and about 100 dollars... It was exciting... a band of young college graduates thinking we'd get some practical experience on the job, hoping it would be a steppingstone to the big leagues. Little did we know it would become the big league Because I am foreign I was assigned to the foreign desk. I kid you not. I was just the tea boy really, but I quickly announced innocently but ambitiously that I was going to be a foreign correspondent. I am sorry to say my first boss was a woman...if I had thought I would get a sympathetic hearing, some female solidarity, I was sorely mistaken. She hated me...made fun of my ambitions and basically said I would never make it at CNN...all character-building stuff. Well I worked my way up through every level...writer.. producer...field producer...reporter...I managed to convert a few believers in management, and here I am. We thrived on the pioneer spirit of CNN...we adored being the little network that could....we loved the fact that we were mocked as chicken noodle news...as we kicked ass all over the world. We were thrilled and privileged to be part of a revolution...because make no mistake about it...Ted Turner changed the world with CNN. Not only did he create 24-hour news, and all that has meant, he truly created the global village. As corny as that may sound, nothing has been the same since. With all my youthful exuberance and all my high-faluting dreams...nothing really prepared me for the intensity of the work I have done over the past 10 years. I was an adventurer...I thought CNN would be my ticket to see the world, and be at the center of history.... On someone else's dime.!!!!! Well, it was...and I did...but soon the reality of the business I had chosen began to sink in. I have spent the past ten years in just about every war zone there was...I have made my living bearing witness to some of the most horrific events of the end of the 20th century. I am so identified with war and disaster that wherever I go these days. People joke....or perhaps not...that they shudder whenever they see me: Oh god...Amanpour is here...is something bad happening to us? U.S. soldiers...with whom I now have more than a passing acquaintance...joke that they track my movements in order to know where they will be deployed next. I calculated that I have spent more time at the front than most normal military units. I have lost many friends, to the sniper, the mortar bomb, the landmine...the crazed Kalashnikov-wielding druggie at the checkpoint. It occurred to me that I have spent almost every working day of the past ten years living in a repressed state of fear. I very rarely talk about it because it is impossible to talk about....but I ask you tonight whether anyone in this room knows what it must be like to live on fear...fear of being shot...of being kidnapped, of being raped by some lunatic who hates your stories or blames you for bringing NATO bombs down around them. We manage the fear, but the strain takes its toll. And then there's the horror of what I have seen...in Rwanda piles of bodies lifted by bulldozer and dumped into mass graves. In Bosnia little children shot in the head by a guy who thinks it's okay to aim his gun at a child. In Somalia and Ethiopia, walking skeletons. And always the weeping....children, women, even men. These images and sounds are always with me. Yes I have often wondered why I...why we... do it? After a few seconds the answer used to come easily: because it matters, because the world will care once they see our stories...because if we the storytellers don't do this, then the bad guys will win. We do it because we are committed, because we are believers. One thing I knew for certain...I never could have sustained a relationship while I worked that hard, or was that driven by the story... Indeed in the full flush of journalistic conviction I once told an interviewer that of course I would never get married. And I definitely would never have children. If you have a child, I said, you have a responsibility to at least stay alive. That was seven years ago. I have been married two years and I have a five-month-old son. Before my son was born I used to joke about looking for bullet-proof Snugglies...Kevlar diapers...I was planning to take him on the road with me. At the very least I fully expected to keep up my hectic pace, and my passions a war correspondent....but now When I think of my son...and having to leave him...and I imagine him fixing his large innocent eyes on me and asking...mummy, why are you going to that weird place...what if they kill you...I wince. I know what I want to say...I want to say because I have to...because it matters...because mummy's going to tell the world about the bad guys and perhaps do a little good. But a strange thing has happened...something I never expected....motherhood has coincided with the demise of journalism as I knew it...I am no longer sure that when I go out there and do my job...it'll even see the light of air...if the experience of my network colleagues is anything to go by. More times than I care to remember I have sympathized with too many colleagues assigned like myself, to some of the world's royal bad places. They would go through hell to do their pieces...only to frequently find them killed back in New York, because of some fascinating new twist that's been found on I don't know.....killer Twinkies or Fergie getting fatter, or something. I have always thought it morally unacceptable to kill stories that people have risked their lives to get. My son was barely two months old when two of my best friends and colleagues were murdered in an ambush in Sierra Leone. ...I was devastated and really angry...does anyone even know where Sierra Leone is? If not, why not? How many of you aired their footage? It made me think long and hard about what we do...I asked myself why do I still do it? Do I have anything left to prove? Am I a war junkie? Why do any of us do this? There are of course a lot of reasons....mostly a desire to do a bit of good, and the quaint notion that this is what we signed up for...this is the business we have chosen. If the storytellers give up, the bad people will certainly win. I am not alone in feeling really depressed about the state of the news today. A veteran BBC reporter, with supreme British understatement said recently ...news is heading down rather a "curious corridor." A long-time, and highly awarded colleague of mine, has gotten out of the business altogether, saying news and journalism died in the nineties. Now I do not share that much pessimism...but something has got to change. All of us on this room share in this most ludicrous state of affairs. So much so that I recently carefully clipped the following cutting and just about slept with it under my pillow....WBBM-TV in Chicago is going back to basic journalism! A rare example of dog bites man actually being news!!!! I don't dare ask how this radical experiment is doing in the ratings....all my fingers and toes are tightly crossed. You get the point....the powers that be...the money men, have decided over the last several years to eviscerate us. It actually costs a bit of money to produce good journalism....to travel, to investigate...to put on compelling viewing. But God forbid they should spend money on quality...no, let's just cheapskate our way into the most demeaning, irrelevant, super-hyped, sensationalism we can find. And then we wonder why people are tuning out in droves...it's not just the new competition, it's the drivel we spew into their living rooms. David Halberstam...recently wrote that journalism today is basically tailored to the shareholders. Perhaps all of you are raking in the profits...but let me throw down a challenge: what's the point of having all this money if we are simply going to drive ourselves into the ground? Makes you wonder about all those mega-mergers. Yes, you are running businesses but surely there is a level beyond which profit from news is simply indecent. We live in a society after all, not a marketplace. News is part of our communal experience...a public service. Surely a news operation should be the crown jewel of any corporation...the thing that makes a corporation feel good about itself. We all love "Millionaire," make your money off that....make your super-dollars somewhere else. Leave us alone, with only good competitive journalism as our benchmark. I know I do not need to remind you of all the quality programs that make money too...60-minutes, Nightline...are just a couple. No matter what the hocus-pocus focus groups tell you, time has proven that all the gimmicks and cheap journalism can only carry you so far. Remember the movie "Field of Dreams" when the voice said, "Build it and they will come." Well, tell a compelling story and they will watch. Lest you think these are woolly-headed musings ...we are not dinosaurs...we are the frontier. You've mastered the hardware...we are the software. And that will never change. Today's buzzwords seem to be content, and platforms. Well, we produce the content for all your different platforms...and that will never change. Humble newsprint, the New York Times, still rules the world. As someone else might have said, "It's the content stupid." You've invested so much money in technology...perhaps it's time to invest in talent...in people...do you know how many people in newsrooms I know have a hard time even recognizing news anymore.... I am personally thrilled by the changes at CNN, because it means we are responding to the times. I'm sure we will regain our unique niche, stop trying to be all things to all people, and find our way again to doing what we do best, what we alone can do...gather the news first, and send it out the farthest. Here in the United States, our profession is much maligned, but I work all over the world, where people actually see us as serious players. They take journalism seriously because they know what a force it can be. In emerging democracies like Russia, in authoritarian states like Iran, Yugoslavia, journalists play a critical role in civil society...they form the very basis of those new democracies and civil societies. Russia's new president Vladimir Putin is hell-bent on silencing the voice of independent media, unless they toe his line. When he failed the test of leadership and lied to his own people when their nuclear submarine sank. It was Russian journalists who exposed the Kremlin's double talk and KGB-style propaganda: Russian journalists revealed there were in fact no survivors, no-one was hammering on the inside of the hull...Russian ships were not in fact supplying oxygen to the stranded crew, as officials repeatedly claimed. In Iran the whole reform and democracy movement has been based on the emerging free press. So powerful in fact that now the hard-line mullahs have cracked down, and closed down the outspoken new journalists. I am proud of the work western journalists did spurring action...eventually...in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, bringing the famines of Ethiopia and Somalia to light...getting those people help....often our words and pictures are their only opening to the world. And there is so much good stuff being produced here in the United States....but think how much more of a contribution we could make to this great society if we weren't so dependent on what those hocus-pocus groups tell us people are not interested in...oh Americans don't care about serious news...oh Americans don't care about this presidential election....oh Americans don't care about foreign news. Oh Americans don't care about anything but contemplating their own navels. It's just flat out not true... what Americans don't care much about is the piffle we put on TV these days, what they don't care about is boring, irrelevant, badly told stories, and what they really hate is the presumption that they are too stupid to know the difference. That's why they are voting with their off switch. For example, why are we terrorizing the country at large leading with murder and mayhem when crime is actually on the decline? Why have we given George W Bush such an easy ride...until now...when actually his qualifications are questionable? The way the mass media treats the democratic process here must have a lot to do with the reason so many Americans are alienated from it. That's bad for the greatest country in the world, who seeks to project her values and beliefs around the world. I'm part English, part Iranian, and I have always had an outsiders' respect for the American people.... The way I tell my stories reflects that. It seems simple to me...if we have no respect for our viewers...then how can we have any respect for ourselves and what we do....it's time the cost-cutters, the money- managers and the advertisers gave us room to operate in a way that is meaningful, otherwise we will soon be folding our tent, and slinking off into the sunset. No new media vehicle has ever killed off another....it's the age of interactive, yet newspapers, radio, television, are all still here. But we the people are in danger of doing what no new technology has ever done, becoming extinct. Only we can stop it. I recently came across the following quote from the indomitable Martha Gelhorn...wife of Ernest Hemingway (though she hated to be introduced that way) and war correspondent par excellence: "All my reporting life I have thrown small pebbles into a very large pond, and have no way of knowing whether any pebble caused the slightest ripple. I don't need to worry about that. My responsibility was the effort. I belong to a global fellowship, men and women, concerned with the welfare of the planet, and its least protected inhabitants. I plan to spend the rest of my years applauding that fellowship and cheering from the sidelines....good for you never give up." I still have many years left in me, but that's what I'll tell my son when he's old enough to torture me with painful questions. I'll tell him I am a believer and I believe that good journalism, good television, can make the world a better place....and yes...I believe good journalism is good business.
30th Anniversary of the Chicano MoratoriumRich MonjeSeptember 7, 2000 August 29, 2000 was the 30th anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium, a historic demonstration in East Los Angeles against the Vietnam War. The Chicano Moratorium of August 29, 1970 joined the issue of the Vietnam War with the struggles of Latinos for economic and political equality. On that day, Mexican minority communities expressed the frustration and anger with decades of oppression in the explosion that occurred. The demonstration had a profound affect on the Mexican minority movement for equality. The young people that were involved and their families -- especially those who had been in this country for generations -- began to assert a new political awareness influenced by the black and Puerto Rican movements. A significant percentage of those drafted to fight in Vietnam were minorities. The Chicano Moratorium brought over 30,000 people together. However, before the speeches could begin, the Los Angeles County sheriffs marched into the park and attacked the crowd and began beating anyone in their way. The people rebelled. This was a rally with families and children. My 1-year-old son was there. The young men had to fight the sheriffs to allow people to escape, as many were pinned in by a baseball backstop. Our fury and rage knew no bounds, and the fires burned well into the next day. East Los Angeles was under siege for several months. We could not go to the corner store without being stopped and harassed. After several community meetings, another protest was organized for January 31, 1971. After the rally, a march proceeded to Whittier Boulevard. Seven sheriffs stood by their cars with shotguns drawn. They ordered the crowd to halt. Several thousand marchers, unable to hear the order, surged, pushing those at the front forward. The sheriffs opened fire with "warning shots." I turned to run and was hit in the back of the left leg. The crowd was again attacked; one person was killed and many others were injured. As my friend helped me, the searing pain was intolerable. A lady over 60 years old told my friend to take me into her house. I looked around and there must have been 80 people in her home, with many standing in the yard. She was protecting us from the police riot going on. They helped me to the hospital. The lessons we learned at the Chicano Moratorium did not begin there. This event and subsequent actions were rooted in the history of struggle of the Mexican minority in the United States. The ethnic agenda promoted in the 1960s during the Chicano movement did not accomplish what many of us had hoped. The lesson we must learn is that many times in some struggles our interests are inter-linked as Latinos. The impact of the competition generated by the global economy has driven down wages and working conditions where many poor workers and immigrants are finding jobs. In their fight against those wages and conditions, Latinos are now the group that has the highest percentage of workers joining unions. I have witnessed organizing drives during which Latinos are many times some of the staunchest workers. Latinos, like their counterparts, have become an active and leading sector of the working class. They are a component part of the organized labor movement, a part of the growing movement against poverty, and a part of the movement for political independence. Many young people from Latino communities across the country are proudly donning the mantle of revolutionary. The struggle for equality is far from over. Laws are being passed to restrict our rights as we speak (Propositions 187 and 209, the "three-strikes" sentencing rules). However, the force for change is the emerging technology and its influence on the economic system that allows for the possibility for economic equality that would eliminate the basis for political inequality. Good schools, jobs, housing and food are the equalizing factors. The critical element is to have access to the power to have the basic necessities of life. The divisions of the past based in color, language, or nationality are decreasing in direct proportion to the understanding of our common economic needs for the revolutionary transformation to a cooperative society. This will be a society based on the principle "from each according to one's ability, to each according to one's needs" with mutual respect for our different histories, cultures, religions and languages, and guaranteeing real political equality. Our allegiance will be with those that can help us attain that economic and political equality. This article originated in the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE/TRIBUNO DEL PUEBLO (Online Edition), Vol. 27 No. 9/ September, 2000; P.O. Box 3524, Chicago, IL 60654; Email: pt@noc.org; http://www.lrna.org Feel free to reproduce and use unless marked as copyrighted. The PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE/TRIBUNO DEL PUEBLO depends on donations from its readers.
Bobby Ross Launches New CD, Greyhound TourBobby RossAugust 30, 2000 Howdy from High Atop Music Row! My new CD on Eddie Bayers' Medallion Record label has finally been released. To listen to a FREE sample of my music, go to: http://www.geocities.com/~-mack/omit.html We are all very proud of this CD, "LT Bobby Ross - Voice of America". To purchase it, go to: http://www.The-Record-Store.com/ltbobbyross.htm This is an extremely different concept of music, and an alternate slant on the music business. The music is not geared to the Country Honky Tonk jukebox. It is music for healing, and features many of the finest talents in Nashville's music community. Everyone who buys a copy is automatically registered into my LRRP Network as an active member. This LRRP Network spans the globe and includes many of America's greatest heroes who represent most of America's wars in the 20th Century. To learn more about my LRRP Network, go to: http://www.nashville.net/~bobbyros/lrrpnet.htm We at The-Record-Store are still looking for sponsors for our show at the Ryman Auditorium on September 26th. If you want more information, please call John D. Loudermilk, III, at 1-877-Get-MyCd. For more information on this rare show to benefit the Vanderbilt Children's Hospital, go to: http://www.the-record-store.com/ Right after Labor Day, I will begin my 2 year Cyber-Tour, utilizing the Greyhound Bus line. I will be making "history". At well over 80 cities and towns, American Veterans are waiting for me at the Bus Stop and will take me to their homes and put me up there so I can meet up with America's greatest treasure: her Veterans. For more information on this Cyber-Tour, go to: http://www.nashville.net/~bobbyros/tour/index.html I just got off the phone with Amy Kurland at her world famous Bluebird Cafe. This coming Veterans Day she wants me to perform, again, continuing a Nashville tradition. Eddie Bayers and his lovely wife, Lane Brody, will again join me for the Nashville Veterans Day Parade. We will be with many Veterans from Nashville and around the country on this day, so stay tuned for other High Ground Reports. We look forward to you joining us on this sacred day. Nashville's Veteran Community goes all out on this Veterans Day Parade, and if you have not witnessed it, you are missing something very special. For those of you who are asking about Jeff Skorik's new CD, "Another Day Down", it is in the final phase of manufacturing and will be released in time for the Holidays. Jeff is playing at Guido's, so I'll keep you informed. OK, that's enough for now. I'm back to my alligators....
PEACE, LT Bobby Ross
Perseverance Pays Off for Conscientious Objector AuthorJacobyte PressJuly 29, 2000 Fukuoka, Japan--Robert W. Norris, a native Californian and Vietnam War conscientious objector (CO) now living in Japan, knows what it means for a writer to persevere. Nearly thirty years after being court-martialed as a CO and twenty-five years of writing, Norris has drawn upon his many experiences to write his first electronic novel Looking for the Summer. Looking for the Summer, published by Jacobyte Books and released August 1, 2000, tells the story of a Vietnam War CO's adventures and search for identity on the road from Paris to Calcutta in 1977. "Back in 1970 I was a CO within the military, refused my orders to fight in the war, got court-martialed, and spent time in a military prison," Norris said. "The Kent State killings were the final straw in what was, at the time, a difficult and personal decision to make a stand against the war. "After serving my sentence, I was kicked out of the military with an 'undesirable' discharge. For the next ten years I wandered the globe in search of an identity. I hitchhiked across the States twice, bummed around Europe sleeping in fields and under bridges, and took one journey around the world. Afghanistan and India, in particular, made a deep impression on me. I worked a lot of labor jobs during that time. Wherever I went I was continually taking notes and writing journals. Looking for the Summer took about ten different drafts and over 20 years to write, but I was finally able to pull all those earlier experiences together and put them to use. To see the book available to the world on the Internet makes everything worth having gone through." Meredith Whitford, Director and Senior Editor of Jacobyte Books, said, "Looking for the Summer is a novel that we are proud to publish. Anyone who lived through the upheaval of the 1960s and 70s will recognize themselves and their past in this quest for self-knowledge and identity. To those who know this period only as history to be read about or studied--or ignored--Norris offers illuminating insights." A synopsis of the book: David Thompson |
Darden saw a poster for a new collector stamp that depicts a veteran leaning against the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Above his outstretched hand, a beam of sunlight illuminates the etched names of veterans who died in battle.