The Winter Soldier Investigation (Reel 1) (sound)

In the bleak winter of 1776, when the men who had enlisted in the summer were going home because the way was hard and their enlistments were over, Tom Paine wrote, "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of his country. But he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman." Like the winter soldiers of 1776 who stayed after they had served their time, we veterans of Vietnam know that America is in grave danger. What threatens our country is not redcoats or even reds. It is our crimes that are destroying our national unity by separating those of our countrymen who deplore these acts from those of our countrymen who refuse to examine what is being done in America's name. The winter soldier investigation is not a mock trial. There will be no phony indictments. There will be no verdict against Uncle Sam. In these 3 days over 100 Vietnam veterans will present straightforward testimony, direct testimony about acts which are war crimes under international law. We're ready to let the testimony say it all. My name's David Bishop. I was attached to Hotel Company 25. I was Before I went into the Marine Corps, I was a lab technician. I'm still a lab technician. My testimony's going to consist of uh my skipper or my captain killing prisoners, uh throwing heat tablets or trioxane gas to children, four NV four NVA nurses that were captured were POWs were uh that were raped, tortured, and then completely destroyed. Their bodies were destroyed in free-fire zones, and uh health problem in Vietnam. My name is Joe Bangert. I'm a Philadelphia resident. I enlisted in the Marine Corps 4 years in 1967. Uh went to Vietnam in 1968, and my testimony will deal with my participation or witnessing uh my unit in Vietnam was Marine Observation Squadron 6 with the First Marine Air Wing. And my testimony will cover the slaughter of civilians, the specific uh the slaughter of civilians I the skinning of a Vietnamese woman woman, uh the type of observing our squadron did in Vietnam, and uh the crucifixion of of uh Vietnamese either suspects or civilians uh in Vietnam. My name is Jack Vernal, and I uh joined the Marine Corps about 6 months after getting out of high school. I was 18 years of age at the time. I enlisted for years. I went to Vietnam in February of '68. I served with Echo Battery 213 and detached to 2nd Battalion 27th Marines. Mainly my testimony is about the uh indiscriminate murder of innocent civilian women and children. Uh torture of prisoners for fun and other reasons and uh Uh Michael Kenny joined the Marine Corps at the age of 19 17 in uh '68. Served in Vietnam '69 '70 with 2nd Battalion 26 Marines. Uh testimony mainly concerns uh the uh maltreatment and murder of uh Vietnamese non-combatants and uh general maltreatment of uh civilian population. My name is Kevin Dela. I entered the Marine Corps shortly after graduating from high school. I served in Vietnam with 3rd Battalion 1st Marines from October 1969 to March 1970. My testimony concerns the falsification of body count reports. Your last day in the States in staging battalion at Camp Pendleton, you have a little lesson. It's called the rabbit lesson. Where the staff NCO comes out and he has a rabbit. He's talking to you about escaping evasion and survival in the jungle. And he has this rabbit and then after in a couple seconds he where everyone just about falls in love with it not falls in love with it but uh you know they're humane there. He cracks in the neck, skins it, disembowels it just like I sit testified that this happened to a woman. Uh he does this to a rabbit and then he throw the guts out in the audience and uh you can you can get anything out of that you want but that's your last lesson you catch in the United States before you leave for Vietnam. The first day I got to Vietnam, I landed in Da Nang. I was picked up by a truckload of grunt Marines with two company grade officers, first lieutenants. We were about 5 miles down the road where there were some Vietnamese children uh at the gateway to the village and they gave the old finger gesture gesture at us. Uh and uh it was uh understandable that they picked this up from the GIs there. They stopped the truck. They didn't stop the truck. They slowed down a little bit and it was just like response the guys got up, including lieutenants, and just blew all the kids away. There was about five or six kids blown away there and then the truck just moved and uh continued down the hill. That was my first day in Vietnam. Christmas Eve, uh shortly before midnight, a platoon from India Company, a group of Marines from India Company, had set up an ambush in uh Arizona territory and uh they killed 25 people. To my knowledge, it was never determined whether they were civilians or were in fact the enemy. But um in examining the bodies, they discovered one weapon. It was a 9-mm pistol. The next day on Christmas Day uh the battalion commander sent an order all about the uh the battalion area, Hill 37, requesting uh any enemy weapons that were in the hands of individual Marines. A friend of mine from Delaware had bought an AK-47 from another Marine when he came into country. I was ordered to take this weapon down to the command bunker and give it to the executive officer of Third Battalion, First Marines. Um when I gave this to him, he gave it to another Marine and told him to go smear some mud on it. There were several other weapons acquired in this manner and they were all sent into regimental headquarters as being captured Christmas Eve with those bodies to make it appear as it was to make the um make the group of people appear to be a heart heavily armed enemy force. All right. Uh Do you remember if there was a Christmas truce announced at that time? Yes, there was. We came across four NVA nurses that were hiding out in one of the bunkers. They were nurses. We found medical supplies on them. They had black uniforms on. Uh the Rock Marines came up to us, one of their officers, and they asked us if they could have the NVA nurses that they would take care of them because we were sweeping through the area and that we couldn't take we couldn't take care of any POWs. So, imagine instead of killing them, we handed them over to the Rock Marines. Well, we were still in the area when the Rock Marines started tying them down to the ground. They um tied their hands to the ground. They spread-eagled them. They um they raped them. They raped all four. There was like maybe 10 or 20 uh Rock Marines involved. They um tortured them. They sliced off their breasts. They uh took machetes and cut off parts of their fingers and things like this. And um when that was over, they took the uh on all four, they took pop-up flares, which are uh it's an aluminum canister you hit with your hand, it'll shoot maybe 100 200 ft in the air. They stuck them up their uh vaginas, all four of them, and they blew the tops of their heads off. My name is Rusty Sachs. I entered the Marine Corps in 1964 after working as a news broadcaster for a network radio station. I was a helicopter pilot. I came out as a captain. I was in Vietnam with Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 362 as a medevac pilot from August of '66 to September of '67. My testimony concerns the leveling of villages for for no valid reason. Throwing Viet Cong suspects from the aircraft after binding and gagging them with copper wire and racism in the assignment of priorities to medical evacuations where white people were given priority over non-white people. My name is Scott Camil. I was a sergeant attached to Charlie 1 1. I was a forward observer in Vietnam. I went in right after high school and I'm a student now. My testimony involves burning of villages with uh civilians in them, the cutting off of ears, cutting off of heads, torturing of prisoners, calling in of artillery on villages for games, corpsmen killing wounded prisoners, napalm dropped on villages, women being raped, women and children being massacred, CS gas used on people, animals slaughtered, Chu Hoi passes rejected and the people holding them shot, bodies shoved out of helicopters, tear gassing people for fun, and running civilian vehicles off the road. My name is Kenneth J. Campbell. I'm 21. I'm a Philadelphia resident. I was a corporal in the Marine Corps. I was I was an FO forward artillery artillery scout observer. I FO'd for Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division. I was in Vietnam from February '68 to March of '69. I was a I went straight into the Marine Corps from high school. And I am now a student at Temple University in Philadelphia. My testimony will consist of uh eye witnessing and participating in the calling in of artillery on undefended villages, mutilation of bodies, killing of civilians, mistreatment of civilians, mistreatment of prisoners, and indiscriminate use of artillery, harassment and interdiction fire. My name's Chris Simpson, age 21, of New York, as a corporal in the United States Marine Corps from '66 to '70. I was in Vietnam from '67 to '68. Uh I'll be talking about maltreating of prisoners, destruction of uh villages, crops, and animals. Uh the torture of prisoners was done uh with beatings, and uh I saw one case where there were two prisoners, and one prisoner was uh staked out on the ground, and he was cut open while he was alive, and part of his insides were cut and out, and they told the other prisoner if he didn't tell him what they wanted to know that they would kill him. And I don't know what he said because he spoke in Vietnamese, but then they killed him after that anyway. Uh All right. Were these uh primarily civilians, or do you believe that they were or do you know that they were actual uh um The way that we distinguish between uh civilians and VC, uh VC had weapons and civilians didn't, and anybody that was dead was considered a VC. If you killed someone, they said, "How do you know he's a VC?" You would The general reply would be, "He's dead." And that was sufficient. The general attitude of the officers was I was a lieutenant at the time. "Well, there's somebody senior to me here, and I guess if this wasn't SOP, he'd be doing something to stop it." And since since nobody senior ever did anything to stop it, the the policy was promulgated, and everybody assumed that this was what was right. We'd never had any instruction in the Geneva Convention. When we were given our Geneva Convention cards, the lecture consisted of "If you take in prisoner, all you got to do is give them your name, rank, serial number, and date of birth. Uh here's your Geneva Convention cards. Go get them, Marines. We were never told anything about the way to treat prisoners if we were the capturers rather than the captee. The cutting off of heads on Operation Stone uh there was a lieutenant colonel there and two people had their heads cut off and put on stakes and stuck in the middle of the field. And we were notified that there were press covering the operation and that we couldn't do that anymore. Uh before we went out on the operation, we were told not to waste our heat tablets on food but to save them for the villages because we were going to destroy all the villages. And we didn't give the people any time to get out of the villages. We just went in and burned them. And if people were in the villages yelling and screaming, we didn't help them. We just burned the houses as we went. It wasn't like they were humans. Like we were you know, we were conditioned to believe that, you know, this was for the the good of the nation, the good of our country and that anything we did was okay. And like when you shot someone, you didn't think you were shooting a human. They were a [ __ ] or a commie and it was okay. Anything you did to them was okay because like they they would tell you, well, they would do it to you if they had the chance. I had been in Marine Corps over 10 years, for 10 long years in Marine Corps. Went to Vietnam twice. Got my brother down in 1965. He felt like it was his patriotic duty. I did the same thing. I said, "Uh I want to wipe them all out, really do it. Get my medals and be a real just really make it on the on the on the scene. But then you go down and you keep listening to they keep using the word commie and and and uh slant uh slope and slant eyes. I said, "Hey, you know, those are the same words almost they use in the States against me, you know, third world people." They dehumanize these people so much that, you know, it's easy to go out and say go out and kill them or something like uh uh blow them away because they are dehumanizing and then it becomes in your mind you they become dehuman to you so use your your reaction to that and and use that as as your thing. But then as you go on you begin to realize this this is foolish you're killing your own brothers. And so that other ten years is what I got out of it makes you very bitter. Uh my name is Evan Hanning and uh I would like to point out that if you took the Vietnamese War or the American War as it is and uh compared it right to the Indian Wars a hundred years ago it would be the same thing. All the massacres were the same and uh nowadays they use chemical warfare back then uh they put smallpox in the blankets and gave them to the Indians. And uh you could uh just go right down the line and name them all and they would be the same thing. Like uh the well we made treaties long ago it was for as long as grass shall grow and as long as river shall flow. The way things are going now one these days the grass isn't going to grow and the rivers aren't going to flow. Mhm.