Still Slandering the Troops

By Scott Swett
FrontPageMagazine.com

On August 8th, the Los Angeles Times published a long article in which Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson reported that Army investigators had substantiated 320 U.S. atrocities during the Vietnam War. It is not clear what the Times meant by “substantiated,” since many of these investigations did not lead to criminal charges.

It is also difficult to determine how many of the events, if confirmed, would qualify as war crimes, since Turse and Nelson did not distinguish between ordinary crimes by soldiers and military atrocities. The only “news” presented in the article was that documents on file in the National Archives appear to support the claim of James Henry, then a 20-year old medic, to have witnessed a war crime in the province of Quang Nam.

Why would the Times make available 4,400 words of valuable space to allow a relatively obscure researcher to expound his theories about the Vietnam War? Because James Henry was one of the men who testified at the Vietnam Veterans Against the War’s signature “war crimes” propaganda effort, the “Winter Soldier Investigation,” held in Detroit in early 1971.

Henry’s own story predated the VVAW event, and was already being investigated by the Army at that time. Winter Soldier provided the basis for John Kerry’s April 1971 testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, during which Kerry became a media star by comparing U.S. troops in Vietnam to “the army of Genghis Kahn” and charging the U.S. military with routinely committing war crimes “authorized at all levels of command.” This lie, which came under intense criticism and exposure during the 2004 presidential campaign, is a central part of the leftist myth that America is the primary cause of evil in the world. And it is this lie that the Times seeks to defend.

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