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Winter Soldier Investigation

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The Winter Soldier Investigation was a meeting of American Vietnam War veterans as well as civilians at which information was given alleging atrocities against the population of Vietnam by U.S. troops.

The meeting took place in Detroit, Michigan, on January 31-February 2, 1971 as an activity of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and was presented as an assembly of 109 Vietnam War Veterans and 16 civilians which alleged specific war crimes by the United States in Vietnam during the years of 1963-1970. The soldiers' testimony often overlaps, alleging a pattern of atrocities against the Vietnamese people. According to Stolen Valor author Burkett, the investigation has been thoroughly discredited, while the VVAW maintains the validity of all accounts and participants except Al Hubbard. Hundreds of known violations were prosecuted by the military, however, none of those testifying specifically at this event are known to have been prosecuted.

Jane Fonda helped raise funds for the event, and organizers included Dick Gregory, Phil Ochs, Graham Nash, David Crosby, and Donald Sutherland.

Future Senator John Kerry, then a decorated lieutenant in the Naval Reserve (inactive status), would shortly thereafter testify before the American Congress to the general conclusions gathered in Detroit. Near the beginning of the film Winter Soldier, Kerry is shown interviewing. Kerry co-moderated the Miscellaneous Panel.

Sen. Mark Hatfield of Oregon entered the Winter Soldier transcripts into the Congressional Record and asked the commandant of the Marine Corps for an investigation of the Marines that testified. Investigators were unable to confirm or refute the claimed atrocities, but identified one organizer (Al Hubbard) as never being in combat. Guenter Lewy in America in Vietnam says "The results of this investigation, carried out by the Naval Investigative Service are interesting and revealing ... Many of the veterans, although assured that they would not be questioned about atrocities they might have committed personally, refused to be interviewed. One of the active members of the VVAW told investigators that the leadership had directed the entire membership not to cooperate with military authorities."

Testimony Troubles the Nation

The February 3, 1971, Detroit Free Press interviewed James Weber and Ron Palosaari, and another soldier (Wilson, by phone, as he hadn't heard of the hearings) all of the same Americal unit, after the Winter Soldier Hearings. Weber told of witnessing an attack on a village by white phosphorous artillery and air strikes - an event neither he nor Palosaari mentioned during the hearings. Palosaari and Wilson confirmed the artillery and air strikes, but differed in opinion about the amount of damage done. Palosaari noted the strikes did hit the village, "because we could see people running around and trying to drag away bodies." They had photos of a large arms cache uncovered in the village, it apparently being a Vietcong stronghold. The Pentagon confirmed that Weber and Palosaari were Vietnam veterans. To view the events they actually testified about at the hearings, and had entered into congressional record, see the Winter Soldier Investigation link below.

Excerpted testimonies

Bishop: "I hardly saw any MEDIVACS at all taking out wounded Vietnamese civilians or Vietnamese prisoners. Usually we didn't have any prisoners. The prisoners were exterminated.
Bangert: "I was picked up by a truckload of grunt Marines with two company grade officers, 1st Lts.; we were about 5 miles down the road, where there were some Vietnamese children at the gateway of the village and they gave the old finger gesture at us. It was understandable that they picked this up from the GIs there. They stopped the trucks--they didn't stop the truck, they slowed down a little bit, and it was just like response, the guys got up, including the lieutenants, and just blew all the kids away. There were about five or six kids blown away and then the truck just continued down the hill. That was my first day in Vietnam.
  • It has been pointed out that among the oddities of Bangert's testimony is that he should not have been hitchiking on that day, as his unit used helicopter transport.
  • Bangert was involved in creating the Winter Soldier film about this VVAW event.
  • Bangert has worked for several of John Kerry's campaigns since 1984, including as a veterans' organizer in 2004.
Bronaugh: "The bridge got a radio call that they had supposedly received a sniper round from this village. So the Lt. on the bridge told them to sweep the village. They swept the village and they called back that there was nothing found. There was nothing found, I mean, there were just people in the village and so the Lt. told them to burn the village"..."From where I was standing, I saw maybe two or three male villagers and the rest were women and children--some of the children walking and some of them young enough to be carried, I would say under a year, maybe. The last thing I heard as a command was the gunnery sergeant told them to open fire to keep them back. Their village was on fire and they were in panic; they didn't stop, so they just cut down the women and children with mortars, machine guns, tank, snipers were"..."Well, the tank, the 90 millimeter gun wasn't used because, I mean, it was too close a range, but they used the .50 and the .30 off the tank and all the troops that were at the bridge with M16s. The officer, a Lt., a few got close enough to where he used his .45. They used a few frag hand grenades."
Camile: "I really don't know that much about what it is or what it's made of. I just know that when it gets on you it burns and when they drop it from the planes, they usually drop two big canisters of napalm at a time. It just burns everything up, including the people. Many times we've called in air before we'd go into a village, or if we had a village where we'd lost people because of booby traps, we'd call in napalm and it just burns down the village and the people"..."most of the time it was for safety. We'd napalm it first before we'd even go in just to make sure we wouldn't lose any men without any fire whatsoever. It was just for our protection, supposedly."
  • "Camile" in transcripts is Scott Camil, a VVAW leader.
Nienke: "I think every person who was in Vietnam who was in the infantry used CS, which is a gas, chemicals, Willie Peter--that's White Phosphorus--and we used these sometimes to clear bunkers and other times to destroy a hootch. We used to think that was kicks; there would be people in a hootch or something like this and we'd throw in a gas grenade and they'd cough and then we'd leave. And other times we used to use--we had mortar squads in the infantry used to avoid going into a village or something if we thought it might be VC infested or something like this, we'd send in Willie Peter mortars, 60 millimeters, and this would burn up the hootches --that explode--throwing white phosphorus on different hootches in the village. Start the hootches burning and also kill people. It's probably one of the worst sights I've ever seen is a person that's been burned by Willie Peter, because it doesn't stop. It just burns all completely through your body. The only way you can end this burning is to cut off the air."
Olimpieri: "...it was usually the officers, but I can remember times where we'd be sitting up on a hill, Nick and myself, and they used to have these things called "Pop-ups." You hit them on the bottom and it shoots like a green star cluster up in the air. It's used for location when somebody wants to find out where you are and we used to shoot them down into the village that was below and watch the people run around and we used to get big kicks out of it"..."it was pretty well accepted. I mean, everybody did it.
Bishop: "We were on Operation Taylor Common. We were up in the mountains. We were operating just above the Laotian border where Laos and Cambodia meet. We were making heavy contact up there. We had quite a few losses and most of the operations we were holding were usually squad type or platoon type because the area was so thick and we couldn't send big units in there. We were very close to the border and very many times we were fired upon and we would chase the enemy back and you wouldn't know really how many grid squares you would go. We would come back to the unit and even though we knew we were close to Cambodia, we'd come back and the skipper would kind of get us all together and say like, "That was really a far out thing we did today and just for your own information we were in another country." This was general knowledge at the time that we were going back and forth into Cambodia.
Unidentified panelist: "We never really had that much incentive for body counts. But this is slightly related. You know, everybody likes souvenirs. That's sort of like an American pastime. I went to visit a friend. There was a Connex--it's a metal box that they ship goods over to Vietnam in, and they're big enough for a man to walk in. On top of it was a set of ears drying in the sun. This was right behind the battalion TOC, which is Tactical Operations Center. They could not help but see a set of ears on Connex, you know, drying in the sun. I thought at first that it was revolting, but after a while I thought, you know, hey man, maybe I want a souvenir. One of these days when I come across a body I'll get myself a finger or an ear. When I went over there, it was a revolting idea. But then, you know, once you did kill a body, you could bring back the souvenir that you did kill it."

False testimony

In September 2004, Steve Pitkin stated that "John Kerry and other leaders of that event pressured me to testify about American war crimes, despite my repeated statements that I could not honestly do so. One event leader strongly implied that I would not be provided transportation back to my home in Baltimore, Maryland, if I failed to comply. Kerry and other leaders of the event instructed me to publicly state that I had witnessed incidents of rape, brutality, atrocities and racism, knowing that such statements would necessarily be untrue." Pitkin was a participant shown in the Winter Soldier film, shown while talking with Kerry.

Allegations of phony Vietnam veterans

Guenter Lewy's 1978 book America in Vietnam (pages 316-317) and B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley's Stolen Valor (Verity Press, Inc., Dallas, Texas)(pages 113, 131-137) contain similar information about alleged flaws in Lane's book. Neither book, however, refutes any of the testimony given during the Winter Soldier Investigation.

  • Lawyer and leftist activist Mark Lane was one of the organizers of Winter Soldier. In 1970, Lane had published a book called Conversations With Americans purporting to be interviews with Vietnam veterans about war crimes, containing Vietnam tales of atrocities. Reporter Neil Sheehan showed some interviewed in Lane's book had never served in Vietnam and others had not been in the situations they described. Lane admitted he did not check military records, as confirmation of details was not relevant. Lane later claimed to have confirmed these military records, without explaining the faults pointed out by Sheehan.
    • The following are often falsely listed as being participants in Winter Soldier, but were actually in Lane's book instead. This confusion is probably due to Stolen Valor having an explanation of Lane's history within the section on Winter Soldier.
      • Chuck Onan, stock room clerk in Beaufort, S.C.
      • Michael Schneider, deserted in Europe and deserted again in the USA.
      • Terry Whitmore, was in an unpopulated area of Vietnam.
      • Garry Gianninoto, medical corpsman at battalion headquarters.
    • VVAW leader and Winter Soldier co-organizer Al Hubbard lied about being an officer, and sustaining war injuries - but he never testified at Winter Soldier .

According to the investigative work of Burkett, Lewy and others, there were many imposters, liars, and plain nutjobs who infiltrated the ranks of the anti-war movement, and, in some cases, testified to war crimes and atrocities that never occurred in order to get attention, sympathy, and, in one documented case, medals and honors. It is also true, as noted by author Gerald Nicosia in his authoritative history of the Vietnam Veterans Movement Home to War, that those discredited voices were never key witnesses in either the Winter Soldier Investigation or in subsequent war crimes investigations such as the congressional Dellums Hearings of 1971.

Vietnam conflict situation

Also from that same chapter in Guenter Lewy's book America in Vietnam (page 309): "The conflict in Vietnam was a guerilla war without fronts, and this created a setting especially conducive to atrocities. Aggressive behavior is often the result of frustration and anxiety, and the American servicemen in Vietnam experienced both of these states of mind in abundance ... Gradually the entire Vietnamese population became an object of fear and hatred. As a marine lieutenant told an American doctor: "You walk through the fucking bush for three days and nights without sleep. Watch your men, your buddies, your goddamn kids get booby trapped. Blown apart. Get thrown six feet in the air by a trap laid by an old lady and come down with no legs." Eventually you conclude, he said, that the only thing to do is 'kill them all.'

(page 315) ... "The argument that certain "tactical field policies," as for example the stress on body count, created an atmosphere conducive to atrocities was certainly valid. Yet despite the pressure for a high enemy causalty toll most soldiers in Vietnam did not kill prisoners or intentionally shoot unarmed villagers. Violations of the law of war in this regard where committed by individuals in violation of existing policy. ... That no "individual soldiers or officers be brought to trial was in effect a demand that nobody should be held responsible for atrocities. It amounted to a repudiation of individual responsibility not unlike that made with regard to the German people after World War II. Yet while collective guilt, like the notion of original sin, may have a place in theology, it is not part of Anglo-American jurisprudence. Here guilt is always personal, and if all are guilty then in effect nobody is guilty. Perhaps this was indeed the end result which these veterans relating atrocities, often involving them personally, wanted to bring about. As McCusker ... candidly acknowledged: "I'm absolving him as, in essence, the same way I'm absolving myself." Another veteral testifying about atrocities admitted that it was less difficult to live with such killings if you could convince yourself that you had been programmed to do these things. ... Some individuals, under pressure and sometimes provocation, committed atrocities while others successfully resisted these pressures and maintained their integrity. Instead of facing up to this harsh fact of individual moral failure it was easier to place "the monkey" on the backs of the generals."

While no one involved with the Winter Soldier Investigation, and subsequent Senate hearings, ever accused "all" servicemen of misconduct - problems were presented as having grown beyond "isolated incident" status. They were perceived by the participants as epidemic, and was seen as ignored and even condoned by leaders at all levels in the military and government. Winter Soldier was the culmination of efforts to finally bring national attention to this situation, and to expedite the end of America's participation in the Vietnam conflict.

External links

Books

  • Nicosia, Gerald (2002). Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement. CA: Three Rivers Press. ISBN 0609809067
  • Burkett, B. G. & Whitley, Glenna (1998). Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History. Dallas: Verity Press Inc. ISBN 096670360X.
  • Lewy, Guenter (1978). America in Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195023919. ISBN 0195027329 pbk.