> ***** Winter Soldier Investigation
From Gerald Nicosia history of VVAW, now out in pb. (Nicosia was physically attacked by Bob, "Spart, " Mandel, son of windbag Bill, at a Mumia event at UCB last yr.)
<URL: http://www.bigmagic.com/pages/blackj/column68a.html > [The following excerpt on the Winter Soldier Investigation from Gerald Nicosia’s HOME TO WAR: A HISTORY OF THE VIETNAM VETERANS' MOVEMENT(Copyright © 2001 Gerald Nicosia) is used here with the permission of the author. HOME TO WAR: A HISTORY OF THE VIETNAM VETERANS' MOVEMENT(Crown, 690 pages) was picked as one of "the best books of 2001" in nonfiction category by LOS ANGELES TIMES, Dec. 2, 2001. It has received numerous excellent reviews, including cover reviews in the LOS ANGELES TIMES, the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLEand the DALLAS MORNING NEWS. Yet the NEW YORK TIMEShas failed even to mention the book's existence. More information about the book and its author can be obtained by clicking on http://www.geraldnicosia.com/. Gerald Nicosia may be contacted at GNicosia at earthlink.net.]
Tom Hayden, cofounder of SDS and still a leader of the New Left, passed through Detroit in February, 1971, while Vietnam Veterans Against the War was staging its Winter Soldier Investigation (in fact he first met Jane Fonda, his future wife, there). He claims that until he listened to veterans speaking about their war experiences, it had never occurred to him that the United States might lose the war. In other words, before Winter Soldier, the war for him was chiefly a foreign-policy issue. Afterward, at least in part because of what the vets said there, he began to see more clearly that "losing a war is a state of mind." The major loss for individual soldiers, he learned, was not of the territory they were holding, but a loss of their own mental peace:
"It's loneliness; it's seeing your buddies die without believing that they died for anything worthwhile; it's marking your time, hoping that you don't get killed for nothing; it's indulging in mindless, nihilistic behavior. There's nothing good about it, and it goes on for 24 hours a day for most of a year of a young man's life, until they get out. And so it's personally felt in all kinds of ways in your head and in your gut."
Scott Camil, formerly a gung-ho Marine, now looking Christ-like with long hair and beard and chiseled Semitic features, was one of the most dramatic witnesses at Winter Soldier. Camil testified about slitting old men's throats and the abominable sexual torture and murder of a female Viet Cong suspect. He stated that he had always believed in the rightness of his actions, and in his nation's urgent need for him to perform these terrible tasks. It amazed him, therefore, to see a band of American neo-Nazis marching through the snow and bitter cold outside the motor inn, carrying banners that read:
"HOWARD JOHNSON'S HARBORS REDS" and "JANE FONDA IS A COMMUNIST."
Becoming a Communist was the furthest thing from Camil's mind. He came to
Winter Soldier because he was "very angry and pissed" at having been misled by his government. Oddly, he found himself laughing a lot there, which he attributed to his having been brought up all his life not to show pain--—a lesson the Marines had merely reinforced. There's a moment near the start of the Winter Soldier film that truly shows what the occasion meant to Camil. He bumps into veteran Ken Campbell, who had been a forward observer in the same company as Camil, just after Camil had returned to the States. Having heard of each other, they compare notes about famous battles and fellow Marines. One can almost read the relief on their faces, to have found another who would surely understand, because he had been to the same place. Winter Soldier for Camil and so many others was just this chance to connect again with their fellow men, and with the America they had once loved enough to risk their lives for.
There was an innocence among these veterans that was almost childlike, and totally incongruous with the hell of experience they had just come from.
They could not imagine that anyone would think they were lying, or that they had some ulterior motive in bringing forward such gruesome testimony. They came, for the most part, without political motivation, nor did they expect to be categorized politically for their action. They assumed it would be obvious, as Joe Urgo puts it, that "they had every reason to expose the truth and get this stuff off their chest." Moreover, many of them believed that Winter Soldier, rather than continuing to politicize the war, would in fact put an end to their nation's political agony.
"Our naive belief," wrote Bill Crandell, "was that the testimony of 125 American combat veterans on the criminal nature of the Vietnam War would simply end it, that an America already shocked by war crime and already turning toward calls for peace would simply demand an end to the slaughter of innocents and the waste of our brothers."
Yet the depth of the testimony, both very personal and very comprehensive, generated its own political impact, because it was not just the portrait of a war that was being painted, it was the portrait of a whole society. Urgo recalls being struck as if by a revelation when he heard one vet testify:
"They've been getting us ready for Vietnam since grade school."
Suddenly he found himself listening with new ears to testimony about racism in schools and sexism in the culture and the role of churches in supporting the military—--for confessions that began with traumatic war stories often ended with vets reflecting on how they’d ended up in such an unlikely, down-and-dirty fight so far from home.
The witnesses at Winter Soldier "were exposing every aspect of the superstructure," Urgo recalls. "They were showing that all of education, all of religion, all of the laws, <SNIP>