August 31, 2004

A Vietnam Atrocity
Posted by McQ

An example of one of those day-to-day atrocities John Kerry was going on about in 1971:


villagevisit.jpg

The atrocity?

Read the caption:

This is a psyops visit to a village in late 1969 in the Bassac River. That's me with my back to the camera, handing out candy to the kids and vitamins to the adults. Note the expressions on the faces of the adults -- and the fact that they are voting with their feet by crowding toward the boat. Kids and adults loved to have their pictures taken with our Polaroid -- the magic of having their picture right away and most of them didn't even know what a camera was!

Sadly, this village was attacked a day or so later by the Vietcong. They literally beat the village chief and his wife to death with clubs and hacked a 4-inch hole in their daughter's skull with a machette. We ran the little girl to Binh Thuy to the hospital at 0230 with me sitting on the fantail holding her. We never did find out if she lived or not... she was alive when I handed her to the corpsman.

Dave Wallace
Former OinC PCFs 32 & 65
CosDiv 13 / Cat Lo & Sa Dec, RVN


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Comments

What a difference if he had just chosen to say insread: "...regularly gave pre-natal check-ups to pregnant women, cleaned up infected ears, sewed up torn heads...and generally treated the countryside in a fashion reminiscent of Florence Nightingale."

But there were no votes in Massachusetts for such as that.

Posted by: Jumbo at August 31, 2004 08:16 PM

The broad spectrum atrocity proponents are curiously silent so far here.

We actually did good things...what a concept.

McQ - thank you. And thank you to Dave Wallace.

Posted by: looker at September 1, 2004 10:12 AM