" Your last lesson you catch in the United States before you leave for Vietnam is where they take that rabbit and they kill it, and they skin it... "

LT. WILLIAM 'Rusty" Calley put it pretty well when he said to his prosecutor in Ft. Benning, Ga., "It wasn't any big deal, sir."

It wasn't. Death is America's biggest industry and like other industries, it does not usually find itself confined by moral guidelines.

Recently however, Americans have begun to look at themselves in a somewhat stronger critical light, admitting for almost the first time that they too might be guilty of the same crimes which they have been taught to believe could happen only in Nazi Germany or Communist countries.

One of the most striking things about last month's Vietnam Veterans Against the War protest in Washington was the fact that reporters could walk up to virtually any soldier there and get an earful on American atrocities in Southeast Asia. Without the usual intellectualizing which accompanies any discussion of the war by people without first-hand knowledge of it, they spoke from the gut.

Two months earlier, over 100 of these honorably discharged veterans gathered in Detroit to give testimony on American war crimes. The hearings, held on January 31, February 1 and 2 of this year, were largely overlooked by the press at the time.

On April 6, however, Sen. Mark O Hatfield (D.-Ore.) inserted the testimony into the Congressional Record, asking that further investigations be made by both Congress and the Pentagon. The portions of the transcript below have been taken from the April 6 and 7 issues of the Record.

" Over the border they send us to kill and to fight for a cause they've long ago forgotten." These lines of Paul simon's recall to Vietnam Veterans the causes for which we went to fight in Vietnam and the outrages we were part of because the men who sent us had long ago forgotten the meaning of the words.

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, "Those 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 who stayed after they had served their time, we veteans 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 country-men 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 Unce Sam. In these three days, over a hundred Vietnam Veterans will present straightforward testimony-direct testimony-about acts which are war crimes under international law. Acts which these men have seen and participated in. Acts which are the inexorabe result of national policy.

-From the Opening Statement by William Crandell, 26, 1st Lt., 199th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division.

Joe Bangert, 22, Sgt. (E-5), VMO-6, PMAG-39, 1st Marine Air Wing, 1st Marine Division (October 1968 to October 1969)

The first day I got to Vietnam I landed in Da Nang Air Base. From Da Nang Air Base I took a plane to Dong Ha. I got off the plane and hitchhiked on Highway 1 to my unit. 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 lined 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. As far as the crucified bodies, they weren't actually crucified with nails, but they would find VCs or something (I never got the story on them) but, anyway, they were human beings, obviously dead, and they would take them and string them out on fences, on barbed wire fences, stripped, and sometimes they would take flesh wounds, take a knife and cut the body all over the place to make it bleed, and look gory as a reminder to the people in the village.

Also in Quang Tri City I had a friend who was working with USAID and he was also with CIA. We used to get drunk together and he used to tell me about his different trips into Laos on Air America Airlines and things. One time he asked me would I like to accompany him to watch. He was an advisor with an ARVN group and Kit Carson's. He asked me if I would like to accompany him into a village that I was familiar with to see how they act. So I went with him and when we got there the ARVN had control of the situation. They didn't find any enemy but they found a woman with bandages. So she was questioned by six ARVNs and the way they questioned her, since she had bandages, they shot her. She was hit about twenty times. After she was questioned, and, of course, dead, this guy came over, who was a former major, been in the service for twenty years, and he got hungry again and came back over working with USAID, Aid International Development. He went over there, ripped her clothes off, and took a knife and cut, from her vagina almost all the way up, just about up to her breasts and pulled her breasts and pulled her organs out, completely out of her cavity, and threw them out. Then, he stopped and knelt over and commenced to peel every bit of skin off her body and left her there as a sign for something or other and that was those instances.

Moderator : Okay, there were American officers present when this happened or?