TIMELINE MARCH TO MAY 1971 VIETNAM WAR

January 31 - February 1, 1971	The VVAW met at a at a Howard Johnson’s in Detroit for the "Winter Soldier Investigation," a national conference intended to convince the public that American troops were routinely committing war crimes in Vietnam. "I was just going to show support for the guys who were already picked out to testify," said Steve Pitkin. "Fighting in the war was terrible enough -- I shot people -- but I never saw any atrocities against civilians. The Vietcong hung up tribal chiefs and disemboweled them in front of their own families -- they did that to their own people. I never saw Americans do anything like that. Among those present were Scott Camil, John Kerry, Jane Fonda, Jan Crumb, Joe Bangert, and Steven J. Pitkim. Steven J. Pitkin gave testimony (1 - 2). "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. (Note: August 31, 2004, Steve Pitkin signed an Affadavit. Steve wants to apologize to Vietnam veterans for what he did and said at the Winter Soldier Investigation. "The VVAW found me during a difficult time in my life, and I let them use me to advance their political agenda. They pressured me to tell their lies, but that's no excuse for what I did. I just want people to know the truth and to make amends as best I can. I'd hate to see the troops serving today have to go through what Vietnam veterans did.")
February 19, 1971	VVAW leaders meet in New York to plan the organization's next action. John Kerry proposes to "march on Washington and take this whole thing to Congress." The protest is designated "Dewey Canyon III," after two military operations into Laos intended to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail. John
March 14 - 18, 1971	Jane Fonda, Mark Lane, and VVAW representative Michael Hunter fly to Europe for a five-day tour. In Paris, Fonda meets privately with Madame Binh of the PRG, then the three activists fly to London, where Fonda alleges American atrocities that include "applying electrodes to prisoners' genitals, mass rapes, slicing off of body parts, scalping, skinning alive, and leaving 'heat tablets' around which burned the insides of children who ate them.'"
March 16, 1971	The VVAW held a news conference on the third anniversary of the My Lai massacre to announce the forthcoming protest in Washington, DC. Retired Marine commandant General David Shoup and John Kerry demanded an immediate end to the war. Kerry, wearing his medals, described American soldiers as being "given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history."
April 18, 1971	John Kerry first appeared on NBC's Meet the Press with Al Hubbard and made the following statement.: MR. KERRY (Vietnam Veterans Against the War): There are all kinds of atrocities and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free-fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50-caliber machine guns which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search-and-destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare. All of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down. And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free-fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant Calley, are war criminals. Kerry introduced Hubbard as a former Air Force captain who had spent two years in Vietnam and was wounded in action.
April 18 - 23, 1971	More than a thousand VVAW members stage an "invasion" of Washington D.C., for Operation Dewey Canyon III. They hold memorial ceremonies, meet with sympathetic members of Congress, camp on the Mall, perform "guerilla theater" -- re-enactments of atrocities against civilians, complete with fake blood -- on the Capitol steps and in front of the Justice Department, and hold a candlelight march around the White House carrying an upside-down American flag. At the end of the six-day event, a number of the veterans throw military medals and ribbons over a fence in front of the Capitol in a gesture of contempt. Many shout obscenities or threats against the government. The protests receive enthusiastic coverage in the communist Daily World newspaper on April 20th (Part 1, Part 2), 21st (Part 1, Part 2), 23rd (Part 1, Part 2), and 24th (Part 1, Part 2).
April 22, 1971	John Kerry, director of the Vietnam Veterans against the War, testified before special session the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for two hours about alleging widespread atrocities by U.S. troops, and the official policies in Vietnam which were illegal, according to international law. He asks the Congressional panel "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" "They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country." (1 - 2) * * * "I have been to Paris. I have talked with both delegations at the peace talks, that is to say the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government and of all eight of Madam Binh's points it has been stated time and time again, and was stated by Senator Vance Hartke when he returned from Paris, and it has been stated by many other officials of this Government, if the United States were to set a date for withdrawal the prisoners of war would be returned." (3) * * * Senator Stuart SYMINGTON (D- Mo.): Mr. Kerry, from your experience in Vietnam do you think it is possible for the President or Congress to get accurate and undistorted information through official military channels." KERRY: I had direct experience with that. Senator, I had direct experience with that and I can recall often sending in the spot reports which we made after each mission; and including the GDA, gunfire damage assessments, in which we would say, maybe 15 sampans sunk or whatever it was. And I often read about my own missions in the Stars and Stripes and the very mission we had been on had been doubled in figures and tripled in figures. . . . I also think men in the military, sir, as do men in many other things, have a tendency to report what they want to report and see what they want to see. (4) A large group of veterans march to the steps of the Supreme Court to ask the Court why it has not ruled on the constitutionality of the war. They sing God Bless America. One hundred and ten are arrested for disturbing the peace and are led off the steps with their hands clasped behind their heads. Lobbying on Capitol Hill continues all day. A District Court judge angrily dissolves his injunction order, rebuking Justice Department lawyers for requesting the court order and then not enforcing it. Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General and lawyer for the vets, spoke on the Supreme Court's ban against the veteran's campsite at the foot of Capitol Hill. John Kerry can be seen pictured on the podium. Veterans stage a candlelight march around the White House. A huge American flag is carried upside down as a signal of distress. The march ends back at the camp when the flag carriers mount the stage.
April 23, 1971	Veterans threw their medals and ribbons over a makeshift fence on the steps of the Capitol. Kerry claimed to throw his ribbons over the fense, then claimed they were someone else's ribbons or medals. Congressman Jonathan Bingham held hearings with former intelligence and public information officers over distortion of news and information concerning the war. Senators George McGovern and Philip Hart held hearings on atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. The NBC Nightly News reveals that Al Hubbard had not been an Air Force Captain, as he claimed, but a staff sergeant E-5. A later investigation of Hubbard's military records shows that he was never assigned to Vietnam. Kerry is interviewed in a New York Times article titled “An Angry War Veteran,” in which he admits to the reporter that he enlisted in the Swift Boats to avoid the war in Vietnam, since the boats were only used for patrol duty: “That first trip to Vietnam piqued his curiosity, 'I wanted to go back and see for myself what was going on, but I didn’t really want to get involved in the war.' So late in 1968 he volunteered for an assignment on "swift boats" - the short, fast aluminum craft that were then used for patrol duty off the coast of Vietnam. "Two weeks before he arrived in Vietnam as a swift boat commander, he said, 'they changed the policy on the use of the boats - decided to send them up the river to prove to the Vietcong that they didn’t own the waters.' The river missions involved shooting at sampans and at huts along the banks and suddenly, Mr. Kerry recalls, we said, ‘hey, wait a minute - we don’t know who these people are.’ So we started to beach our boats to go to ashore and find out what we had been shooting at.”
May 25, 1971	Kerry appears on 60 Minutes with Morley Safer. Asked whether he wants to be President of the United States, Kerry replies in the negative, and calls it a "crazy question."