In 1972, Kerry opposed switching to an all-volunteer army, arguing that such an army would be "an army of the poor and the black and the brown. We must not repeat the travesty of the inequities present during Vietnam. I also fear having a professional army that views the perpetuation of war crimes as simply 'doing its job.'" Contrary to Kerry's prediction, middle-class young people comprise the bulk of today's wartime volunteer army recruits.
Tim Kane, an economics scholar and Air Force Academy graduate who prepared the report for a 2005 Heritage Foundation study on recruits, said, "We found that recruits tend to come from middle-class areas, with disproportionately fewer from low-income areas." The study found that " . . . on average, recruits in 2003 were from wealthier neighborhoods than were recruits in 1999." Never mind Kerry's insult to the poor, the black and the brown by suggesting that, were they the bulk of the all-volunteer army, they would happily engage in "war crimes" as a matter of policy!
Kerry also repeated the lie of "inequities" during the Vietnam War -- that minorities died in higher percentages than their numbers in the population. Not true, according to David Horowitz of the Freedom Center. During the Vietnam War draft era, blacks comprised 13.5 percent of the population. Of those who died in Vietnam, 12.5 percent were black, with blacks comprising 12.1 percent of men killed in actual battle.
When Kerry returned from Vietnam and testified before Congress in 1971, he accused the military of engaging in widespread atrocities and war crimes, recounting soldiers' stories that American GIs had "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. . . . "
Many of the stories Kerry recounted then and in a book he wrote turned out to have been fabrications. Tim Russert, in 2004, confronted Kerry on "Meet the Press" about his 33-year-old accusations.
Russert: You committed atrocities.
Kerry: . . . I think it's an inappropriate word. . . .
Russert: You used the word "war criminals."
Kerry: . . . It was, I think, a reflection of the kind of times we found ourselves in, and I don't like it when I hear it today.
Russert: . . . A lot of those stories have been discredited . . .
Kerry: Actually, a lot of them have been documented. . . . Have some been discredited? Sure, they have, Tim.
As for Kerry's Pasadena City College remark, he finally apologized -- that is, to anyone "offended" by his words, which he claimed were "misinterpreted."
The "botched joke" didn't hurt the Democrats on election night, but what about the military?