'We were in a sweep in a rice paddy and the flank man spotted somebody and told him to halt and started running and I fired an M79 over the trees. It went off and the man went down and our Lt. told us to go over there and check and see if he had an ID and find out if he was dead or what was happening with him. We went over there and he was still alive. He was about 70 years old. I believe he was some sort of religious, like a monk or something like that, from his dress. He had an ID card and he was in pretty bad shape so they didn't want to call in a Medivac chopper so they told us to kill him. And the person who did the killing fired about six rounds in him and I had to tell him to stop.'
Paul Olimpieri, 5th Marine Corps

'I saw one case where a woman was shot by a sniper, one of our snipers. When we got up to her she was asking for water. And the Lt. said to kill her. So he ripped off her clothes, they stabbed her in both breasts, they spread-eagled her and shoved an E- tool up her vagina, an entrenching tool, and she was still asking for water. And then they took that out and they used a tree limb and then she was shot.'
Scott Camile, 1st Marine Division

These are three snippets from the testimonies of Vietnam veterans who, horrified by what they had seen, and in some cases done, came back to the United States in the late 1960s determined to tell their countryfolk about the realities of their 'noble war' for the liberation of Vietnam. They formed a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War and you can read more of their testimonies here. A lot of them are horribly disturbing.

John Kerry was the leader of this group. His own testimony, probably better-known by hearsay than in detail, can be read here. Contrast all this with the claims of the Bush-supported smear group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that 'our consistent policy was to take every precaution to avoid harming civilians.'

It's hard to be inspired by Kerry these days. But having read this I find it hard, too, not to respect the man - or at least the man he was - and to reject the oft-parroted unthinking stuff about him being 'no different' to Bush. To do what the Vietnam Veterans Against the War did back then, in a climate at least as paranoid and 'patriotic' as today's, if not more so, was brave. It's a shame Kerry is too electorally expedient to come out against the Iraq war today - and let's hope some veterans of this one tell the truth about what they did at some stage soon as well. But can you imagine Bush doing what Kerry did back then? Can you imagine him even having the moral imagination to consider it?

If nothing else, Kerry appears a bigger man, morally, than Bush. He has also experienced the horrors of war, and it would be nice to think this would make him less keen to inflict it on others than the chickenhawk neo-cons currently occupying the White House. Somewhere in there, John Kerry must have a genuine moral core. That, if nothing else, would make him a departure from what we have at the moment.