VVAW/IVAW links: Bill Perry [Jonn]

This is Bill Perry of the old VVAW. Here’s a picture I took of him with Elvis Kokesh at the Ron Paul march last August carrying an upside down flag – that’s him, the sea cow-shaped guy, in the Black Vets For Peace T-shirt on your left;

Here’s a picture of him in the VVAW T-shirt horning in on a photo of me and Army Sergeant shaking hands at the Winter Soldiers Congressional hearing back in April(I didn’t find out who he was until after I wrote the post and posted the picture);

Here he is planting a wet one on Elvis Kokesh last month in Nassau County when the charges against the IVAW arrestees were dropped.

Here’s Bill Perry with VoteVets co-founder and chairman Jon Soltz along with some IVAW members:

So who is Bill Perry, you might be asking. Well, he’s one of the original VVAW members and he testified at the first Winter Soldier hearings in 1971 (you know, with such luminaries as phony soldier Al Hubbard and John Kerry). He testified to his own misconduct which, if it happened, cost the lives of his own platoon as well as some innocent Vietnamese villagers;

Bill Perry, 23, Pfc. (E-3), “A” Co., 1/506, 101st Airborne Division (November 1966 to August 1968)

PERRY: I served in Vietnam from ’67 to ’68. I wouldn’t like to go too far into the horror stories you’ve been hearing about the last few days, but I would like to relate a few incidents. On March 5, 1968, in the province of Phuc Long, village of Song Be, a platoon of us, twenty-nine of us, were on a search and destroy mission. A few of us, who were considered expendable, were told to walk point.

As we came up out of a bamboo thicket into a clearing, a woman with whom I and one of the other two people had previously had what you might call business transactions with concerning marijuana, informed us of an imminent ambush on the part of the local forces. Myself and two others ran into her home with her. We weren’t sure whether she was _____ us or what, but we were scared so we ran into her home. The rest of the platoon came up out of the valley into the clearing and was ambushed. We were isolated pretty well from the rest of the platoon while they were getting shot up. And when an NCO came up to look into the house where we were kind of looking out the door with the woman, the NCO automatically figured that we must be VC prisoners and he shot her up. She had a very young child inside her bomb shelter. Every Vietnamese home has to have a bomb shelter. The ambush actually lasted about two or three minutes, and the platoon got pretty well shot up. For about five hours they called in artillery and air strikes and pretty well demolished the town of Song Be. Finally when enough reinforcements came, they went out to sweep the area. They decided to throw fragmentation, or white phosphorus grenades, inside of each bunker regardless of what was going down in any bunker. We tried to stop them from fragging other bunkers where we could hear screams or moans or whatever, but they were really into it.

There was another incident in mid-July 1968 in the vicinity of Nui Ba Den where we had been in about two days of steady combat. We had found a lot of bodies, some killed by air strikes and some killed by small arms fire. And the military fear, you know, came through once again in their mutilation of bodies. They were very much into cutting patches and numbers on dead bodies in this particular incident. I could go on with more horror stories, but like we all know what happens. You can hear it from the other GIs and when the rest of the people on the panel finish, I’d like to go into a little of what causes people to act this way, why people act this way, and what we can do to combat people acting this way. Thank you.

Being a chickenshit coward, Perry hid in a mamasan’s hut without warning his platoon about the ambush (kind of the job of the point team). If he had done his job and warned the platoon, maybe the wanton killing of everything that moved in the area wouldn’t have happened. Then Perry went on to tell the tale of infiltrating Cambodia, apparently just for the sake of infiltrating Cambodia.

MODERATOR: Perry, before we go on to the next one, you mentioned something before about an order received by the higher up and crossing across the national borders. Could you mention something on that?

PERRY: It was very well known that we were within two klicks of Cambodia which is about a mile and two-tenths. Very often we went on search and destroy missions directly west as far as 8-10 klicks and back. We were definitely going into Cambodia.

MODERATOR: Did you ever make contact in Cambodia? Did you ever make contact when you crossed the border?

PERRY: No, I didn’t.

So what was the point of that? There were no incidents in Cambodia so there’d be no reports of operations in Cambodia. Remember this was 1972 – one of the popular charges to make against the Nixon Administration that year was that they’d illegally extended military operations in to Cambodia. According to Perry’s service claims, he was out of the Army before Nixon was even elected.

The end result of all the Winter Soldier in 1971 testimony according to Scott Swett;

The Army’s Criminal Investigative Division (CID) had opened cases for 43 WSI “witnesses” whose claims, if true, would qualify as crimes. An additional 25 Army WSI participants had criticized the military in general terms, without sufficient substance to warrant any investigation.

The 43 WSI CID cases were eventually resolved as follows: 25 WSI participants refused to cooperate, 13 provided information but failed to support the allegations, and five could not be located. No criminal charges were filed as a result of any of the investigations.

So Perry’s story was pretty much bullshit. Again, these are the people behind IVAW.

Category: Antiwar crowd, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Liberals suck, Phony soldiers, Winter Soldier II Live blogging