I have no way of knowing (although I imagine you don't either) but what if the statements they made about the soldiers were true? Would that make it still unpatriotic? Or would it then be OK?
Kerry in his testimony to the Senate and the others in the VVAW on numerous occassions alleged that these war crimes were committed with the knowledge of the chain of command-- that the acts of random and sometimes calculated brutality were encouraged and advocated by official policy, unwritten as it may be. If evidence can be brought to support those statements, I'd support a Nuremberg-style trial, because that would be the historical way to put forward such serious claims for resolution. I suspect, though, that they were fabrications from Mark Lane's book "Conversations with Americans (1970)." In fact, the Naval Investigative Service did look into Kerry's claims and discovered that interviewees couldn't provide details of the alleged war crimes and the testimony regarding the most heinous acts was given by non-military people who'd committed indentity theft by taking the IDs of actual soldiers. Kerry was either gullible by spewing ridiculous slander about our troops or he was traitorous for spewing slander he knew to be slander for the purpose of harming our troops in their war effort. And, by the way, Hanoi Jane funded the VVAW and the Winter Soldier Investigation (which Kerry MC'ed and was the forum for airing these malicious statements to all the nutjob hippies in the midst).
There was probably some truth in it, a war against a guerilla and a civilian population always gets ugly like that. There are always soldiers who cannot handle these situation, we've seen it in Algeria during the French war there, and in Israel.
