John Kerry, in his 1971 testimony to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, gave both an eloquent and simultaneously damning appraisal of the Vietnam War. He did so from the perspective that he and many other men in the room shared- being veterans of that war, and disillusioned by the atrocities they witnessed and the futility of being there.

His account of some of the war crimes he and others witnessed was graphic and appalling, detailing such practices as rape, torture, and random killing of civilian Vietnamese women and children- all by American soldiers. Kerry was indignant that these incidents had occurred, and that these men would be forever emotionally scarred. An especially prophetic line is spoken in reference: “The country doesn't know it yet but is has created a monster” (Gosse, 166).

Kerry's second overall theme was the hypocrisy of the US government in defending the Vietnam War and promoting it as a war against communism. He points out that there was nothing happening in Vietnam that threatened the US in any way, and that most of the people there didn't even know the difference between democracy and communism. And he even singles out then-president Nixon, who didn't want to be the “first President to lose a war” (169).

This, in my opinion, is a quintessential document that sums up the anti-war sentiments of the time, and in a broader sense reflects the turmoil and civil unrest that was occurring, at protests of all types, during the Sixties and on into the Seventies.

Gosse, Van. The Movements of the New Left 1950-1975.  Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martins. 2005. 165-169. Print.