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The War Itself Is a War Crime While sitting around the evening campfires during Operation RAW, veterans shared stories about Vietnam. For many of them, talking about the war marked the beginning of the long healing process. Their accounts often dealt with death, pain, and guilt. Most of the participants simply could not reconcile their actions in Vietnam with their individual codes of ethics and humanity. It was a troubling realization, yet the marchers discovered they were not alone. Others felt the same remorse. In the process of describing their experiences, the veterans concluded that acts of brutality were not necessarily isolated aberrations but the inevitable outcomes of U.S. military policy in Southeast Asia. VVAW leaders understood the intense emotional power of members’ recollections. Activists in the national office believed that such stories, if presented in a proper forum, could convey the tragedy and senselessness of the war. After its highly successful Operation RAW in September 1970, VVAW allied with the Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry on U.S. War Crimes in Vietnam (CCI), to initiate the Winter Soldier Investigation, hearings on atrocities in Southeast Asia. Both groups worked to locate veterans who would be willing to come forward. Most witnesses had yet to fashion a comprehensive critique of the war, but they felt the same inner conflict as the marchers of Operation RAW. The Vietnam War had evoked anger, resentment, self-loathing. The Winter Soldier Investigation would be but a beginning in rousing America’s conscience and healing its veterans. Typical of the joiners who wrestled with the war, and who eventually gravitated toward VVAW during the Winter Soldier Investigation, was a Florida native, Scott Camil. Camil was a man of contradictions. As a youngster, his grandmother had told him stories about relatives who had been murdered in Nazi concentration camps. “I never understood why soldiers would round up civilians and put them in concentration camps and kill them,” he recalls. “And I didn’t understand why people would kill 3 55 people just because they were Jewish. So I developed a feeling for the underdog , the downtrodden.” Neighborhood bullies in Camil’s hometown of Hialeah, a suburb of Miami, Florida, regularly beat young Scott for “killing Jesus.” Yet his grandmother continued to instill in him a belief in forgiveness and compassion.1 But there was another side to Camil. In high school, he took part in several fistfights with Cuban students, particularly when the immigrants cheered President Kennedy’s assassination. His stepfather, a policeman and a leader of the local John Birch Society chapter, taught Camil obedience to authority and duty to the United States. Recruiters at Camil’s high school convinced him to join the marines.“Part of my motivation was really a searching for who I was,” Camil explained, “and trying to prove to my peers, ‘Hey, . . . I’m a real man, I ain’t gonna stick around here. I’m gonna go to war, I’m gonna fucking kill commies, I’m gonna win medals, and I’ll show you guys.’”2 In Vietnam, Camil served as a forward observer with the 1st Marine Division. He lost many good friends in the war, and he grew to “hate the Vietnamese intensely.”3 He later remembered that G.I.s in his unit routinely burned villages and tortured and murdered peasants. They held beer parties, he claimed, celebrating the soldier responsible for the highest body count. Returning to the United States in 1969, Camil sought attention and praise for his service in Vietnam. He recalled: When I came back from Vietnam, the first thing I did was I went to the Pizza Palace, which was the hangout that we’d go to on Friday nights after the dance, after dates and stuff. Everybody would go in their cars. . . . And I went back there with all these pictures that I took in Vietnam of the people I killed, pictures that I still have, pictures of me standing on top of dead people, holding my rifle and smiling. And I’d show those pictures to everybody . I was pretty proud of them.4 So enthusiastic was Camil that the Marine Corps asked him to travel to college campuses to defend the war. But his stint as a speaker proved short-lived. At Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina , Camil defended killing women and children before a shocked audience . “I said, ‘Look, when you kill cockroaches, do you just kill the males or do you kill them all...

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