Kenneth Drew

This is part of what I quoted: The cartridge was a .30-30 hull found by an air-conditioning repair man ( as I recall) on the top of the COunty Records Building at the base of the rampart overlooking Dealy Plaza. The cartridge was supposedly crimped in a way that suggested a sabot round had been used in it. The seat of theI cartridge was stamped, as I recall "Twin Cities Arsenal, 1954" They went on to explain that they were saying that the theory was that the 399 had been fired from the larger casing so that the rifling marks on the 399 which were made by a carcano would not be removed, that kinda implies to me that they didn't want the rifling marks on the larger rifle to mess up the existing marks. So I think that they were, in fact, saying that it was deliberately 'an undersized bullet into a cartridge'. Note that it was stated this way: "The cartridge was supposedly crimped in a way that suggested a sabot round " I'm guessing that they did not expect you to overlook the words, 'supposedlyl' and 'suggested'. You said: Remember what I told you? The sabot MUST be the same diameter as the bullet that would normally be fired from the larger rifle, or it will not be accurate. Would that sentence be accurate if it were changed to: Remember what I told you? The sabot DOES NOT HAVE TO be the same diameter as the bullet that would normally be fired from the larger rifle, AS THE ACCURACY OF THE SHOT IS NOT IMPORTANT. It seems as if you are making an argument of 'absolutes'. I read the whole story as a casing was found, it had peculiar crimping marks on it, someone guessed as to why it had those peculiar crimping marks and they came up with a 'theory'. I know of no one that has made a claim that they know for sure that 399 was fired as a sabot shot into the limo. In the first place, I've never seen any proof that 399 was ever even in the limo, so that was a guess also. Okay, that's as far as I go on this. You are arguing things you don't have a clue about. Goodbye. Well darn Robert, With you bowing out, I guess we'll never know whether that casing found on the records building roof with supposedly a crimp might be the ultimate link to who was shooting at JFK. I guess we'll have to see if we can get an opinion from Mike.

This is part of what I quoted: The cartridge was a .30-30 hull found by an air-conditioning repair man ( as I recall) on the top of the COunty Records Building at the base of the rampart overlooking Dealy Plaza. The cartridge was supposedly crimped in a way that suggested a sabot round had been used in it. The seat of theI cartridge was stamped, as I recall "Twin Cities Arsenal, 1954" They went on to explain that they were saying that the theory was that the 399 had been fired from the larger casing so that the rifling marks on the 399 which were made by a carcano would not be removed, that kinda implies to me that they didn't want the rifling marks on the larger rifle to mess up the existing marks. So I think that they were, in fact, saying that it was deliberately 'an undersized bullet into a cartridge'. Note that it was stated this way: "The cartridge was supposedly crimped in a way that suggested a sabot round " I'm guessing that they did not expect you to overlook the words, 'supposedlyl' and 'suggested'. You said: Remember what I told you? The sabot MUST be the same diameter as the bullet that would normally be fired from the larger rifle, or it will not be accurate. Would that sentence be accurate if it were changed to: Remember what I told you? The sabot DOES NOT HAVE TO be the same diameter as the bullet that would normally be fired from the larger rifle, AS THE ACCURACY OF THE SHOT IS NOT IMPORTANT. It seems as if you are making an argument of 'absolutes'. I read the whole story as a casing was found, it had peculiar crimping marks on it, someone guessed as to why it had those peculiar crimping marks and they came up with a 'theory'. I know of no one that has made a claim that they know for sure that 399 was fired as a sabot shot into the limo. In the first place, I've never seen any proof that 399 was ever even in the limo, so that was a guess also.

This is why I would like to see what the crimp looks like Oh, I thought you were saying they wouldn't use a crimp to do that. Why would you think that crimp would look any different from any other crimp holding a bullet into the casing? I didn't think that. The person you quoted said the mouth of the casing was crimped in a way to suggest a saboted round had been fired from it. That being said, it only makes sense that he meant a sabot crimp looked different than a regular crimp. So, if the sabot crimp is different, what does it look like? So, if the sabot crimp is different, what does it look like? That seems fairly simple from what you've said. So let's use these numbers. casing opening is 1 thousandth larger than the diameter of the cannelure of the bullet so that when it is crimped the casing is squeezed in 1/1000th. When the cartridge is fired, the back end of the bullet stretches the crimp back out to it's original diameter and the crimp 'vanishes'. Now let's do one for the 'sabot'. casing opening is 3/1000ths larger than the bullet cannelure . the casing is crimped in to seal it at the same 1/1000th cannelure. Then the bullet is fired, only 1/1000 of the crimp would be removed, leaving a 1/1000th crimped edge around the casing. That would certainly look different from a casing that had been entirely straightened out. And that's what it looks like. visualize that bullet just overhead there and remove the bullet but leave that crimp. That's what it would look like

This is why I would like to see what the crimp looks like Oh, I thought you were saying they wouldn't use a crimp to do that. Why would you think that crimp would look any different from any other crimp holding a bullet into the casing? In the bullets in your photo, you can clearly see the crimp. But you say if the bullet is the correct diameter, when the bullet is fired it will open the crimp back up to the bullet size. Now just going by the original quote, and with them saying the premise was that they wanted to get this 'smaller' bullet into the limo without removing the rifling marks and therefore the bullet was slightly smaller so the crimp was slightly larger so that when it was fired it 'would not' remove all of the crimp. Now that is only a supposition of why the 'crimp marks' on the empty shell raised suspicions, but I've seen a lot of suspicions raised over much smaller details than that.

Well, Kenneth, this new book by Dr. Jeffrey Caufield, namely, General Walker and the Murder of President Kennedy: The Extensive New Evidence of a Radical-Right Conspiracy, provides a focus on the American right wing in the murder of JFK -- and in 1963 that featured the Confederate Flag. Granted, there have been few who have proposed that JFK was killed first and foremost over Civil Rights. Yet Medgar Evers was slaughtered in his own driveway in Mississippi on the very night that JFK made his 11 June 1963 speech on Civil Rights. (Medgar Evers was the NAACP officer who helped James Meredith become the first Black American to attend Ole Miss University in 1962). Yet I suspect that Dr. Caufield will name the members of the "Old South" conspiracy who killed JFK, including the resigned General Walker, along with Guy Banister and the White Citizens' Councils of Texas and Louisiana. Regards, --Paul Trejo Thanks Paul, I'm one of those old guys from the old south, being originally from Georgia. I certainly have no specific knowledge of who did or did not kill JFK, but I'm gonna suggest that if there were an 'old southerner' that might have been more responsible than any other, it likely was LBJ. But, that's just a guess

I don't really have a need to know the cartridge dimensions because I'm not trying to make the fit. That was apparently done 52+ years ago (if at all) But if I understand the theory, they wanted a barrell large enough that the rifling marks on the bullet would remain so it could be identified as coming from a Carcano. Seems as if there were only a thousandth difference it might be too tight and the rifling marks would be disturbed. Robert, did you miss #168, the quote about assembing bullets?

The cartridge was a .30-30 hull found by an air-conditioning repair man ( as I recall) on the top of the COunty Records Building at the base of the rampart overlooking Dealy Plaza. The cartridge was supposedly crimped in a way that suggested a sabot round had been used in it. The seat of the cartridge was stamped, as I recall "Twin Cities Arsenal, 1954" See the sentence in bold in that paragraph. Seems as if a bullet is in a cartridge shell that it has to be sealed. Seems as if there is more than one way to accomplish that. One to use the plastic insert, the other to crimp the shell around the bullet. I suppose it depends on the difference in diameter. Right, Kenneth, in other words, you and the other people that seem to know so much about sabots don't have a clue what "crimped in a way that suggested a sabot round had been used in it" means and none of you are capable of demonstrating it, either. This is almost as comical as the scope on the Carcano being mounted for a left hand shooter. While you're laughing at that, answer this. If you wanted to put a bullet into a cartridge and they did not make a plastic 'sabot' housing that fit a carcano to a 30 30, and the bullet diameter was almost exactly the same as the cartridge diameter, just a 1 thousandth or so difference, how would you seal it? The choice of an answer, according to you is that you can't use any type of crimping device. So what is your answer? The real question is, why would you try to load that large a diameter of bullet into that cartridge? If you can't use a sabot, what is going to guide that smaller (by a thousandth or so) bullet through the riflings of the bigger rifle's barrel? Simply "crimp" it into place and hope for the best as it rattles back and forth down the barrel? The real question is, why would you try to load that large a diameter of bullet into that cartridge? I guess you misunderstood, I wouldn't load any bullets into cartridges. That casing was supposedly found on the top of a building in Dallas. Do you really not know the answers to those questions you asked? here is 'the theory', not mine. that they wanted to get the 399 bullet into the limo without changing the 'rifling' marks that had been put onto it from the Carcano rifle so they had to fire it from a rifle with a larger barrel. I don't buy that theory because it doesn't work for several reasons, none of which have to do with crimping. You recall that I only quoted someone else on getting the bullet into the limo. I don't personally think 399 has ever been anywhere near the limo. But I notice you shied away from answering the question, obviously those folks that wrote the article about assembling the bullets that think that they 'crimp' them don't really know how a bullet is assembled. Right? You are stating that casings are not crimped in the assembly process, regardless of what those folks think.

Robert P, while reading up on the subject of how cartridges are assembled, I ran across this: Assembling the bullet 4 The bullet is firmly seated into the open end of the case. The bullet has a coating of lubricant to prevent corrosion and assist in the assembly process. The bullet is then crimped into the case to give the correct overall length of the cartridge. The crimp reduces the diameter of the open end of the case and captures the bullet tightly, sealing the assembly together so moisture cannot invade the powder.The press used to assemble cartridges must feed each component accurately and in the correct sequence. Otherwise, cases could be unprimed, powder left out, or bullets seated incorrectly. Any of these could result in a misfire or loss of accuracy at the minimum and, at worst, cause the firearm to blow apart upon firing. In each stage of the process, special dies perform the important assembly function. The dies are made of tooling carbide for long life, and have close adjustments to produce quality ammunition. After assembly, the finished cartridges are packaged, usually 50 to a box, and prepared for shipment to the shooter. Read more: http://www.madehow.com/Volume-2/Ammunition.html#ixzz3jJxY4Ccx I going to take your word for it because you say they don't 'crimp' and say that obviously these people don't know what they're talking about. Right?

The cartridge was a .30-30 hull found by an air-conditioning repair man ( as I recall) on the top of the COunty Records Building at the base of the rampart overlooking Dealy Plaza. The cartridge was supposedly crimped in a way that suggested a sabot round had been used in it. The seat of the cartridge was stamped, as I recall "Twin Cities Arsenal, 1954" See the sentence in bold in that paragraph. Seems as if a bullet is in a cartridge shell that it has to be sealed. Seems as if there is more than one way to accomplish that. One to use the plastic insert, the other to crimp the shell around the bullet. I suppose it depends on the difference in diameter. Right, Kenneth, in other words, you and the other people that seem to know so much about sabots don't have a clue what "crimped in a way that suggested a sabot round had been used in it" means and none of you are capable of demonstrating it, either. This is almost as comical as the scope on the Carcano being mounted for a left hand shooter. While you're laughing at that, answer this. If you wanted to put a bullet into a cartridge and they did not make a plastic 'sabot' housing that fit a carcano to a 30 30, and the bullet diameter was almost exactly the same as the cartridge diameter, just a 1 thousandth or so difference, how would you seal it? The choice of an answer, according to you is that you can't use any type of crimping device. So what is your answer?

The cartridge was a .30-30 hull found by an air-conditioning repair man ( as I recall) on the top of the COunty Records Building at the base of the rampart overlooking Dealy Plaza. The cartridge was supposedly crimped in a way that suggested a sabot round had been used in it. The seat of the cartridge was stamped, as I recall "Twin Cities Arsenal, 1954" See the sentence in bold in that paragraph. Seems as if a bullet is in a cartridge shell that it has to be sealed. Seems as if there is more than one way to accomplish that. One to use the plastic insert, the other to crimp the shell around the bullet. I suppose it depends on the difference in diameter.

Good, then you are familiar with this: Note, this is from Wim Dankbaar Members 1,481 posts Posted 26 November 2004 - 04:44 AM william galmor wrote: > > I read somewhere that in the early 1970's a spent rifle cartridge was > found on roof of building across the street from the book depository. Was > this ever investigated? The cartridge was a .30-30 hull found by an air-conditioning repair man ( as I recall) on the top of the COunty Records Building at the base of the rampart overlooking Dealy Plaza. The cartridge was supposedly crimped in a way that suggested a sabot round had been used in it. The seat of the cartridge was stamped, as I recall "Twin Cities Arsenal, 1954" The Twin Cities Arsenal is located in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. I talked with three engineers from the arsenal back in 1992 about the munitions they loaded there. All three, in separate interviews, said that a sabot round for that cartridge required special equipment that was ONLY available at USArmy munitions plants; that sabots could not be hand loaded into that type of cartridge until the early seventies when the equipment first became available; that none of them were ever aware of special rounds being loaded at the TCA, though it was possible. I asked if it would necessarily require records and each said that ALL operations at the Arsenal required records-- but getting to them was very difficult since the plant was then being decommissioned. In seven years the plant still is not fully decommissioned. I talked to a USA Major there last year who said he knew the plant's history pretty well and he didn't believe a special load would have been done there. He said the only place it could have been made was in a special division of the arsenal at St. Louis Missouri, which was known for engineering special rounds and weapons. He was the only person of the four who asked why I wanted to know about such rounds. When I told him it involved the JFK assassination He refused to talk to me anymore. Go figure.... The question a sabot round being fired at the motorcade has been around for a long time. from what I recall, the wound to Connally's back produced a "probability cone" which included the DRB. Anyone? Claims by the ammo "experts " out there that such a round could not maintain the needed stability and accuracy for a shot from the DRB seem true enough. However, in talking to a USR sniper and an ex Green Beret "hunter", both men said not only were such rounds possible, they had used them. Craig Roberts, you out there? I was told Mary Ferrell and Jim Marrs are the experts on the history of the cartridge. Gary probably knows a lot about it, too. What part of it do you disagree with Robert? You did see that part about: 'crimped in such a way'? Seems as if sabot technology might not have been as advanced back in 63 as it is today.

Sorry Robert, I just assumed you knew what a sabot was.

Those of us who are old enough to remember those dark and incomprehensible days of November 1963 have never thought of this subject as merely a crime. Something profound changed in our country as a consequence of JFK's murder---and that something has never been made right. Subsequent developments including the murders of RFK and MLK only deepened our depression and the sense that we had lost our way as a nation. Then the Vietnam War, the racial riots, Watergate, and the resignation of Nixon made it impossible to believe that we could ever believe in ourselves and our future potential again. Given this background, it comes as no surprise that 52 years later we still want to find some indisputable answer and some unmistakable villain(s) who were clearly responsible for taking our innocence from us. And I am absolutely certain that on the 100-year anniversary of JFK's murder, a new generation will still be arguing about whom was responsible. Mr Lazar, i like the first two paragraphs so much that i would ask your permission to quote them, for the most part, on another website i'm beginning. with proper credit, of course. well said. well focused. on another website i'm beginning. What's that about?

and have no doubt about the underlying hatred of the old south towards JFK. Paul is there an implication that 'the old south' had something to do with JFK being killed? That must be one of those '13 conspiracy theories'. But it's one I haven't heard. Who were the members of the conspiracy that were mostly known for their relationship to 'the old south' ? Just curious.

Nobody who actually knew Edwin Walker would conclude that he had the level of intelligence or the people skills and organizational ability required to implement or facilitate (undetected) any complex event such as the assassination of the President of the United States. Furthermore, Walker was not a unique thinker. None of his writings reveal any serious scholarship or analytical ability. At best, he was a mediocre propagandist for one particular political and ideological viewpoint which was informed, primarily, by literature recommended or published by the John Birch Society and similar right-wing conspiracy sources. Walker's friends and admirers often remarked that he was incoherent during his speeches and when Walker was given the opportunity to convince the voters of Texas that he deserved their serious consideration for political office -- the voters of Texas summarily rejected him (he placed 6th in a field of 6 candidates). Consequently, unless Dr. Caufield has discovered some verifiable earth-shaking new factual information which has never previously been discovered by anybody -- then merely speculating about Walker will add nothing significant to what we already know. By definition, to speculate means to provide conjecture -- i.e. a guess or hypothesis without significant fact-based evidence to support it. Anybody can speculate. But real historical scholarship requires verifiable evidence---particularly newly discovered and previously unknown data. Significantly, nobody has (up to now) found anything in Walker's personal papers (at University of Texas-Austin) which links him to planning any illegal activity much less the assassination of JFK. And I don't think anyone has ever found any documentation in personal papers of anybody else to support the Walker-as-Co-Conspirator paradigm. Also, FYI: the National Archives is currently processing for me the FBI-Dallas main field file on Walker. If NARA is correct, I am the first person to ever request the FBI-Dallas field file (157-218) which consists of 515 pages in the main file and an additional 68 pages of a sub-A file. NARA has stated that they anticipate finishing the processing of my request by May 2016. After I get it -- I will arrange to have it posted online on the Internet Archive website -- along with the other Walker-related files which I already have on the Archive -- here: https://archive.org/details/ernie1241_jbs?&sort=titleSorter∧[]=FOIA:%20Walker,%20Edwin I find it interesting that someone that graduated from West Point and rose to the rank of Major General is basically written of as if he were too dumb to tie his own shoes. If he were involved in any way in the assassination of JFK, he was smart enough to hide it at least until now, almost 53 years later. No evidence linking him has been revealed to this date, and I suspect, never will be.

I don't, if the conversation is whether the bullet from the carcano would fit into the 30 06 it appears it will. Kenneth, do you know what a sabot is? Yes I know that there was a theory that the 399 bullet was put into a larger cartridge and fired from the County records building. Since the 30 06 was 'crimped' around the bullet end, that is what created the theory. I don't recall any discussion in that theory as to 'velocity' of bullet,, but if it actually happened, they obviously didn't want any damage to the bullet so that it could remain 'pristine'. And I'm assuming that you know what a sabot is in my statement.

I don't, if the conversation is whether the bullet from the carcano would fit into the 30 06 it appears it will.

What cartridge would you recommend to fire the saboted 6.5mm Carcano bullet, Ollie? P.S. If the sabot was fired from a rifled barrel, it would be spinning rapidly as it left the barrel. This means the bullet held in the sabot would also be spinning as it shed the sabot just shortly out from the barrel. Not quite sure what you mean by the reference to 300 fps and 800 fps. Robert, I don't believe it's possible with normal ammunition to aim at JFK's head and due to "under-charged" ammo hit his upper back at a velocity that would only create a "shallow wound". An under-charged shot that would impact only 10" or so lower than the target would still produce a non-shallow wound, and an undercharged shot that would arrive at a slow velocity would impact much lower than the 10" required. In other words, either condition could be satisfied separately, but not BOTH at the same time. The available charts don't reproduce all the conditions precisely, but are close enough to convince me that the shallow back wound can be explained by an under-charged shot. Considering all types of frangible bullets, would soft tissue fragment the bullet to the degree necessary to prevent the bullet from exiting the body? Or would that require contact with a bone, such as a rib or vertabra? Thanks for any thoughts, Tom FINALLY, someone asks a REALLY intelligent question! God bless you, Tom. A frangible bullet performs in almost exactly the same fashion as a hollow point bullet (lethal frangible bullets actually are a type of hollow point bullet) and do not need to contact bone to make them open up. In fact, both types of bullet perform better if they contact only flesh and organs. A hollow point bullet is made of lead, and has a small deep opening in the nose of the bullet. A hollow point frangible bullet is made from a powdered metal (not always lead) that has been compressed, glued or sintered together and encased in a copper alloy jacket. In both bullets, there is an opening in the nose. When these bullets travel through semi-liquid matter (ie. brain, lungs, other organs) the hollow cavity in the nose fills with this semi-liquid matter, and the velocity of the bullet exerts a tremendous hydraulic pressure inside the nose of the bullet that exerts this force on the rest of the bullet. In the standard hollow point, the nose of the bullet opens up from this force and looks something like this, if it does not break up entirely into fragments. OTOH, the hydraulic pressure in the nose of the frangible bullet exerts enough force to disintegrate the compressed metal powder core back into a 4 inch cloud of metal powder, disintegrating it totally. Upon disintegration into powder, the bullet comes to an abrupt halt and transfers ALL of the energy of the bullet to surrounding tissue. The result is devastating and totally lethal. P.S. I should point out that standard hollow point rifle bullets also lose a tremendous amount of velocity as they open up and, quite often, they will not exit a wound, either. But they will also show up on an xray.

Robert, Question: What force was causing the bullet to gain velocity while traveling "uphill"? Tom I have no idea, Tom. In fact, I have never seen this on a ballistics calculator before, and I wonder if it is not an error in their computer. The laws of inertia state that a body in motion tends to stay in motion, but it doesn't say anything about gaining velocity; at least, not in this universe, anyways. From what I read, the velocity of a bullet is greatest when it leaves the barrel and falls off from that point til it stops.

I researched Mr Turse. He clearly has an agenda.

FROM LOCKED THREAD on this "EDUCATION" forum. ,gaal --- http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=21189&p=286753 -- A New Book Transforms Our Understanding of What the Vietnam War Actually WasCross-posted with TomDispatch.com For half a century we have been arguing about “the Vietnam War.” Is it possible that we didn’t know what we were talking about? After all that has been written (some 30,000 books and counting), it scarcely seems possible, but such, it turns out, has literally been the case. Now, in Kill Anything that Moves, Nick Turse has for the first time put together a comprehensive picture, written with mastery and dignity, of what American forces actually were doing in Vietnam. The findings disclose an almost unspeakable truth. Meticulously piecing together newly released classified information, court-martial records, Pentagon reports, and firsthand interviews in Vietnam and the United States, as well as contemporaneous press accounts and secondary literature, Turse discovers that episodes of devastation, murder, massacre, rape, and torture once considered isolated atrocities were in fact the norm, adding up to a continuous stream of atrocity, unfolding, year after year, throughout that country. It has been Turse’s great achievement to see that, thanks to the special character of the war, its prime reality -- an accurate overall picture of what physically was occurring on the ground -- had never been assembled; that with imagination and years of dogged work this could be done; and that even a half-century after the beginning of the war it still should be done. Turse acknowledges that, even now, not enough is known to present this picture in statistical terms. To be sure, he offers plenty of numbers -- for instance the mind-boggling estimates that during the war there were some two million civilians killed and some five million wounded, that the United States flew 3.4 million aircraft sorties, and that it expended 30 billion pounds of munitions, releasing the equivalent in explosive force of 640 Hiroshima bombs. Yet it would not have been enough to simply accumulate anecdotal evidence of abuses. Therefore, while providing an abundance of firsthand accounts, he has supplemented this approach. Like a fabric, a social reality -- a town, a university, a revolution, a war -- has a pattern and a texture. No fact is an island. Each one is rich in implications, which, so to speak, reach out toward the wider area of the surrounding facts. When some of these other facts are confirmed, they begin to reveal the pattern and texture in question. Turse repeatedly invites us to ask what sort of larger picture each story implies. For example, he writes: “If one man and his tiny team could claim more KIAs [killed in action] than an entire battalion without raising red flags among superiors; if a brigade commander could up the body count by picking off civilians from his helicopter with impunity; if a top general could institutionalize atrocities through the profligate use of heavy firepower in areas packed with civilians -- then what could be expected down the line, especially among heavily armed young infantrymen operating in the field for weeks, angry, tired, and scared, often unable to locate the enemy and yet relentlessly pressed for kills?” Like a tightening net, the web of stories and reports drawn from myriad sources coalesces into a convincing, inescapable portrait of this war -- a portrait that, as an American, you do not wish to see; that, having seen, you wish you could forget, but that you should not forget; and that the facts force you to see and remember and take into account when you ask yourself what the United States has done and been in the last half century, and what it still is doing and still is. Scorched Earth in I Corps My angle of vision on these matters is a highly particular one. In early August 1967, I arrived in I Corps, the northernmost district of American military operations in what was then South Vietnam. I was there to report for the New Yorker on the “air war.” The phrase was a misnomer. The Vietnamese foe, of course, had no assets in the air in the South, and so there was no “war” of that description. There was only the unilateral bombardment of the land and people by the fantastic array of aircraft assembled by the United States in Vietnam. These ranged from the B-52, which laid down a pattern of destruction a mile long and several football fields wide; to fighter bombers capable of dropping, along with much else, 500-pound bombs and canisters of napalm; to the reconfigured DC-3 equipped with a cannon capable of firing 100 rounds per second; to the ubiquitous fleets of helicopters, large and small, that crowded the skies. All this was abetted by continuous artillery fire into “free-fire” zones and naval bombardment from ships just off the coast. By the time I arrived, the destruction of the villages in the region and the removal of their people to squalid refugee camps was approaching completion. (However, they often returned to their blasted villages, now subject to indiscriminate artillery fire.) Only a few pockets of villages survived. I witnessed the destruction of many of these in Quang Ngai and Quang Tinh provinces from the back seat of small Cessnas called Forward Air Control planes. As we floated overhead day after day, I would watch long lines of houses burst into flames one after another as troops moved through the area of operation. In the meantime, the Forward Air Controllers were calling in air strikes as requested by radio from troops on the ground. In past operations, the villagers had been herded out of the area into the camps. But this time, no evacuation had been ordered, and the population was being subjected to the full fury of a ground and air assault. A rural society was being torn to pieces before my eyes. The broad results of American actions in I Corps were thus visible and measurable from the air. No scorched earth policy had been announced but scorched earth had been the result. Still, a huge piece was missing from the puzzle. I was not able to witness most of the significant operations on the ground firsthand. I sought to interview some soldiers but they would not talk, though one did hint at dark deeds. “You wouldn’t believe it so I’m not going to tell you,” he said to me. “No one’s ever going to find out about some things, and after this war is over, and we’ve all gone home, no one is ever going to know.” In other words, like so many reporters in Vietnam, I saw mainly one aspect of one corner of the war. What I had seen was ghastly, but it was not enough to serve as a basis for generalizations about the conduct of the war as a whole. Just a few years later, in 1969, thanks to the determined efforts of a courageous soldier, Ron Ridenhour, and the persistence of a reporter, Seymour Hersh, one piece of the hidden truth about ground operations in I Corp came to light. It was the My Lai massacre, in which more than 500 civilians were murdered in cold blood by Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, of the Americal Division. In subsequent years, news of other atrocities in the area filtered into the press, often many years after the fact. For example, in 2003 the Toledo Blade disclosed a campaign of torture and murder over a period of months, including the summary execution of two blind men by a “reconnaissance” squad called Tiger Force. Still, no comprehensive picture of the generality of ground operations in the area emerged. It has not been until the publication of Turse’s book that the everyday reality of which these atrocities were a part has been brought so fully to light. Almost immediately after the American troops arrived in I Corps, a pattern of savagery was established. My Lai, it turns out, was exceptional only in the numbers killed. Turse offers a massacre at a village called Trieu Ai in October 1967 as a paradigm. A marine company suffered the loss of a man to a booby trap near the village, which had in fact had been mostly burned down by other American forces a few days earlier. Some villagers had, however, returned for their belongings. Now, the Marine company, enraged by its loss but unable to find the enemy, entered the village firing their M-16s, setting fire to any intact houses, and tossing grenades into bomb shelters. A Marine marched a woman into a field and shot her. Another reported that there were children in the shelters that were being blown up. His superior replied, “Tough xxxx, they grow up to be VC [Vietcong].” Five or ten people rushed out of a shelter when a grenade was thrown into it. They were cut down in a hail of fire. Turse comments: “In the story of Trieu Ai one can see virtually the entire war writ small. Here was the repeated aerial bombing and artillery fire… Here was the deliberate burning of peasant homes and the relocation of villagers to refugee camps... Angry troops primed to lash out, often following losses within the unit; civilians trapped in their paths; and officers in the field issuing ambiguous or illegal orders to young men conditioned to obey -- that was the basic recipe for many of the mass killings carried out by army soldiers and marines over the years.” The savagery often extended to the utmost depravity: gratuitous torture, killing for target practice, slaughter of children and babies, gang rape. Consider the following all-too-typical actions of Company B, 1st Battalion, 35th infantry beginning in October 1967: “The company stumbled upon an unarmed young boy. 'Someone caught him up on a hill, and they brought him down and the lieutenant asked who wanted to kill him...' medic Jamie Henry later told army investigators. A radioman and another medic volunteered for the job. The radioman... ’kicked the boy in the stomach and the medic took him around behind a rock and I heard one magazine go off complete on automatic...’ “A few days after this incident, members of that same unit brutalized an elderly man to the point of collapse and then threw him off a cliff without even knowing whether he was dead or alive... “A couple of days after that, they used an unarmed man for target practice... “And less than two weeks later, members of Company B reportedly killed five unarmed women... “Unit members rattled off a litany of other brutal acts committed by the company... [including] a living woman who had an ear cut off while her baby was thrown to the ground and stomped on...” Pumping Up the Body Count Turse’s findings completed the picture of the war in I Corps for me. Whatever the policymight have been in theory, the reality, on the ground as in the air, was the scorched earth I had witnessed from the Forward Air Control planes. Whatever the United States thoughtit was doing in I Corps, it was actuallywaging systematic war against the people of the region. And so it was, as Turse voluminously documents, throughout the country. Details differed from area to area but the broad picture was the same as the one in I Corps. A case in point is the war in the Mekong Delta, home to some five to six million people in an area of less than 15,000 square miles laced with rivers and canals. In February 1968, General Julian Ewell, soon to be known by Vietnamese and Americans alike as “the Butcher of the Delta,” was placed in charge of the 9th Infantry Division. In December 1968, he launched Operation Speedy Express. His specialty, amounting to obsession, was increasing “the body count,” ordained by the high command as the key measure of progress in defeating the enemy. Theoretically, only slain soldiers were to be included in that count but -- as anyone, soldier or reporter, who spent a half-hour in the field quickly learned -- virtually all slain Vietnamese, most of them clearly civilians, were included in the total. The higher an officer’s body count, the more likely his promotion. Privates who turned in high counts were rewarded with mini-vacations. Ewell set out to increase the ratio of supposed enemy soldiers killed to American soldiers killed. Pressure to do so was ratcheted up at all levels in the 9th Division. One of his chiefs of staff “went berserk,” in the words of a later chief of staff. The means were simple: immensely increase the already staggering firepower being used and loosen the already highly permissive “rules of engagement” by, for example, ordering more night raids. In a typical night episode, Cobra gunships strafed a herd of water buffalo and seven children tending them. All died, and the children were reported as enemy soldiers killed in action. The kill ratios duly rose from an already suspiciously high 24 “Vietcong” for every dead American to a completely surreal 134 Vietcong per American. The unreality, however, did not simply lie in the inflated kill numbers but in the identities of the corpses. Overwhelmingly, they were not enemy soldiers but civilians. A “Concerned Sergeant” who protested the operation in an anonymous letter to the high command at the time described the results as he witnessed them: “A battalion would kill maybe 15 to 20 a day. With 4 battalions in the Brigade that would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 a month 1500, easy. (One battalion claimed almost 1000 body counts one month!) If I am only 10% right, and believe me its lots more, then I am trying to tell you about 120-150 murders, or a My Lay [My Lai] each month for over a year.” This range of estimates was confirmed in later analyses. Operations in I Corp perhaps depended more on infantry attacks supported by air strikes, while Speedy Express depended more on helicopter raids and demands for high body counts, but the results were the same: indiscriminate warfare, unrestrained by calculation or humanity, on the population of South Vietnam. Turse reminds us that off the battlefield, too, casual violence -- such as the use of military trucks to run over Vietnamese on the roads, seemingly for entertainment -- was widespread. The commonest terms for Vietnamese were the racist epithets “gooks,” “dinks,” and “slopes.” And the U.S. military machine was supplemented by an equally brutal American-South Vietnamese prison system in which torture was standard procedure and extrajudicial executions common. How did it happen? How did a country that believes itself to be guided by principles of decency permit such savagery to break out and then allow it to continue for more than a decade? Why, when the first Marines arrived in I Corps in early 1965, did so many of them almost immediately cast aside the rules of war as well as all ordinary scruples and sink to the lowest levels of barbarism? What chains of cause and effect linked “the best and the brightest” of America’s top universities and corporations who were running the war with the murder of those buffalo boys in the Mekong Delta? How did the gates of hell open? This is a different question from the often-asked one of how the United States got into the war. I cannot pretend to begin to do it justice here. The moral and cognitive seasickness that has attended the Vietnam War from the beginning afflicts us still. Yet Kill Anything that Moves permits us, finally, to at least formulate the question in light of the actual facts of the case. Reflections would certainly seem in order for a country that, since Vietnam, has done its best to unlearn even such lessons as were learned from that debacle in preparation for other misbegotten wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here, however, are a few thoughts, offered in a spirit of thinking aloud. The Fictitious War and the Real One Roughly since the massacre at My Lai was revealed, people have debated whether the atrocities of the war were the product of decisions by troops on the ground or of high policy, of orders issued from above -- whether they were “aberrations” or “operations.” The first school obviously lends itself to bad-apple-in-a-healthy-barrel thinking, blaming individual units for unacceptable behavior while exonerating the higher ups; the second tends to exonerate the troops while pinning the blame on their superiors. Turse’s book shows that the barrel was rotten through and through. It discredits the “aberration” school once and for all. Yet it does not exactly offer support for the orders-from-the-top school either. Perhaps the problem always was that these alternatives framed the situation inaccurately. The relationship between policy and practice in Vietnam was, it turns out, far more peculiar than the two choices suggest. It’s often said that truth is the first casualty of war. In Vietnam, however, it was not just that the United States was doing one thing while saying another (for example, destroying villages while claiming to protect them), true as that was. Rather, from its inception the war’s structure was shaped by an attempt to superimpose a false official narrative on a reality of a wholly different character. In the official war, the people of South Vietnam were resisting the attempts of the North Vietnamese to conquer them in the name of world communism. The United States was simply assisting them in their patriotic resistance. In reality, most people in South Vietnam, insofar as they were politically minded, were nationalists who sought to push out foreign conquerors: first, the French, then the Japanese, and next the Americans, along with their client state, the South Vietnamese government which was never able to develop any independent strength in a land supposedly its own. This fictitious official narrative was not added on later to disguise unpalatable facts; it was baked into the enterprise from the outset. Accordingly, the collision of policy and reality first took place on the ground in Trieu Ai village and its like. The American forces, including their local commanders, were confronted with a reality that the policymakers had not faced and would not face for many long years. Expecting to be welcomed as saviors, the troops found themselves in a sea of nearly universal hostility. No manual was handed out in Washington to deal with the unexpected situation. It was left to the soldiers to decide what to do. Throughout the country, they started to improvise. To this extent, policy was indeed being made in the field. Yet it was not within the troops’ power to reverse basic policy; they could not, for instance, have withdrawn themselves from the whole misconceived exercise. They could only respond to the unexpected circumstances in which they found themselves. The result would combine an incomprehensible and impossible mission dictated from above (to win the “hearts and minds” of a population already overwhelmingly hostile, while pulverizing their society) and locally conceived illegal but sometimes vague orders that left plenty of room for spontaneous, rage-driven improvisation on the ground. In this gap between the fiction of high policy and the actuality of the real war was born the futile, abhorrent assault on the people of Vietnam. The improvisatory character of all this, as Turse emphasizes, can be seen in the fact that while the abuses of civilians were pervasive they were not consistent. As he summarizes what a villager in one brutalized area told him decades later, “Sometimes U.S. troops handed out candies. Sometimes they shot at people. Sometimes they passed through a village hardly touching a thing. Sometimes they burned all the homes. ‘We didn’t understand the reasons why the acted in the way they did.’” Alongside the imaginary official war, then, there grew up the real war on the ground, the one that Turse has, for the first time, adequately described. It is no defense of what happened to point out that, for the troops, it was not so much their orders from on high as their circumstances -- what Robert J. Lifton has called “atrocity-producing situations” -- that generated their degraded behavior. Neither does such an account provide escape from accountability for the war’s architects without whose blind and misguided policies these infernal situations never would have arisen. In one further bitter irony, this real war came at a certain point to be partially codified at ever higher levels of command into policies that did translate into orders from the top. In effect, the generals gradually -- if absurdly, in light of the supposed goals of the war -- sanctioned and promoted the de facto war on the population. Enter General Ewell and his body counts. In other words, the improvising moved up the chain of command until the soldiers were following orders when they killed civilians, though, as in the case of Ewell, those orders rarely took exactly that form. Nonetheless, the generals sometimes went quite far in formulating these new rules, even when they flagrantly contradicted official policies. To give one example supplied by Turse, in 1965, General William Westmoreland, who was made commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam in 1964, implicitly declared war on the peasantry of South Vietnam. He said: “Until now the war has been characterized by a substantial majority of the population remaining neutral. In the past year we have seen an escalation to a higher intensity in the war. This will bring about a moment of decision for the peasant farmer. He will have to choose if he stays alive.” Like his underlings, Westmoreland, was improvising. This new policy of, in effect, terrorizing the peasantry into submission was utterly inconsistent with the Washington narrative of winning hearts and minds, but it was fully consistent with everything his forces were actually doing and about to do in I Corps and throughout the country. A Skyscraper of Lies One more level of the conflict needs to be mentioned in this context. Documents show that, as early as the mid-1960s, the key mistaken assumptions of the war -- that the Vietnamese foe was a tentacle of world communism, that the war was a front in the Cold War rather than an episode in the long decolonization movement of the twentieth century, that the South Vietnamese were eager for rescue by the United States -- were widely suspected to be mistaken in official Washington. But one other assumption was not found to be mistaken: that whichever administration “lost” Vietnam would likely lose the next election. Rightly or wrongly, presidents lived in terror of losing the war and so being politically destroyed by a movement of the kind Senator Joe McCarthy launched after the American “loss” of China in 1949. Later, McGeorge Bundy, Lyndon Johnson’s national security advisor, would describe his understanding of the president’s frame of mind at the time this way: "LBJ isn't deeply concerned about who governs Laos, or who governs South Vietnam -- he's deeply concerned with what the average American voter is going to think about how he did in the ball game of the Cold War. The great Cold War championship gets played in the largest stadium in the United States and he, Lyndon Johnson, is the quarterback, and if he loses, how does he do in the next election? So don't lose. Now that's too simple, but it's where he is. He's living with his own political survival every time he looks at these questions.” In this context, domestic political considerations trumped the substantive reasoning that, once the futility and horror of the enterprise had been revealed, might have led to an end to the war. More and more it was understood to be a murderous farce, but politics dictated that it must continue. As long as this remained the case, no news from Vietnam could lead to a reversal of the war policies. This was the top floor of the skyscraper of lies that was the Vietnam War. Domestic politics was the largest and most fact-proof of the atrocity-producing situations. Do we imagine that this has changed? Jonathan Schell is a Fellow at The Nation Institute, and the peace and disarmament correspondent for the Nation magazine. Among many other works, he is the author of The Real War, a collection of his New Yorker reportage on the Vietnam War. [Under review in this essay: Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (Metropolitan Books, 2013). Jonathan Schell’s classic Vietnam books, The Village of Ben Suc and The Military Half, are now collected in The Real War (Da Capo Press).] +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The Vietnam War Memorial in Vietnam Would Be 20 to 50 Times Larger Than OursBy Global Research News Global Research, February 04, 2013 Alternet Imagine if we could bridge the empathy gap that separates us from the Vietnamese and our war with them and against them. When I was on active duty in the Air Force, I visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. I was moved to tears as I encountered the names of more than 58,000 of my fellow Americans etched in stone. What a waste, I thought, but at least they died for their country, and at least we didn’t forget their sacrifice. To be honest, I don’t recall thinking about the Vietnamese dead. The memorial, famously designed by Maya Lin, captures an American tragedy, not a Vietnamese one. But imagine, for a moment, if we could bridge the empathy gap that separates us from the Vietnamese and our war with them and against them. How might their suffering compare to ours? Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Christian Carollo America first sent ground combat units to Vietnam in March of 1965. If we count the Linebacker II air offensive against North Vietnam in December of 1972 (the infamous Christmas bombing) as the end of major combat operations, the U.S. military waged war in Vietnam for roughly 93 months. Now, let’s consider the number of Vietnamese killed, to include soldiers and civilians, regardless of their political allegiance or lack thereof. No one knows for sure how many Vietnamese died over this period; the “low” estimate is roughly one million Vietnamese, while the “high” estimate is in the vicinity of three million. Even using the low estimate, that’s more than ten thousand dead per month, for 93 months. How can we bring meaning to such mind-numbing statistics? To imagine the impact of this war on the Vietnamese people, Americans have to think not of one tragic wall containing 58,000 names, but of twenty (or perhaps even fifty) tragic walls, adding up to millions of names, a high percentage of them being noncombatants, innocent men, women and children. Difficult as that is to imagine, we must also recognize that the impact of the American war in Vietnam was not limited to killing. The U.S. military bombed and blasted and napalmed and defoliated the landscape as well. So along with twenty or more Maya Lin-type memorials to list all of the Vietnamese war dead, we’d have to imagine scores of “Super Fund” sites in Vietnam, land poisoned by Agent Orange and similar powerful chemicals, tortured terrain that is still occasionally deadly to the Vietnamese who live there. How did so many Vietnamese come to die? How did Vietnam itself become a blasted and poisoned landscape? And how did the United States come largely to forget its complicity in the killing and blasting? The reasons are not easy to contemplate, but Nick Turse’s harrowing new study, Kill Anything that Moves, forces us to confront what he terms “the real American war in Vietnam.” In A Rumor of War (1977), a classic memoir of the Vietnam War, U.S. Marine Lieutenant Philip Caputo recounts how the U.S. strategy of “search and destroy” and the obsession with enemy body count led to “orgiastic violence” in which the goal, in his words, was “to kill Communists and to kill as many of them as possible. Stack ’em like cordwood. Victory was a high body-count … war a matter of arithmetic. The pressure [from the top] on unit commanders to produce enemy corpses was intense, and they in turn communicated it to their troops. This led to such practices as counting civilians as Viet Cong. ‘If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s VC,’ was a rule of thumb in the bush. It is not surprising, therefore, that some men acquired a contempt for human life and a predilection for taking it.” The horrific reality that Caputo wrote of more than 35 years ago is now fully fleshed out in Turse’s new study. The obsession with body count—starting with General William Westmoreland, the commanding general in Vietnam—led to, in Turse’s words, “the indiscriminate killing of South Vietnamese noncombatants—the endless slaughter that wiped out civilians day after day, month after month, year after year.” The enormity of the crime was “neither accidental nor unforeseeable,” but rather “the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military,” Turse concludes. The evidence he amasses – of “murder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, imprisonment without due process”—is irrefutable. Indeed, much of the evidence he relies upon was gathered secretly by the U.S. military at the time, only to be suppressed, consigned to archives, and forgotten. It’s hardly surprising that senior U.S. military officials sought to suppress evidence of atrocities on a mass-scale, since they themselves were both complicit and culpable. A line that has always stayed with me from Caputo’s memoir came from one of his NCOs, a Sergeant Colby, who in 1965 told then-Lieutenant Caputo that, “Before you leave here, sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.” Turse’s study plumbs the depths of such brutality, to include a racist subculture (dehumanizing the Vietnamese as “gooks” and “slopes”) within the U.S. military that facilitated it. Draft an American teenager, teach him to kill, send him to an utterly foreign land in which he can’t distinguish friend from foe, give him power over life and death against a dehumanized enemy, and reward him for generating a high body count in which “If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s VC,” and you have an ineluctable recipe for murderous violence. Contrast the brutal honesty of Sergeant Colby with the patent dishonesty of an American political scene that to this day fosters a very different interpretation of the Vietnam War. For many Americans, the true victims of the war are not the millions of Vietnamese who died, or the millions who continue to suffer to this day. No—the true victims are the American veterans who were allegedly spat upon by unwashed anti-war protesters, or a U.S. military that was allegedly betrayed by back-stabbers at the home front, denying the troops the victory they had so justly earned. In this narrative, even the infamous slaughter at My Lai becomes the exception that proves the rule, the rule being that with few exceptions the American military fought honorably and cleanly. For these Americans, the war remains a combination of the Rambo myth mixed with the “noble cause” rhetoric of Ronald Reagan—history as Hollywood fairy tale—a concerted rewriting of the historical record and a rewiring of American culture consistent with feel-good militarism and confectionary war. To confront the truth, we must abandon the confection. The truth is that, rather than confronting our nation’s inner heart of darkness during and after Vietnam, the military and our government collectively whitewashed the past. America’s true “Vietnam Syndrome” was not an allergy to using military power after Vietnam but an allergy to facing the destruction our nation caused there. And that allergy has only exacerbated our national predilection for military adventurism, warrior glorification, and endless war. It’s time our nation found the courage to face those twenty (or fifty) walls of Vietnamese dead. It’s time we faced them with the same sorrow and same regret we reserve for our own wall of dead. Only after we do so can our nation stop glorifying war. Only after we do so can our nation fully heal. William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), now teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. His books and articles focus primarily on military history and include Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism (Potomac Press, 2005). He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ It appears this book was written by someone with an agenda. It's not one I agree with.

I'm not a fan of listening to tapes of any of the presidents. I've only heard Tricky's tapes that have been on tv. I might be interested in hearing some of Slick's while Monica was in his office. I certainly didn't intend to imply there was any bribery involved in LBJ's dealings, I certainly agree it was patronage (LBJ was getting very rich at the same time) I agree that LBJ bought into the domino theory and that was his method for escalation to enrich his friends. I suspect LBJ intended to start the war and have it wind down just in time to insure his re-election in 68. Unfortunately for him and the US, NVN didn't play along with that strategy and gave him a fit. I don't need to help pile on Nixon, you covered that quite well.

Three screws held the scope mount onto the rifle and these could be removed in a few seconds. The scope mounted on this rifle was a toy, designed to be mounted on a youth's pellet gun or .22 rifle, and practical at very close ranges only; due to its extremely limited field of view. Here is the Walmart equivalent: http://www.walmart.com/ip/Crosman-Target-Finder-4x15-Airgun-Scope/14234828?action=product_interest&action_type=title&item_id=14234828&placement_id=irs-106 If Oswald practiced as much as the WC apologists claim he did, he would quickly realize that his scope was misaligned PLUS it was totally inadequate at target acquisition. To those of you that do not hunt, "target acquisition" is a difficult thing to explain. All I can say is that trying to find and track a target through a scope with a tiny field of view is like trying to watch TV with everything but a 3 inch circle at the centre of the screen blacked out. I do not believe Oswald could have tracked JFK with this scope to make the first shot. So why and how did we get back to what LHO did that day? I'm going to stick with, if LHO was doing the shooting, he was doing it from the 2nd floor lunchroom in between sips on his Coke. And I'll even say that it doesn't really matter if there was a window in the lunchroom looking out onto Elm street. When we get into all these 'hypothesis' why not at least go with one with some chance of reality?

The sniper didn't use the scope for the head shot, Robert. This was the fervent belief of the HSCA's ballistics experts, and I suspect they actually got this one right. Pat, I hate to ask this type question, but it keeps coming up. Which sniper? Which shot?

and I can only imagine how much velocity the bullet would gain from six storeys up. I still object to the assumption that a bullet was fired from 6 stories up. Never seen any proof of it.