'PRIVATE SCOTT CAMIL'S first, frontal close-up, recounting boot-camp training up to his first kill overseas, compresses all of Full Metal Jacket into seven minutes." So writes slantmagazine.com's Fernando Croce in a recent review of Winter Soldier. That comparison does a fine job of condensing the power of Camil's testimony, and of communicating why the documentary containing it is more potent than any dramatic Hollywood take on Vietnam. Today, Camil remains a vocal antiwar presence, and after taking off his VA hearing aid, he recently sat down for a phone interview with the Bay Guardian. It was mid-afternoon for me, and night in Florida, where Camil was speaking, but you could still refer to the conversation as a wake-up call:

Bay Guardian: How did you come to be contacted for the Winter Soldier investigation?

Scott Camil: When I was in Vietnam, I remember reading a Navy newspaper called the Seal Tiger. It talked about a concert in SF with Joan Baez and others to collect blood that would go to North Vietnam. I was pissed, and thought, "I could be killed by some Commie gook with American blood in them."

But after I got out of the Marine Corps, I'd see things on the news that weren't true. In junior college we read Howard Zinn's The People's History, and it started me thinking – how Ho Chi-Minh was our ally during World War II, and we'd promised there'd be no colonialization, and then went back on our word. Still, I'd wear my marine jacket and pick fights with the antiwar demonstrators.

Then I read in the newspaper that Jane Fonda was coming to speak. Some friends of mine and I smoked a joint and went. Basically she said that for democracy to function, the people inside have to have access to the truth. If they didn't, they were being manipulated. Then she said the government is lying about Vietnam, and that it's up to the patriotic veterans to tell people what's being done in their name with their money.

BG: What was it like to testify?

SC: It was a pivotal event in my life. If you had asked me about Vietnam before I went to Winter Soldier – I'd spent 600 days there, and I'd think of the 20 worst, when bad things happened to us – I wouldn't think about what happened to the Vietnamese. That's what I was planning to talk about, but they asked questions that shifted my attention from inward to outward. Those people who sat in the room with me made me think and made me understand that the Vietnamese were human beings. When I left, I felt remorse for what I had done. I'd thought, "We came here to help, and they're trying to kill us. Fuck them!" But what if I had been born there? Would that have been acceptable to me? All they were doing was defending their homes.

BG: It must have been maddening to witness the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry and see Winter Soldier used against him on the Internet and in the media.

SC: It blew me away that they could take a president who didn't win an election, who was AWOL for more than 10 days – desertion, basically – and who is dumber than a doorknob, and make him a hero, while they took a guy who fought and won medals and made him into a bum. They put out the propaganda; they mobilized the Nazi information, the big lie.

I've gotten to meet some of those guys, such as [B.G.] Burkett, who'd written a book [Stolen Valor], and [Webmaster of wintersoldier.com] Scott Swett. They look you right in the eye, and they lie. They think because they wear suits with a little flag on the tie that they're respectful. There's no talking with them. They have no integrity – it's the ends justify the means.

BG: I'd imagine the situation in Iraq is frustratingly familiar to you.

SC: I think they's why they've put the film out now. Both wars were started with deception. Neither war had a strategy. The basic idea was might makes right, we're gonna kick their ass. If the idea is to win hearts and minds, you can't do it that way – it didn't work in Vietnam and won't in Iraq.

We trained Vietnamese soldiers and they went to the other side – the same thing is going on in Iraq. In Vietnam, 80 percent of the casualties were from mines and booby traps. In Iraq, they call 'em IEDs. In both wars, the borders were not secure and the US has made illegal incursions into neighboring countries. In both, there's prisoner abuse, and the US has a huge arms and technology difference the enemy can't match.

The major difference that worries me is that because the body count [in Vietnam] made us look so bad, they're not keeping track of the dead Iraqis. There's no accountability. I feel if my government would have learned from the sacrifices my friends and I made not to do this to another generation, it would be worth it. To see them doing the same thing is a big kick in the ass to me and all those people on the wall in Washington. It's incredible. (Johnny Ray Huston)