Gould,
Kerry enlisted in the Navy to get out of being drafted into the army. He
requested a 2S deferment, was denied and chose the Navy as a better
alternative to the army.

And therefore he was not a draftee.

One whole bunch of people opted to join the Coast Guard, the Navy, the Texas
Air National Guard, or etc to avoid trudging through tropical forests while
lugging heavy weapons.

One who volunteers, regardless of the motivation, is not a draftee.

I do appreciate the correction concerning this first term of duty, I was not
aware of that. The question I have is if he spent 12 months in VN, he knew
we were burning villages, raping the population, killing innocent people,
and committing extreme atrocities and war crimes, why did he volunteer for a
term of duty?

Who knows?

In December of 1968, we had 535,000 troops in Viet Nam.

Take any city of 1/2 million people. There are going to be a lot of bad actors.
If 98% of the troops observed the Geneva conventions, and 2% did not, that
means we had about 10,000 jerkoffs in country
who could very conceivably commit atrocities.

Did all, or most, of the guys in Viet Nam commit atrocities? Heck no, unless
you count war itself as an atrocity. Did some guys do every one of the things
that the Winter Soldiers testified about? Certainly.

Without getting bogged down in detail, one of the most lethal forces we had in
Viet Nam was the CIA.

We ran a program called "Phoenix" in Viet Nam, the Viet Namese called if Phung
Hoang. The Phung Hoang, like the Phoenix, was also a giant bird. The Phung
Hoang of legend would snatch people out of their beds at night, just like the
CIA.

"Phoenix" involved methods not in the least approved the Geneva conventions.
Our enlisted fround forces were often used as "muscle" by the CIA, with full
cooperation from the highest levels of command
..
Here's an excerpt from a book by a very highly decorated VN veteran. His
experience was not typical, but it does
add some credibility to stories about cutting off ears, etc.

"The problem was, how do you find the people on the blacklist? It's not like
you had their address and telephone number. The normal procedure would be to go
into a village and just grab someone and say, 'Where's Nguyen so-and-so?' Half
the time the people were so afraid they would say anything. Then a Phoenix team
would take the informant, put a sandbag over his head, poke out two holes so he
could see, put commo wire around his neck like a long leash, and walk him
through the village and say, 'When we go by Nguyen's house scratch your head.'
Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the door, and say, 'April
Fool, mother****er.' Whoever answered the door would get wasted. As far as they
were concerned whoever answered was a Communist, including family members.
Sometimes they'd come back to camp with ears to prove that they killed people."
-- Vincent Okamoto, combat officer (Lieutenant) in Vietnam in 1968, and
recipient of Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest award conferred by
the U.S. Army. Wounded 3 times. He was also an intelligence liaison officer for
the Phoenix Program for 2 months in 1968. Quote is from page 361 of the
hardback 2003 first edition of the book "Patriots: the Vietnam War remembered
from all sides."