Jennifer Nemo recently sat down with Scott Camil to chat about his part in the Winter Soldier Investigation, being in the film Winter Soldier (see Pulse article “Winter Solider: The Horror”), and the situation today in the Iraq War. Camil is a decorated Marine and Vietnam veteran who attended school at the University of Florida after serving during the Vietnam War. At UF, Camil became involved in the student protest movement, and then assumed a leadership role in Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

In the winter of 1971, a few months before Lieutenant William Calley would be sentenced to life in prison for the My Lai Massacre that claimed the lives of many innocent Vietnamese civilians—he was pardoned by Nixon in 1974 and served less than four years of his sentence—a group of 125 veterans (including a young John Kerry) and 16 civilians responded to a public call by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) to assemble for a conference over the course of four days and nights between January 31 and February 2 at a Howard Johnson hotel in Detroit, Michigan, to testify in public hearings about the horrors and atrocities they had either witnessed firsthand or committed while stationed in Vietnam.