During his 1972 gubernatorial run, Senator Bernie Sanders told high school students that the U.S. had committed acts in its war with Vietnam that were “almost as bad as what Hitler did.” An article in Vermont newspaper The Rutland Herald reported on the comments, made while Sanders was campaigning for governor as a member of the Liberty Union party. The article was first unearthed by the Washington Free Beacon. The North Vietnamese “are not my enemy,” Sanders told a class of ninth graders in Rutland while on the campaign trail. “They’re a very, very poor people. Some of them don’t have shoes. They eat rice when they can get it. And they have been fighting for the freedom of their country for 25 years. They can hardly fight back.” The American death toll from the Vietnam War was over 58,000. The Herald reported that students pushed back against Sanders’s support for amnesty for draft evaders, saying it wouldn’t be fair to the parents of soldiers killed in the fighting. During his 1972 gubernatorial run, Senator Bernie Sanders told high school students that the U.S. had committed acts in its war with Vietnam that were “almost as bad as what Hitler did.” An article in Vermont newspaper The Rutland Herald reported on the comments, made while Sanders was campaigning for governor as a member of the Liberty Union party. The article was first unearthed by the Washington Free Beacon. The North Vietnamese “are not my enemy,” Sanders told a class of ninth graders in Rutland while on the campaign trail. “They’re a very, very poor people. Some of them don’t have shoes. They eat rice when they can get it. And they have been fighting for the freedom of their country for 25 years. They can hardly fight back.” The American death toll from the Vietnam War was over 58,000. The Herald reported that students pushed back against Sanders’s support for amnesty for draft evaders, saying it wouldn’t be fair to the parents of soldiers killed in the fighting.