posted October 05, 2004 01:48 PM            

More than 250 Swift boat veterans have now signed an open letter to Senator Kerry challenging his fitness to serve as commander-in-chief of America's armed forces

"We resent very deeply the false war crimes charges he made coming back from Vietnam in 1971 and repeated in the book "Tour of Duty." We think those cast an aspersion on all those living and dead, from our unit and other units in Vietnam. We think that he knew he was lying when he made the charges, and we think that they're unsupportable. We intend to bring the truth about that to the American people.

We believe, based on our experience with him, that he is totally unfit to be the Commander-in-Chief."
-- John O'Neill, spokesman, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth

"I do not believe John Kerry is fit to be Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States. This is not a political issue. It is a matter of his judgment, truthfulness, reliability, loyalty and trust -- all absolute tenets of command. His biography, 'Tour of Duty,' by Douglas Brinkley, is replete with gross exaggerations, distortions of fact, contradictions and slanderous lies. His contempt for the military and authority is evident by even a most casual review of this biography. He arrived in-country with a strong anti-Vietnam War bias and a self-serving determination to build a foundation for his political future. He was aggressive, but vain and prone to impulsive judgment, often with disregard for specific tactical assignments. He was a 'loose cannon.' In an abbreviated tour of four months and 12 days, and with his specious medals secure, Lt.(jg) Kerry bugged out and began his infamous betrayal of all United States forces in the Vietnam War. That included our soldiers, our marines, our sailors, our coast guardsmen, our airmen, and our POWs. His leadership within the so-called Vietnam Veterans Against the War and testimony before Congress in 1971 charging us with unspeakable atrocities remain an undocumented but nevertheless meticulous stain on the men and women who honorably stayed the course. Senator Kerry is not fit for command."
-- Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann, USN (retired), chairman, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth

"During Lt.(jg) Kerry's tour, he was under my command for two or three specific operations, before his rapid exit. Trust, loyalty and judgment are the key, operative words. His turncoat performance in 1971 in his grubby shirt and his medal-tossing escapade, coupled with his slanderous lines in the recent book portraying us that served, including all POWs and MIAs, as murderous war criminals, I believe, will have a lasting effect on all military veterans and their families.

Kerry would be described as devious, self-absorbing, manipulative, disdain for authority, disruptive, but the most common phrase that you'd hear is 'requires constant supervision.'"
-- Captain Charles Plumly, USN (retired)

"Thirty-five years ago, many of us fell silent when we came back to the stain of sewage that Mr. Kerry had thrown on us, and all of our colleagues who served over there. I don't intend to be silent today or ever again. Our young men and women who are serving deserve no less."
-- Andrew Horne

"In my specific, personal experience in both coastal and river patrols over a 12-month period, I never once saw or heard anything remotely resembling the atrocities described by Senator Kerry. If I had, it would have been my obligation to report them in writing to a higher authority, and I would certainly have done that. If Senator Kerry actually witnessed or participated in these atrocities or, as he described them, 'war crimes,' he was obligated to report them. That he did not until later when it suited his political purposes strikes me as opportunism of the worst kind. That he would malign my service and that of his fellow sailors with no regard for the truth makes him totally unqualified to serve as Commander-in-Chief."
-- Jeffrey Wainscott

"I signed that letter because I, too felt a deep sense of betrayal that someone who took the same oath of loyalty as I did as an officer in the United States Navy would abandon his group here (points to group photo) to join this group here (points to VVAW protest photo), and come home and attempt to rally the American public against the effort that this group was so valiantly pursuing.

It is a fact that in the entire Vietnam War we did not lose one major battle. We lost the war at home... and at home, John Kerry was the Field General."
-- Robert Elder

"My daughters and my wife have read portions of the book 'Tour of Duty.' They wanted to know if I took part in the atrocities described. I do not believe the things that are described happened.

Let me give you an example. In Brinkley's book, on pages 170 to 171, about something called the 'Bo De massacre' on November 24th of 1968... In Kerry's description of the engagement, first he claimed there were 17 servicemen that were wounded. Three of us were wounded. I was the first..."
-- Joseph Ponder

"While in Cam Rahn Bay, he trained on several 24-hour indoctrination missions, and one special skimmer operation with my most senior and trusted Lieutenant. The briefing from some members of that crew the morning after revealed that they had not received any enemy fire, and yet Lt.(jg) Kerry informed me of a wound -- he showed me a scratch on his arm and a piece of shrapnel in his hand that appeared to be from one of our own M-79s. It was later reported to me that Lt.(jg) Kerry had fired an M-79, and it had exploded off the adjacent shoreline. I do not recall being advised of any medical treatment, and probably said something like 'Forget it.' He later received a Purple Heart for that scratch, and I have no information as to how or whom.

Lt.(jg) Kerry was allowed to return to the good old USA after 4 months and a few days in-country, and then he proceeded to betray his former shipmates, calling them criminals who were committing atrocities. Today we are here to tell you that just the opposite is true. Our rules of engagement were quite strict, and the officers and men of Swift often did not even return fire when they were under fire if there was a possibility that innocent people -- fishermen, in a lot of cases -- might be hurt or injured. The rules and the good intentions of the men increased the possibility that we might take friendly casualties."
-- Commander Grant Hibbard, USN (retired)

"Lt. Kerry returned home from the war to make some outrageous statements and allegations... numerous criminal acts in violation of the law of war were cited by Kerry, disparaging those who had fought with honor in that conflict. Had war crimes been committed by US forces in Vietnam? Yes, but such acts were few and far between. Yet Lt. Kerry gave numerous speeches and testimony before Congress inappropriately leading his audiences to believe that what was only an anomaly in the conduct of America's fighting men was an epidemic. Furthermore, he suggested that they were being encouraged to violated the law of war by those within the chain of command.

Very specific orders, on file at the Vietnam archives at Texas Tech University, were issued by my father [Admiral Elmo Zumwalt] and others in his chain of command instructing subordinates to act responsibly in preserving the life and property of Vietnamese civilians."
-- Lt. Col. James Zumwalt, USMC (retired)

"We look at Vietnam... after all these years it is still languishing in isolated poverty and helplessness and tyranny. This is John Kerry's legacy. I deeply resent John Kerry's using his Swift boat experience, and his betrayal of those who fought there as a stepping-stone to his political ambitions."
-- Bernard Wolff

"In a whole year that I spent patrolling, I didn't see anything like a war crime, an atrocity, anything like that. Time and again I saw American fighting men put themselves in graver danger trying to avoid... collateral damage.

When John Kerry returned to the country, he was sworn in front of Congress. And then he told my family -- my parents, my sister, my brother, my neighbors -- he told everyone I knew and everyone I'd ever know that I and my comrades had committed unspeakable atrocities."
-- David Wallace

"I served with these guys. I went on missions with them, and these men served honorably. Up and down the chain of command there was no acquiescence to atrocities. It was not condoned, it did not happen, and it was not reported to me verbally or in writing by any of these men including Lt.(jg) Kerry.

In 1971, '72, for almost 18 months, he stood before the television audiences and claimed that the 500,000 men and women in Vietnam, and in combat, were all villains -- there were no heroes. In 2004, one hero from the Vietnam War has appeared, running for President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief. It just galls one to think about it."
-- Captain George Elliott, USN (retired)

"During the Vietnam War I was Task Force Commander at An Thoi, and my tour of duty was 13 months, from the end of Tet to the beginning of the Vietnamization of the Navy units.

Now when I went there right after Tet, I was restricted in my movements. I couldn't go much of anyplace because the Vietcong controlled most of the area. When I left, I could go anywhere I wanted, just about. Commerce was booming, the buses were running, trucks were going, the waterways were filled with sampans with goods going to market, but yet in Kerry's biography he says that our operations were a complete failure. He also mentions a formal conference with me, to try to get more air cover and so on. That conference never happened..."
-- Captain Adrian Lonsdale, USCG (retired)

"I was in An Thoi from June of '68 to June of '69, covering the whole period that John Kerry was there. I operated in every river, in every canal, and every off-shore patrol area in the 4th Corps area, from Cambodia all the way around to the Bo De River. I never saw, even heard of all of these so-called atrocities and things that we were supposed to have done.

This is not true. We're not standing for it. We want to set the record straight."
-- William Shumadine

"In 1971, when John Kerry spoke out to America, labeling all Vietnam veterans as thugs and murderers, I was shocked and almost brought to my knees, because even though I had served at the same time and same unit, I had never witnessed or participated in any of the events that the Senator had accused us of. I strongly believe that the statements made by the Senator were not only false and inaccurate, but extremely harmful to the United States' efforts in Southeast Asia and the rest of the world. Tragically, some veterans, scorned by the antiwar movement and their allies, retreated to a life of despair and suicide. Two of my crewmates were among them. For that there is no forgiveness. "
-- Richard O'Mara

"My name is Steve Gardner. I served in 1966 and 1967 on my first tour of duty in Vietnam on Swift boats, and I did my second tour in '68 and '69, involved with John Kerry in the last 2 1/2 months of my tour. The John Kerry that I know is not the John Kerry that everybody else is portraying. I served alongside him and behind him, five feet away from him in a gun tub, and watched as he made indecisive moves with our boat, put our boats in jeopardy, put our crews in jeopardy... if a man like that can't handle that 6-man crew boat, how can you expect him to be our Commander-in-Chief?"
-- Steven Gardner

"I served in Vietnam as a boat officer from June of 1968 to July of 1969. My service was three months in Coastal Division 13 out of Cat Lo, and nine months with Coastal Division 11 based in An Thoi. John Kerry was in An Thoi the same time I was. I'm here today to express the anger I have harbored for over 33 years, about being accused with my fellow shipmates of war atrocities.

All I can say is when I leave here today, I'm going down to the Wall to tell my two crew members it's not true, and that they and the other 49 Swiftees who are on the Wall were then and are still now the best."
-- Robert Brant

"I never saw, heard of, or participated in any Swift boat crews killing cattle, poisoning crops, or raping and killing civilians as charged by John Kerry, both in his book and in public statements. Since we both operated at the same time, in the same general area, and on the same missions under the same commanders, it is hard to believe his claims of atrocities and poor planning of Sea Lord missions.

posted October 05, 2004 01:54 PM            

Campaign Says May Have Been Self-Inflicted

Washington -— In a reversal of their staunch defense of John Kerry’s military service record, Kerry campaign officials were quoted by Fox News saying that it was indeed possible that John Kerry’s first Purple Heart commendation was the result of an, unintentional, self-inflicted wound.

GARRETT: "And questions keep coming. For example, Kerry received a Purple Heart for wounds suffered on December 2, 1968. But in Kerry's own journal written nine days later, he writes he and his crew, quote, 'hadn't been shot at yet,' unquote. Kerry's campaign has said it is possible this first Purple Heart was awarded for an unintentional self-inflicted wound -- Brit." (Special Report with Brit Hume Aug.23, 2004)

A recent television ad from Swift Boat Veterans for Truth featured Doctor Louis Letson who treated Kerry for his minor injury and Grant Hibbard who served as John Kerry’s direct commander on the mission where he claimed his medal. Both men say Kerry did not deserve the medal given the fact that Kerry received a very minor wound requiring no more than band-aid treatment and because the wound was not a direct result of hostile fire, a requirement for a Purple Heart commendation.

"When Grant Hibbard and Doctor Letson appeared in our ad, they were attacked and vilified by the Kerry campaign but now we see news reports saying the Kerry campaign is now sheepishly acknowledging that what we said was true," said Admiral Hoffmann, founder of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. "John Kerry’s own journal reinforces the fact that neither Kerry nor his crew had seen hostile enemy action. John Kerry’s first Purple Heart medal is based on fiction."

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is calling on the Kerry campaign to apologize to Grant Hibbard and Doctor Letson as the men did nothing more than come forward to speak the truth about the situation involving John Kerry’s first Purple Heart medal.

This is not the only incident in which Kerry campaign officials have changed their story concerning Kerry’s prestigious war medals. The incident on the Bay Hap River in which Kerry received his third Purple Heart and Bronze Star has also been the subject of considerable waffling by Kerry officials. During the Democratic National Convention, Kerry used the Bay Hap River incident to suggest that he alone returned to rescue Jim Rassmann —- a Special Forces soldier -— who was on Kerry’s boat and was tossed into the river. Kerry described this incident to the American people as "No man left behind."

However, Kerry officials were forced to acknowledge that Kerry’s boat actually left the scene when another swift boat -— operating on the other side of the river —- was damaged by an underwater mine. Kerry officials now admit that Kerry’s boat returned after several minutes to pull Rassmann from the water while three other swift boats remained on site to render assistance to the injured crew of the one damaged boat. Campaign officials once claimed that Kerry returned to the scene under withering hostile fire to rescue Rassmann after all the other swift boats left. But other accounts from eyewitnesses of that day confirm that the other boats stayed on site and that Kerry returned to the scene, facing no enemy fire, only seconds before another swift boat was preparing to retrieve Mr. Rassmann from the water.

posted October 05, 2004 02:01 PM            

WASHINGTON, D.C. --- Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a non-partisan, non-profit group representing more than 250 Swift Boat veterans who served with Senator John Kerry in Vietnam, announced today they are joining forces with a group of American prisoners of war who were held captive by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. The merger coincides with a new $1.4 million television ad campaign released by the new group Swift Vets and POWs For Truth.

“We welcome the POWs to this battle on behalf of truth, the real truth of who John Kerry is and how he betrayed his fellow veterans. His visits to Paris to meet with the enemy – and his subsequent public endorsement of their so-called ‘peace plan’ – only served to encourage our enemies and prolong the captivity of our POWs,” said Admiral Roy Hoffmann, founder of Swift Vets and POWs for Truth.
“For John Kerry to now claim that his activities were part of an effort to help solve the POW problem is absolutely ludicrous. Kerry encouraged the North Vietnamese to keep us in captivity longer which meant more torture, more lost years and, sadly, more death,” said Vietnam POW Ken Cordier who was held captive for six years and three months and was awarded two Silver Stars, a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart among other decorations.

The new ad will air in three states as well as on national cable and is the most expensive media buy the group has made to date. The ad features wives of two POWs:

Mary Jane McManus: Three months after we were married, my husband was shot down over Hanoi.

Phyllis Galanti: Paul and I were married in 1963. Two years later he was shot down over North Vietnam.

MCMANUS: All of the prisoners of war in North Vietnam were tortured in order to obtain confessions of atrocities.

Galanti: On the other hand, John Kerry came home and accused all Vietnam veterans of unspeakable horrors.

McManus: John Kerry gave aid and comfort to the enemy by advocating their negotiating points to our government.

Galanti: Why is it relevant? Because John Kerry is asking us to trust him.

McManus: I will never forget John Kerry’s testimony. If we couldn’t trust John Kerry then, how could we possibly trust him now?

Several POWs and their wives will also be featured in a satellite media tour Thursday morning that reaches out to local television stations. The vets will be interviewed via satellite from Colorado Springs where they will be attending the Air Force/Navy football game Thursday afternoon. Swift Vets and POWs For Truth is also launching a direct mail campaign that will reach 1.2 million people.

Swift Vets and POWs For Truth now has over 63,000 online financial contributors to their campaign to get the truth out about John Kerry.

posted October 05, 2004 02:19 PM            

What follows is a primer on the main issues, the evidence and open questions.

Christmas in Cambodia

On March 27, 1986, Kerry took the floor of the U.S. Senate to deliver a dramatic indictment of Reagan administration foreign policy. As is his habit, he drew on his Vietnam experience: "I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and having the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there."

He continued: "I have that memory which is seared — seared — in me, that says to me, before we send another generation into harm's way we have a responsibility in the U.S. Senate to go the last step, to make the best effort possible to avoid that kind of conflict."

Kerry has told of this Cambodia trip many times, from a 1979 Boston Herald review of "Apocalypse Now" to a June 1, 2003, Washington Post profile. The Post's Laura Blumenfeld reported that Kerry pulled a mildewed hat out of his briefcase and described it as "my good luck hat, given to me by a CIA man as we went in for a special mission in Cambodia."

Yet parts of Kerry's story are incredible on their face — such as saying Richard Nixon was responsible for the illegal mission, when Lyndon Johnson was president in 1968.

And there is no record that Swift boats were ever used for secret missions in Cambodia. (Their size and noisy engines make them ill-suited for the job.) Kerry's authorized biography, "Tour of Duty" by Douglas Brinkley, makes no mention of any such mission during Kerry's service.

Not a single crewman who served with Kerry has supported his claim to have entered Cambodia, and three have expressly denied it. Kerry's commanding officers have denied he was ever sent there. And Kerry's own Vietnam journal (excerpted in the Boston Globe) shows that on Christmas 1968 he was docked at Sa Dec, 50 miles from Cambodia.

In mid-August, these facts promped the Kerry campaign to "correct" the story, saying the mission took place in January 1969 when Kerry "inadvertently or responsibly" crossed the border.

Yet "inadvertently" straying into Cambodia — were that even possible — belies the basic point of Kerry's original story: that he lost his faith in government because the president lied about having sent U.S. troops into Cambodia. It also contradicts his story about ferrying a CIA man.

And the "correction" plainly hasn't sunk in: The Democratic Party chairman, Terry McAuliffe, told us in an interview earlier this month that Kerry had made two missions to Cambodia to drop off CIA men.

Some questions that Kerry himself has yet to answer: When exactly did he enter Cambodia? Accidentally, or intentionally? If by accident, how did that lead him to lose faith in the government? If on a secret mission, what was its purpose? What is the name of the CIA man? Why is there no record of any Cambodia mission, even in Kerry's journals? And why do Kerry's crewmates and fellow officers unanimously deny that any such mission ever occurred?

First Combat . . . Maybe

Kerry won his first Purple Heart for a combat engagement on Dec. 2, 1968, while training on a skimmer, or Boston whaler. On his campaign Web site, Kerry claims that on that day, he "experiences his first intense combat; receives combat-related injury" — for which he would eventually receive a Purple Heart.

But in "Tour of Duty," Brinkley writes:

"They pulled away from the pier at Cat Lo with spirits high, feeling satisfied with the way things were going for them. They had no lust for battle, but they also were not afraid. Kerry wrote in his notebook, 'A cocky feeling of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel because we hadn't been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven't been shot at are allowed to be cocky.' "

According to Kerry's journal, the date on which he "hadn't been shot at yet" was Dec. 9. Which means he hadn't been in combat on Dec. 2.

This fits in with the Swift vets' contention that Kerry's initial request for a Purple Heart had been denied by the chain of command. In fact, he didn't get a Purple Heart commendation for his Dec. 2 injury until months later, after transferring to a different command — which took Kerry at his word on being under enemy fire in the earlier engagement.

Kerry's campaign has now admitted that his first Purple Heart wound may have been unintentionally self-inflicted, sustained when he exploded a hand grenade too close to shore. The Kerry camp has not responded substantively to questions on the discrepancies between his citation and his journal entries as published by his biographer.

False Memories Of Fighting Together

David Alston has accompanied Kerry on campaign appearances, giving powerful testimony about Kerry's leadership under fire (including perhaps the most effective speech on Kerry's behalf at the Democratic Convention).

Alston and Kerry have both spoken of two engagements in which they took fire together on PCF-94, one on Jan. 29, 1969, the other on Feb. 28, 1969, when Kerry won his Silver Star.

Problems with these stories arose this April, when Lt. Tedd Peck complained that Kerry had appropriated one of Peck's actions as his own. It turned out that Peck, not Kerry, commanded PCF-94 on Jan. 29.

Both Peck and Alston were seriously wounded in that battle. We know that no other officer was aboard PCF-94, because enlisted man Del Sandusky took command after Peck was disabled. So Kerry's claim to have commanded the boat in that engagement is clearly false.

Kerry spokesman Michael Meehan created a timeline that credited all of PCF-94's January engagements to Kerry. Only after Peck complained publicly did Kerry stop trying to take credit for engagements that occurred before he was assigned to PCF-94. The campaign Website now notes only that he took command of PCF-94 in "late January."

According to records formerly available on the site, Alston was Medevaced to an Army hospital in Binh Thuy after being injured in the Jan. 29 fight, and did not return quickly. Kerry took command of PCF-94, the next day, replacing the injured Lt. Peck. The boat also got at least one and probably two new gunners to replace Alston. Fred Short arrived as the new gunner on Feb. 13.

On Feb. 28, PCF-94 took part in the engagement that won Kerry a Silver Star, and a commendation for every member of his crew. Alston has repeatedly asserted, since at least May 2002, that he participated in that action. In an interview with ABC News on June 24, Alston said: "I know when John Kerry told Del to beach that damn boat, this was a brand-new ball game. We wasn't running. We took it to Charlie."

"We?" All of Kerry's crew received commendations for this action. Absent from the list is the name David Alston. But Short's name is listed, and he was photographed at the award ceremony along with Kerry and his five enlisted men (a full PCF crew). Not in the photo: David Alston.

In an interview with Byron York of National Review, Short said that Alston didn't return to PCF-94 until after March 4, 1969, well after the Feb. 28 engagement. The exact date of Alston's return remains a mystery because (like Kerry) Alston has refused to release his military records. What is clear is that both Alston and Kerry have lied since at least May 2002 about Alston's service under Kerry.

Why did Kerry claim to have been in command of PCF-94 on Jan. 29, 1969? Why did Kerry try to replace Fred Short with David Alston as gunner in the Feb. 28 engagement? Only Kerry and Alston can explain. But since the controversy arose, Alston has disappeared from the campaign trail.

One Medal, Three Citations

In that Feb. 28 engagement, Kerry beached his PCF to frontally assault a Viet Cong ambush. He then leapt off the boat and chased an armed VC from the beach, killing him and capturing his rocket launcher. On that much, everyone agrees. The mystery surrounds the three differing citations Kerry has for the Silver Star he earned that day.

Adm. Elmo Zumwalt personally awarded the medal to Kerry. The citation (No. 1) notes that "an enemy soldier sprang up from his position not ten feet from Patrol Craft Fast 94 and fled. Without hesitation, Lieutenant (junior grade) KERRY leaped ashore, pursued the man behind a hootch and killed him . . . " The citations says the operation resulted in 10 Viet Cong killed.

For most people, one citation per award is sufficient. However, Kerry has another (No. 2) for this incident, this one signed by Adm. John Hyland, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet.

This citation fails to mention the VC that Kerry killed, but has added praise: Kerry now acted "with utter disregard for his own safety and the enemy rockets" and has now faced a "numerically superior force."

Citation No. 3 was signed by John Lehman as secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, more than 10 years after the action. It's nearly identical to No. 2, except it adds, "By his brave actions, bold initiative, and unwavering devotion to duty, Lieutenant (jg) Kerry reflected great credit upon himself."

What really happened on the Dong Cung River that day? Kerry's own crew (most of whom support his candidacy) insisted that Kerry chased the injured VC behind the hootch, out of sight of the crew, before killing him. Kerry denies leaving his crew's sight — which would be a brave but foolish tactical mistake for the commander of a beached boat under fire. And both later citations fail to mention Kerry personally killing the VC.

Last week, The Post's Deborah Orin confirmed from Navy sources that the original teletype of the after-action report had been found in the Naval Archives. It confirms the statements of Kerry's crew: "OinC [Officer in Command] of PCF 94 chased VC inland behind hootch and shot him while he fled capturing one B-40 rocket launcher with round in chamber."

The report also makes clear that the three PCFs carried a contingent of 90 Vietnamese RFPF troops, which would have hardly made their patrol numerically inferior to the snipers that ambushed them. And the final calculation of KIA from that mission, according to the immediately-filed after-action report, was 4 KIA, not 10 or a score as the citations state.

Kerry performed well under fire. But his changing stories regarding the action have mysteriously found their way into the extraordinary series of citations that stretch out over a decade for this single action and award.

Lehman, moreover, insists that he never signed the third citation nor wrote the additional language. On Friday, the Navy inspector general concluded, following an investigation prompted by a Judicial Watch request, that the proper procedure had been followed in the processes initially used to approve Kerry's medals and the officers involved had proper authority to approve the awards. But Adm. R. A. Route's probe didn't address any qualitative review of Kerry's awards, and Lehman's disavowal of citation No. 3 has prompted a separate investigation.

Conclusion

posted October 05, 2004 02:29 PM            

The widely repeated myth of "John Kerry, the Vietnam Navy Hero" is one of the most dishonorable and dangerous deceptions ever perpetrated upon the American public.

John Kerry is not a hero. He built this facade with unabashed personal promotion, aided and abetted by a supportive liberal media ready and willing to repeat in print his gross exaggerations, distortions of fact, and outright lies about his abbreviated four-month, 12-day tour of duty in Vietnam.

Until the Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth spoke up in press conferences, television ads, and with the now best-selling book, Unfit for Command, no one - not even the conservative media - seriously or effectively challenged the veracity of John Kerry's self-aggrandizement. Only now is his war-hero facade beginning to peel away.

Kerry arrived in Vietnam on November 17, 1968, with a strong anti-war bias and a self-serving determination to build a foundation for a future political career. Even a most casual review of his biography, Tour of Duty by Douglas Brinkley, will reveal that Kerry entered the Naval Reserve as a "vain intellectual" with contempt for military authority.

Stooped to Achieve Goal

In hindsight, his obvious objective was to emulate his idol, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, serve as short a time as possible, and escape Vietnam unscathed but with sufficient credentials and decorations to portray himself in heroic terms. To achieve his goal, Kerry stooped to scamming an after-combat reporting system that was based on trust, promoting himself for a handful of medals regardless of their dubious merits, so he could "bug out" of the war zone early.

His propensity for gross exaggeration and lying was legend to those who knew him, even early on at Cam Rahn Bay, his first duty station in Vietnam. In Tour of Duty, Kerry recounts the story of the seas being so rough during the monsoon season that sailors came in "******* red and that several people have broken bones" - a ridiculous story that was totally unsubstantiated.

Or consider the story of how Kerry, according to Brinkley, stated, "A sampan navigating in the shroud of darkness was assumed to be Viet Cong and would be fired on" - a breach of the U.S. Navy's rules of engagement. That is an outright defamatory lie. The South Vietnamese National Government had established and promulgated well-defined coastal-control zones to facilitate surveillance, illegal activity, and infiltration of enemy arms from seaward. Although our Swift Boats and Coast Guard cutters did diligently enforce the restricted areas, a boat or ship violating a restricted zone would not be fired upon unless attempting to escape inspection, and only after proper warning in accordance with U.S. Navy strict rules of engagement.

Kerry repeatedly embellishes this lie by referring to "U.S. designated free-fire zones," implying that such zones authorized indiscriminate killing, in order to portray the U.S. military as unwanted, brutish conquerors in Vietnam. In truth, free-fire zones fell within the normal rules of engagement and authorized not an order to fire but discretion to fire first if threatened by, or when confronting, enemy forces.

Kerry's First Purple Heart

Another troubling sequence involves Kerry's first Purple Heart. Exactly two weeks after arrival in Vietnam, Kerry was involved in a scenario in which he was "wounded" by a small fragment, about the size of a rose thorn - a self-inflicted wound resulting from the careless use of his own M-79 grenade launcher. According to the testimony of the attending physician, Dr. Louis Letson, the fragment barely penetrated the skin of his right arm and was easily removed with tweezers and dressed with a Band-Aid. Despite the minor nature of the injury, Kerry still requested a Purple Heart from Division Commander Grant Hibbard. Commander Hibbard denied, noting that there was no hostile fire involved in the incident, no casualty report, and no after-action report - all requisites for a Purple Heart medal.

Still, somehow Kerry circumvented the system and somehow was awarded the Purple Heart some three months after Lt. Commander Hibbard denied the award. Who initiated the award remains a mystery and will remain so until Kerry authorizes the full release of his military and medical records, complete and unaltered. Although Kerry continues to imply that he was the officer in charge of this "Boston Whaler" operation, he fails to mention that he was under the training supervision of Lt. William Schachte, the actual officer in charge and aboard the small craft with Kerry.

Another example of Kerry's lies about his Vietnam "war hero" status involves the now infamous secret mission into Cambodia on Christmas Day, 1968, a fabrication now disclaimed by Kerry campaign spokesman Michael Meehan and Kerry's campaign biographer Douglas Brinkley.

On March 27, 1986, the then-Senator Kerry on the floor of the U.S. Senate claimed he was on Navy duty in Cambodia in Christmas, 1968, at a time when President Nixon was lying to the public, saying there were no U.S. forces in Cambodia at that time. The Congressional Record reports Kerry as saying, "I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have the memory which is seared - seared - in me."

Not even a good lie. President Nixon did not take office until January 20, 1969. Moreover, how does one differentiate the ethnic and political distinctions of the unseen foes shooting at you? As one lie begets another, Kerry's own biographer, Douglas Brinkley, writes in Tour of Duty that Kerry's private Vietnam journal places him on the Bassac River near the city of Sa Dec, Vietnam, 50 miles from the Cambodian border.

Further, the U.S. Army had placed on 24-hour surveillance a manned landing craft blocking passage into Cambodian waters, along with a huge sign designed to prevent entrance, accidental or otherwise, into Cambodian waters. The U.S. Navy also had two river patrol boats patrolling the area for the same reason, making it almost impossible for a U.S. craft to enter Cambodian waters.

Lt. (jg.) Kerry's third Purple Heart is as questionable as the first. On March 13, 1969, Kerry's boat, PCF-94, with provincial troops embarked was engaged in an infantry sweep of a known Viet Cong sanctuary on the Dong Cong canal, in An Xuyen province. During this operation, the troops blew up some huge bins of rice. According to Kerry's biography, "I got a piece of small grenade in my [rear] from one of the rice bin explosions." Kerry would later the same day claim this accidental and minor injury was a result of a mine explosion near his boat that threw him into a bulkhead, smashing his arm.

The truth is that there was only one explosion, and that this single explosion severely damaged PCF-3 near the opposite bank of the Bay Hop River. There was no damage to any other of the five Swift Boats in that formation.

Claims of Making Rescue

Based on the after-action report filed by Lt. (jg.) Kerry, he was awarded a Purple Heart for wounds resulting from a mine explosion and a Bronze Star with a "V" for rescuing Lt. Rassmann, U.S. Army, who fell overboard when Kerry's PCF-94 abruptly fled the scene of action.

Contrary to the false after-action report citing automatic weapons and rifle fire from both banks for 3.1 miles, there were six on-scene witnesses who have stated that there was no enemy fire from either bank. Kerry did return to the scene and pick up Rassmann after it was evident that there was no hostile fire. There was nothing heroic about rescuing Rassmann, who was about to be picked up by another PCF. Had the truth been known, Kerry would have been disqualified from being awarded the Bronze Star.

Medical records also report Kerry's injuries from the March 13, 1968, incident involved only a minor bruise on his right arm and minor shrapnel wounds on his buttocks. Since there was no hostile fire, and only one mine explosion, with no structural effect on PCF-94, there was no justification for the Purple Heart award.

John Kerry was the only man in the entire Task Force of 3,600 men - officers and enlisted - to request transfer out of country based on three Purple Hearts. Particularly galling to his shipmates was the fact that not one of his minor nicks was debilitating nor resulted in one lost day of duty.

Nevertheless, with his three specious Purple Hearts, John Kerry shamelessly invoked an obscure Navy directive allowing him to "jump ship" and return home, there to begin his infamous betrayal of all those U.S. soldiers, Marines, sailors, airmen, and POWs who served honorably in the Vietnam War - more than 2 million Americans who deserved Kerry's respect.

Kerry's leadership within the fraudulent and contemptible Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and his testimony before Senator William Fulbright's Committee in 1971 charging us with unspeakable atrocities remain even today an unspecified and undocumented dishonor to the men and women who dutifully and courageously stayed the course.

Meeting With Madame Binh

Kerry's meeting with Madame Binh representing the Viet Cong and with other members of the Vietnamese Communist delegations to the Paris Peace Conference in 1970, while he was yet a Naval Reserve officer, constitute meeting with the enemy during time of war. His subsequent press conference in July, 1971, urging President Nixon to accept Madame Binh's proposal for the return of our POWs , was a major propaganda victory for the Communist regime. His illegal and traitorous activities with the VVAW and the ilk of Jane Fonda unquestionably had a seriously demoralizing impact on our POWs and probably extended their imprisonment by at least two years.

Kerry is not a hero. He betrayed his comrades-in-arms in time of war. He is a chronic liar and a fraud. This is not about politics; it's about truthfulness, reliability, loyalty, and trust - all absolute tenets of command. John Forbes Kerry is not fit to be Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States of America.

posted October 05, 2004 03:17 PM              

Origins: John Kerry's service in Vietnam as an officer in command of a Swift boat and his subsequent activities as an anti-war protester have engendered a good deal of controversy, especially among those who also served in Vietnam. Many Vietnam veterans were angered by Kerry's anti-war stance after he returned to the U.S., viewing his anti-war activities — particularly his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971 — as unfairly and undeservedly smearing the reputations of all who served in Vietnam.

That said, the piece quoted above, in which a variety of veterans offer their views of John Kerry, isn't really something that can evaluated as "true" or "false." It's true that the men named do exist, that they served in Vietnam, and that they made the statements attributed to them, but the substance of most of these quotes is an expression of opinion, not something objectively classifiable as right or wrong.

The important point to note here is that this piece presents only one side of the story:

Although the men quoted above are often identified as "John Kerry's shipmates," only one of them, Steven Gardner, actually served under Lt. Kerry's command on a Swift boat. The other men who served under Kerry's command continue to speak positively of him:

"In 1969, I was Sen. Kerry's gun mate atop of the Swift boat in Vietnam. And I just wanted to let everyone know that, contrary to all the rumors that you might hear from the other side, Sen. Kerry's blood is red, not blue. I know, I've seen it.

"If it weren't for Sen. John Kerry, on the 28th of February 1969, the day he won the Silver Star . . . you and I would not be having this conversation. My name would be on a long, black wall in Washington, D.C. I saw this man save my life."3

— Fred Short

"I can still see him now, standing in the doorway of the pilothouse, firing his M-16, shouting orders through the smoke and chaos . . . Even wounded, or confronting sights no man should ever have to see, he never lost his cool.

I had to sit on my hands [after a firefight], I was shaking so hard . . . He went to every man on that boat and put his arm around them and asked them how they're doing. I've never had an officer do that before or since. That's the mettle of the man, John Kerry."3

— David Alston

"What I saw back then [in Vietnam] was a guy with genuine caring and leadership ability who was aggressive when he had to be. What I see now is a guy who's not afraid to tackle tough issues. And he knows what the consequences are of putting people's kids in harm's way."2

— James Wasser
Many of Kerry's Vietnam commanders and fellow officers also continue to speak positively of him:

Navy records, fitness reports by Kerry's commanders and scores of interviews with Swift boat officers and crewmen depict a model officer who fought aggressively in river ambushes and won the respect of many of his crewmates and commanders, even as his doubts about the war grew.

"I don't like what he said after the war," said Adrian Lonsdale, who commanded Kerry for three months in 1969. "But he was a good naval officer."2

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"I don't know what conclusions you can draw about someone's ability to lead from their combat experience, but John's service was commendable," said James J. Galvin, a former Swift boat officer . . . "He played by the same rules we all did."1
How well all of these men knew John Kerry is questionable, and discrepancies between how some of them described Kerry thirty-five years ago and how they describe him today suggest that their opinions are largely based upon political differences rather than objective assessments of Kerry's military record. For example, Rear Admiral Roy Hoffman is quoted above, yet the Los Angeles Times reported:

. . . Hoffman and Kerry had few direct dealings in Vietnam. A Los Angeles Times examination of Navy archives found that Hoffman praised Kerry's performance in cabled messages after several river skirmishes.1
Last updated: 30 July 2004

(Here's what he said above:
"I do not believe John Kerry is fit to be Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States. This is not a political issue. It is a matter of his judgment, truthfulness, reliability, loyalty and trust -- all absolute tenets of command. His biography, 'Tour of Duty,' by Douglas Brinkley, is replete with gross exaggerations, distortions of fact, contradictions and slanderous lies. His contempt for the military and authority is evident by even a most casual review of this biography. He arrived in-country with a strong anti-Vietnam War bias and a self-serving determination to build a foundation for his political future. He was aggressive, but vain and prone to impulsive judgment, often with disregard for specific tactical assignments. He was a 'loose cannon.' In an abbreviated tour of four months and 12 days, and with his specious medals secure, Lt.(jg) Kerry bugged out and began his infamous betrayal of all United States forces in the Vietnam War. That included our soldiers, our marines, our sailors, our coast guardsmen, our airmen, and our POWs. His leadership within the so-called Vietnam Veterans Against the War and testimony before Congress in 1971 charging us with unspeakable atrocities remain an undocumented but nevertheless meticulous stain on the men and women who honorably stayed the course. Senator Kerry is not fit for command."
-- Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann, USN (retired), chairman, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth)

The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/swift.asp

Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2004
by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson
This material may not be reproduced without permission.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sources:
1. Braun, Stephen. "Kerry's Own War Over Vietnam."
Los Angeles Times. 5 July 2004 (p. A1).

2. Braun, Stephen. "Kerry's War Tour Serves as Theme, Target."
Los Angeles Times. 29 July 2004 (p. A13).

Brinkley, Douglas. Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War.
New York: HarperCollins, 2004. ISBN 0-06-056523-3.

Klein, Joe. "The Long War of John Kerry."
The New Yorker. 2 December 2002.

Kranish, Michael. "John F. Kerry: Candidate in the Making — Part 2: Heroism, and Growing Concern About War."
The Boston Globe. 16 June 2003.

3. La Ganga, Maria L. "Crewmates Attest to Kerry's Mettle as Wartime Commander."
Los Angeles Times. 29 July 2004 (p. A13).

Zoroya, Greg. "Vietnam Crewmates Steady at Kerry's Side."
USA Today. 29 July 2004 (p. A4).

posted October 05, 2004 03:35 PM              

If Kerry should be smeared and slammed for things that happened 35 years ago, shall we discuss what little Georgie was doing back then?

Do we want a coke head for president? No.

Laura Bush sold weed in College... *tisk* Can't have that, now can we?

posted October 05, 2004 04:06 PM              

i dont want to make any baseless,irresponsible connections but...
http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/laura.asp

posted October 05, 2004 06:01 PM            

----------
March 8, 1965 -- The first Stockholm Conference on Vietnam is held in Stockholm, Sweden. The conference is the creation of Romesh Chandra, chairman of the KGB-funded World Peace Council. Former Soviet bloc spy chief Ion Mihai Pacepa will later describe it as "a permanent international organization to aid or to conduct operations to help Americans dodge the draft or defect, to demoralize its army with anti-American propaganda, to conduct protests, demonstrations, and boycotts, and to sanction anyone connected with the war." The operation is staffed by undercover intelligence officers and funded to the tune of about $15 million per year by the Communist Party. Between 1966 and 1972 it will generate "thousands of 'documentary' materials printed in all the major Western languages describing the 'abominable crimes' committed by American soldiers against civilians in Vietnam, along with counterfeited pictures."

May 2, 1967 -- Bertrand Russell's International War Crimes Tribunal opens in Stockholm, Sweden, with Jean-Paul Sartre as executive president. The members of the tribunal are all well-known supporters of North Vietnam, and the "evidence" presented is supplied largely by North Vietnam, the Vietcong, and communist investigators. The Tribunal concludes that American forces are engaged in the "massive extermination" of the people of South Vietnam, and are committing "genocide in the strictest sense."

November 20, 1967 -- A second session of the International War Crimes Tribunal is held at Roskilde, Denmark.

Early April, 1969 -- U.S. Naval Lieutenant John Kerry leaves Vietnam and is soon reassigned as a personal aide and flag lieutenant to Rear Admiral Walter F. Schlech, Jr. with the Military Sea Transportation Service based in Brooklyn, New York.

November, 1969 -- In response to a public call from the Bertrand Russell foundation in New York, Jeremy Rifkin and Tod Ensign launch a new organization called Citizens Commissions of Inquiry (CCI) to publicize American war crimes in Indochina.

December, 1969 -- Kerry requests an early discharge from the Navy in order to run for a Massachusetts congressional seat on an antiwar platform.

January 3, 1970 -- Kerry is discharged from active duty.

February 13, 1970 -- Candidate Kerry tells the Harvard Crimson, "I'm an internationalist. I'd like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations," and that he wants "to almost eliminate CIA activity."

February, 1970 -- CCI co-sponsors its first "commissions of inquiry" in Toronto and Annapolis MD, and begins providing accounts of war crimes to the press. During the next few months, the CCI holds events in Springfield Massachusetts, Richmond, New York City, Buffalo, Boston, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Portland Oregon.

March, 1970 -- Kerry drops out of the Fourth District congressional race to make way for antiwar activist Father Robert F. Drinan, dean of Boston College Law School, and later becomes chairman of Drinan's campaign. Drinan defeats pro-war incumbent Philip Philbin in the Democratic primary and goes on to win the general election.

May 7, 1970 -- Kerry appears on The Dick Cavett Show for the first time, speaking in opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

May 23, 1970 -- Kerry marries Julia Stimson Thorne in New York.

Late May, 1970 -- John and Julia Kerry travel to Paris on a private trip. Kerry meets with Madam Nguyen Thi Binh, the Foreign Minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Vietnam (PRG) -- the political wing of the Vietcong -- and with representatives of Hanoi who were in Paris for the peace talks.

June, 1970 -- Kerry joins Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), a national veterans group that is part of the Peoples Coalition for Peace and Justice. The PCPJ is a broad coalition of local and national organizations, including the Communist Party, USA, "committed to conducting demonstrations aimed at ending the war in Indochina, and poverty, racism and injustice at home." The VVAW, CCI and PCPJ all have headquarters at 156 Fifth Avenue in New York City. VVAW Executive Secretary Al Hubbard, a former Black Panther, is also on the coordinating committee of the PCPJ. Hubbard soon appoints Kerry to the VVAW's Executive Committee, bypassing the normal election process.

August, 1970 -- Al Hubbard asks Tod Ensign and Jeremy Rifkin of the CCI to join with the VVAW, the Reverend Dick Fernandez of Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam (CALCAV), Jane Fonda, Mark Lane and others to organize national hearings on war crimes. Lane suggests calling the hearings "Winter Soldier," a play on the opening lines of Thomas Paine's The American Crisis: "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink for the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman." By the end of the month the Winter Soldier Investigation has been planned as a simultaneous event featuring "Vietnamese victims" in Windsor, Canada, and Vietnam veterans in Detroit, connected by closed-circuit television.

September 4, 1970 -- Operation RAW (Rapid American Withdrawal). Some 75 VVAW members begin a three-day hike to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Along the way they simulate war atrocities against civilians, and hand out flyers to townspeople stating that they might have been raped, murdered or tortured by the U.S. Infantry had they been Vietnamese, and claiming that "American soldiers do these things every day."

September 7, 1970 -- At the conclusion of Operation RAW, a rally is held in Valley Forge, featuring speeches by John Kerry, Jane Fonda, and Mark Lane. Fonda is quoted as saying that "...My Lai was not an isolated incident but rather a way of life for many of our military."

September 11, 1970 -- A VVAW Executive Committee meeting is attended by president Jan Crumb, executive secretary Al Hubbard, treasurer Jason Gettinger, Northeast representative John Kerry, and three others. The organization leadership decides to picket against the National Guard Association in New York, send Hubbard on a "speaking tour" with Jane Fonda, consider an "appropriate induction center action for purpose of making clear transition from citizen to war criminal," and "sponsor turn in of war crimes testimony to UN" after the Winter Soldier event.

September 17, 1970 -- The VVAW protests the National Guard's national convention, handing out flyers that read:

The National Guard Uses Your Tax Dollar:
To support the military-industrial complex
To honor war criminals - Westmoreland, Laird, Nixon, etc.
To applaud campus murders by National Guard units
To encourage armed attacks on minority communities
October, 1970 -- Jane Fonda, Al Hubbard and Jan Crumb raise money for the VVAW and create new chapters through a nationwide lecture tour covering more than 50 college campuses. Fonda and Mark Lane also plug the VVAW during appearances on the Dick Cavett Show.

November 22, 1970 -- During a fund-raising tour for GI deserters, Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the Black Panthers, Jane Fonda is quoted in the Detroit Free Press as telling a University of Michigan audience, "I would think that if you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would someday become communist," and "The peace proposal of the Viet Cong is the only honorable, just, possible way to achieve peace in Vietnam."

November, 1970 -- After a falling-out between Mark Lane and the CCI leadership, the CCI splits from the VVAW and drops out of the Winter Soldier event. The CCI turns to planning a National Veterans Inquiry in Washington, D.C. in early December. Fonda and Lane continue working with the VVAW on Winter Soldier.

December 27, 1970 -- In Mark Lane: Smearing America's Soldiers in Vietnam, reporter and Vietnam veteran Neil Sheehan savages Mark Lane's Conversations With Americans in the New York Times Book Review as "irresponsible" and details several fabricated claims of American atrocities. Publisher Simon & Schuster quickly cancels future printings of Lane's book.

December 29, 1970 -- Playboy subscribers start receiving the February 1971 issue of the magazine, which contains a full page ad provided for free to the VVAW by publisher Hugh Hefner. The ad brings in thousands of new members during the next several weeks.

January, 1971 -- Jane Fonda raises funds for the Winter Soldier Investigation through a series of benefit concerts. Participants include Fonda, Dick Gregory, Donald Sutherland, Graham Nash, David Crosby and Phil Ochs. Fonda is named Honorary National Coordinator of the event.

Late January, 1971 -- Newly elected Congressman Ronald Dellums permits the CCI to set up a display of "war crime materials" in his Washington office.

Late January, 1971 -- Canadian authorities deny visas to the Vietnamese refugees who had been scheduled to describe American atrocities in Windsor, limiting the Winter Soldier Investigation to the single event in Detroit.

January 31 - February 2, 1971 -- The Winter Soldier Investigation (see invitation). Members of the VVAW meet in a Detroit hotel to document war crimes that they had participated in or witnessed during their combat tours in Vietnam. During the next three days, more than 100 Vietnam veterans and 16 civilians give anguished, emotional testimony describing hundreds of atrocities against innocent civilians in South Vietnam, including rape, arson, torture, murder, and the shelling or napalming of entire villages. The witnesses state that these acts are being committed casually and routinely, under orders, as a matter of policy.

February 2, 1971 -- The VVAW issues a proclamation threatening civil unrest and violence if American forces attempt to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. Here are some excerpts:

"We, as veterans of the war in Vietnam, give notice that if Laos is attacked, we will respond at once. We call for mass civil disobedience to take place all over this country. We call for industry to shut down. We call upon the students to close the schools. We call upon our brothers who are still in uniform to close the military bases throughout America and the world. We call on the anti-war movement to shut down the major cities of America.... If this be a threat, let us make the most of it... We have been trained to fight. If need be we will use the knowledge we have gained against those who are seeking to extend this war." -- VVAW FBI Files: Section 02, page 66.

Early February, 1971 -- VVAW leaders meet with Vietcong representatives in Windsor, Canada after the Winter Soldier Investigation.

February 16, 1971 -- Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland form "FTA" (F*** The Army), an anti-war, anti-American road show that tours near Army bases in order to undermine troop morale. Skits and songs portray American defeats, soldiers refusing to fight, and the murder of officers by their troops. FTA cast members mingle with soldiers after the shows, encouraging them to desert or to sabotage the Army.

February 19, 1971 -- VVAW leaders meet in New York to plan the organization's next action. John Kerry proposes to "march on Washington and take this whole thing to Congress." The protest is designated "Dewey Canyon III," after two military operations into Laos intended to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

March 14 - 18, 1971 -- Jane Fonda, Mark Lane, and VVAW representative Michael Hunter fly to Europe for a five-day tour. In Paris, Fonda meets privately with Madame Binh of the PRG, then the three activists fly to London, where Fonda alleges American atrocities that include "applying electrodes to prisoners' genitals, mass rapes, slicing off of body parts, scalping, skinning alive, and leaving 'heat tablets' around which burned the insides of children who ate them.'"

March 16, 1971 -- The VVAW holds a news conference in the office of Congressman Michael Harrington (D-Mass.) on the third anniversary of the My Lai massacre to announce the forthcoming protest in Washington, DC. Retired Marine commandant General David Shoup and John Kerry demand an immediate end to the war. Kerry, wearing his medals, describes American soldiers as being "given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history."

Early April, 1971 -- The VVAW is flat broke the week before the Dewey Canyon III event, with no way to transport protestors. In his book "Home to War," Gerald Nicosia will report that "Kerry immediately got on the phone to some of the biggest Democratic Party fund-raisers in New York and set up a meeting. When it broke up, VVAW was $75,000 in the black, and busfare for at least a few hundred out-of-towners was assured." Writing in "Winter Soldiers," Richard Stacewicz will cite an FBI memorandum dated April 13, 1971 as follows, "VVAW had received fifty thousand dollars from United States Senators McGovern and Hatfield, who... obtained the money from an unknown New York source."

April 18, 1971 -- John Kerry and Al Hubbard appear on NBC's "Meet the Press" to allege widespread atrocities by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. Hubbard is introduced as a former Air Force captain who had spent two years in Vietnam and was wounded in action. Kerry seems to admit to committing war crimes, saying, "There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50 calibre machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages."

April 18 - 23, 1971 -- Operation Dewey Canyon III. More than a thousand VVAW members stage an "invasion" of Washington D.C., where they hold memorial ceremonies, meet with sympathetic members of Congress, camp on the Mall, perform "guerilla theater" -- re-enactments of atrocities against civilians, complete with fake blood -- on the Capitol steps and in front of the Justice Department, and hold a candlelight march around the White House carrying an upside-down American flag. At the end of the six-day event, a number of the veterans throw military medals and ribbons over a fence in front of the Capitol in a gesture of contempt. Many shout obscenities or threats against the government. The protests receive enthusiastic coverage in the communist Daily World newspaper on April 20th (Part 1, Part 2), 21st (Part 1, Part 2), 23rd (Part 1, Part 2), and 24th (Part 1, Part 2). Later in 1971, Kerry and the VVAW will publish The New Soldier, a book of essays and photographs documenting the event.

April 22, 1971 -- John Kerry testifies on behalf of the VVAW before the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs. He claims that American soldiers had "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan..." and that these acts were "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." Kerry also accuses the U.S. military of "rampant" racism and of being "more guilty than any other body" of violating the Geneva Conventions, supports "Madame Binh's points" when asked to recommend a peace proposal, and states that any reprisals against the South Vietnamese after an American withdrawal would be "far, far less than the 200,000 a year who are murdered by the United States of America."

April 22, 1971 -- The NBC Nightly News reveals that Al Hubbard had not been an Air Force Captain, as he claimed, but a staff sergeant E-5. A later investigation of Hubbard's military records shows that he was never assigned to Vietnam.

April 24, 1971 -- Hundreds of thousands of protestors march in Washington, D.C., led by members of the VVAW. Kerry addresses the crowd, accepting applause on behalf of "the 1,200 active-duty GIs who took part in the [Dewey Canyon III] demonstration." The Daily World is on the job, with glowing coverage of the day's events (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4).

April 25 - 28, 1971 -- Congressman Dellums sponsors ad hoc war crimes hearings organized by the CCI and attended at least in part by twenty members of Congress.

May 3, 1971 -- VVAW members throw bags of cow manure on the steps of the Mall Entrance to the Pentagon, then offer to clean up the mess in return for an audience with an assistant Secretary of Defense. This offer is rejected, and 28 people are arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

May 25, 1971 -- Kerry appears on 60 Minutes with Morley Safer. Asked whether he wants to be President of the United States, Kerry replies in the negative, and calls it a "crazy question."

May 30-31, 1971 -- Several hundred VVAW members march from Concord to Boston, reversing the path of Paul Revere's 1775 midnight ride. After defying a ban on overnight use of Battle Green in Lexington, site of the first battle of the American Revolution, 458 people are arrested and held overnight, including John Kerry. The following day the group marches from Bunker Hill to Boston Common.

June 20, 1971 -- Kerry appears on The Dick Cavett Show to debate Navy veteran John O'Neill, who is representing the group Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace.

July 17, 1971 -- Following a month-long speaking tour of the Soviet Union and other countries, six VVAW and CCI members meet with PRG representatives in Paris to show support for the communist peace plan.

July 20, 1971 -- Leaders of the VVAW hold a staff meeting. They agree to use the designations favored by North Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and the Vietcong (Provisional Revolutionary Government) for future press releases, decide to remove all American flags from VVAW offices, and discuss how best to handle Al Hubbard's planned trip to Hanoi.

July 24, 1971 -- The Daily World features a photograph of John Kerry speaking in support of the Provisional Revolutionary Government (Vietcong) Seven Point Plan.

August, 1971 -- The FBI opens a full investigation of the VVAW to "determine the extent of control over VVAW by subversive groups and/or violence-prone elements in the antiwar movement," noting that "sources had provided information that VVAW was stockpiling weapons, VVAW had been in contact with North Vietnam officials in Paris, France, VVAW was receiving funds from former CPUSA members and VVAW was aiding and financing U.S. military deserters. Additionally, information had been received that some individual chapters throughout the country had been infiltrated by the youth groups of the CPUSA and the SWP [Socialist Workers Party]." Source: FBI Memorandum to Senate Select Committee, 12/2/75, pp. 2-3; Hearings, Vol. 6, Exhibit 72.

August, 1971 -- VVAW Executive Committee member Joe Urgo travels with other antiwar leaders to North Vietnam, where he meets with Prime Minister Pham Van Dong and others. According to FBI records, (see PDF file) Urgo makes the following proposals to the communist leaders: 1) that the VVAW make tapes to be broadcast over Radio Hanoi to get U.S. troops to stop fighting, and 2) to send a VVAW delegation to Hanoi in the near future.

Late August, 1971 -- Kerry and Hubbard meet with leftist millionaires in East Hampton to promote the VVAW and show film clips of atrocity claims from the Winter Soldier Investigation. According to the New York Times, a request for funds had the attendees "scrambling for pens and checkbooks."

Early November, 1971 -- According to FBI records, (see PDF file) Al Hubbard meets with the North Vietnamese and Vietcong delegations in Paris. Hubbard's trip comes in response to an invitation to "VVAW, Communist Party (CP) USA, and left wing group in Paris, name unrecalled," and is financed by the Communist Party USA.

November 7, 1971 -- John Kerry tells the Sunday Oklahoman that the political power structure within the United States can and must change if the nation is to avoid violent efforts to seize power, saying, "If it (the government) doesn't change we are asking for trouble. If it is not done, those who are talking about seizing it will have every right to go after it." [see page 251 of Section 10 of the VVAW FBI files]

November 12 - 15, 1971 -- the VVAW leadership meets in Kansas City. Fearing surveillance by authorities, the group relocates the meeting to another building. They debate, then vote down a plan to assassinate several pro-war U.S. Senators. Despite John Kerry's claim to have left the VVAW before this event, several witnesses, meeting minutes and FBI records eventually place Kerry at the Kansas City meeting.

November 15, 1971 -- After trying unsuccessfully to have Al Hubbard removed from the group's leadership, John Kerry resigns from the Executive Committee of the VVAW for personal reasons. Kerry will continue to represent the organization in interviews and public appearances for several months.

December 26, 1971 -- Fifteen VVAW protesters take over the Statue of Liberty for some 40 hours and drape an upside-down American flag across the statue's face. Per the New York Post, the VVAW later receives a "congratulatory message" from Vietcong negotiator Le Mai in Paris.

December 27, 1971 -- Twenty-five VVAW protesters take over the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia.

December 28, 1971 -- 150 VVAW protesters splash bags of blood in front of the White House, then take over the Lincoln Memorial. 87 are arrested. John Kerry tells the New York Times that he is helping raise bail money for some of the demonstrators.

January 11, 1972 -- John Kerry represents the VVAW at Dartmouth College.

January 25, 1972 -- John Kerry represents the VVAW at the "People's State of the Union" in Washington, D.C.

February, 1972 -- A VVAW delegation attends a World Assembly for Peace and Independence of the People of Indochina in Versailles, France.

April 22, 1972 -- John Kerry represents the VVAW at the "Emergency March for Peace" in Bryant Park in New York City.

July 8 - 22, 1972 -- Jane Fonda visits Hanoi, where she makes numerous radio broadcasts to American and South Vietnamese military personnel encouraging mutiny and desertion, while repeatedly claiming that the United States is committing war crimes in Vietnam. Fonda also visits American prisoners, reporting on the air that they are being "well cared for" and that they wished to convey their "sense of disgust of the war and their shame for what they have been asked to do." Upon leaving North Vietnam, Fonda accepts from her hosts a ring made from the wreckage of a downed American plane.

July 29 - August 12, 1972 -- Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark travels to Hanoi on behalf of the communist Stockholm International Commission for Inquiry. Clark denounces the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam and visits American POWs, reporting that they are in good health and their conditions "could not be better."

September 18, 1972 -- John Kerry's brother Cameron and Vietnam veteran Thomas Vallely are arrested in Lowell, Massachusetts in the basement of a building that houses both Kerry's campaign headquarters and those of opposing candidate Tony DiFruscia. Cameron Kerry and Vallely are charged with breaking and entering with intent to commit larceny. Kerry will win the Democratic nomination for a Massachusetts congressional seat the next day, but lose in the general election to Republican Paul Cronin. Thomas Vallely will later become director of the Vietnam Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Late 1972 -- The U.S Congress votes to eliminate funding for military operations in Indochina.

January, 1973 -- The Nixon Administration signs the Treaty of Paris.

February and March, 1973 -- American prisoners of war are released by North Vietnam. They report having been starved, beaten and tortured by their captors, in an effort to make them sign documents in which they admitted to committing war crimes.

April, 1973 -- Jane Fonda calls the freed American prisoners "hypocrites and pawns," insisting that, "Tortured men do not march smartly off planes, salute the flag, and kiss their wives. They are liars. I also want to say that these men are not heroes."

Fall, 1974 -- North Vietnam initiates minor probing attacks into South Vietnam, in violation of the Paris treaty. There is no military response by the United States.

Early 1975 -- North Vietnam launches a massive invasion of South Vietnam.

April 30, 1975 -- Saigon falls.

1975 - 1979 -- Communist regimes in southeast Asia murder an estimated two million Cambodians, as well as tens of thousands of South Vietnamese. One million South Vietnamese are imprisoned in "re-education camps," and hundreds of thousands die there. An additional two million flee the country, with many drowning in the attempt.

1978 -- The original VVAW splits when a minority breaks away to form Vietnam Veterans Against the War Anti-Imperialist (VVAWAI), with the larger faction retaining the original name. Both the VVAW and the rabidly anti-American VVAWAI remain in operation today.

1978 -- Former VVAW leader Robert Muller founds the Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA). The VVA also describes John Kerry as a "co-founder" of the organization. In the late 1980s, Muller and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (VVAF) will split from the VVA.

posted October 05, 2004 06:05 PM            

How can the media discount Kerry's betrayal of all U.S. forces fighting in Vietnam, when he testified before the U.S. Congress in 1971, that all U.S. armed forces including his own shipmates committed unspeakable atrocities on a "day to day basis with the participation of all levels of command?" That is simply a lie. Not one alleged atrocity or even a specific accusation has been documented by John Kerry or anyone else to our knowledge.

Now that the memos that called into question President Bush's fulfillment of his National Guard obligations have been discredited, reporters and columnists have seemingly made a tacit bargain to treat the stories as two sides of a single coin. Its a tidy story, one summed up by Kerry's official biographer, Douglas Brinkley, "Every American now knows that there's something really screwy about George Bush and the National Guard, and they know that John Kerry was not the war hero we thought he was."

The only problem is that it's not that simple. Consider the facts.

John Kerry claimed on numerous occasions, including during a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, to have spent Christmas Eve of 1968 in Cambodia: "I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared - seared - in me." When the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth challenged Kerry on this story, he was forced to backpedal. His spokespersons now claim, without proof, that Kerry crossed the border on one occasion, but they have conceded that he was not there on Christmas as he claimed.

And yet, in the looking glass world of today's media, Kerry, who lied, is being unfairly attacked, while the Swift Boat Vets, who told the truth, are dishonest.

The Swift Boat Vets have also called attention to the first of Kerry's three Purple Hearts. As an officer-in-training, Kerry took part in a patrol mission that resulted in a brief firefight between Kerry's boat and suspected Viet Cong forces on shore. The problems for Kerry's account of that mission, of course, are that there was no report of any hostile fire that day (as would be required), nor do the records at Cam Ranh Bay reveal any such hostile fire. There is also no casualty report, as would have been required had there actually been a casualty. In addition, no one else on the mission, including Kerry, claim the presence of enemy fire.

This is why Kerry initially was refused the Purple Heart by his commanding officer. It was only after he re-filed three months later, after the individuals involved had all moved on to other duty stations, that his request for a Purple Heart was granted.

In fact, Kerry's injury that day was consistent with shrapnel from an M-79 grenade launcher that he fired at the shoreline too close to his own boat not enemy fire. Kerry's campaign now has even admitted that it is possible this first Purple Heart was awarded for a self-inflicted wound.

So once again, Kerry was forced to change his story in response to questions raised by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. But Kerrys self-aggrandizing, medal-hunting behavior is somehow beyond reproach while the Swift Vets are blasted by media critics.

Whats most striking is that these are not isolated incidents. As stories like whether or not Kerry actually threw his (or someone elses) medals (or ribbons) over the White House fence make clear, this is a man not, strictly speaking, wedded to a single truth.

posted October 05, 2004 06:07 PM            

To the Swift Boat Veterans For the Truth, John Kerry was a betrayer, plain and simple. First, he betrayed his fellow sailors by leaving Vietnam early, after serving only four short months, while others served full tours, or extended their tours, despite the dangers of combat.

Second, he betrayed the over 2 million men and women who served honorably in Vietnam when he testified to Sen. Fulbright's committee in April 1971 that they were the army of Genghis Khan, committing war crimes on a daily basis, with their atrocities completely approved up and down the chain of command.

John Kerry wanted to be a war hero of a war he said was immoral. The self-contradiction implied in that statement never seemed to bother him. Put simply, he wanted to be an honored member of a select club, even though he insulted the club's members and claimed to the world that the club itself had no legitimate moral authority.

Unfortunately for John Kerry, the most memorable speech of his life may prove to be one of his first, his 1971 testimony before Sen. Fulbright's committee. There he sat in street-theater military fatigues, claiming that the Vietnam War was a mistake, that the United States was a colonial power interfering in a civil war, that we were in Vietnam not to win a victory against godless communism, but to protect a corrupt regime and a puppet dictator in South Vietnam.

John Kerry in that April 1971 testimony asked his most memorable public question: "How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?" Perhaps the ultimate mistake was his. To run for president with his Vietnam "war hero" story as the central pillar of his campaign invited the criticism that his true legacy was that of a Judas – a betrayer, who abandoned his brothers-in-arms on the field of battle and denigrated their honor once he secured the safety of home.

Now we are engaged in another war in a distant part of the world. The president of the United States has claimed we are in Iraq to fight international terrorism and to defend freedom. Where is candidate John Kerry on the question? In the past week, he has given two speeches, one at New York University and another at Temple University, which are remarkable replays of his 1971 anti-war testimony to the Senate.

Kerry tells us the war in Iraq is just another mistake:

The president has said that he "miscalculated" in Iraq and that it was a "catastrophic" success. In fact, the president has made a series of catastrophic decisions... from the beginning... in Iraq. At every fork in the road, he has taken the wrong turn and led us in the wrong direction. The first and most fundamental mistake was the president's failure to tell the truth to the American people.

– Sen. Kerry at New York University, Sept. 20, 2004

Iraq, like Vietnam, according to Senator Kerry, is just another civil war:

We are fighting a growing insurgency in an ever-widening war-zone.

– Sen. Kerry at NYU, Sept. 20, 2004

The war in Iraq, for Sen. Kerry, is no more a war against terrorism than Vietnam was a war against communism:

The invasion of Iraq was a profound diversion from the battle against our greatest enemy – al-Qaida – which killed more than 3,000 people on 9-11 and which still plots our destruction today.

– Sen. Kerry at Temple University, September 24, 2004

Now John Kerry pledges he will fight a "tougher, smarter, more effective war on terror?" But how? By taking the side of the enemy and arguing, as he did in Vietnam, that our enemies are reasonable people who are right to oppose us in this war?

If the past is to be taken as a prologue to the future, the parallels between John Kerry's anti-administration rhetoric on Iraq today – and his war-protest rhetoric of 1971 – must be taken seriously. John Kerry began his campaign at the Democratic National Committee a "war hero," but as was the case with Vietnam, he has now shifted to his second phase, presenting himself as a vocal "anti-war" critic, this time of President Bush's efforts in Iraq.

John Kerry clearly has no commitment to consistency, but he does have an unwavering ambition to win the presidential election in 2004, no matter what he has to say. The parallels to 1971 are all too apparent.

How can we be sure that John Kerry will not end up this time where he ended up last time – betraying our troops by withdrawing from the field of battle at any cost should he ever get the chance to give the order?

posted October 05, 2004 06:10 PM            

It details Mr. Kerry's participation in a naval operation on the Bay Hap River on March 13, 1969, in such glowing terms that Mr. Kerry was awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for pulling Special Forces officer James Rassman out of the water while under heavy enemy fire. This third Purple Heart award allowed Kerry to cut short his tour in Vietnam after only four months.

The report in question described a mission of five Swift boats ambushed on their way to the sea by a mine explosion that seriously damaged one boat while simultaneously the Swift boats received "heavy A/W [automatic weapons] and S/A [small arms] [fire] from both banks. Fire continued for about 5,000 meters," a little over three miles. The admiral who commanded the Swift boats in Vietnam, Roy Hoffman, finds that detail alone absurd. Admiral Hoffman points out "There was never an incident under my command in all of Vietnam where my boats were engaged by continuous fire from both banks of a half-mile in length, much less three."

The report mentions two other mines detonating as well. So according to this report, which now stands as the official Navy record, this Swift boat mission concluded by running a veritable gauntlet of almost 3 miles of enemy fire from both banks, the detonation of three mines, and yet the only casualties occurred on the boat that hit the first mine. The Swift boats managed to escape and even more miraculously retrieve the sinking PCF-3 without getting a single bullet hole in any vessel or crewmember.

"It is miraculous all right, because it never happened," recalls Larry Thurlow, who commanded the mission."PCF-3 hit a mine, all of my boats directed supressing fire on both banks expecting the mine to be followed up by gunfire.

"But after a couple of minutes we ceased firing and took steps to aid the sinking PCF-3 and its injured crewmembers. There was never a shot fired at us and no additional mines went off either. And if we had been facing gunfire from both sides of three miles of riverbank, I would have called in the standby air support. I didn't. All I called for was damage control to be brought to us so we could keep the PCF-3 afloat."

After he returned to the United States the following month, Mr. Thurlow was surprised to find that he had received a Bronze Star himself because of his activities described in the after action report.

When Mr. Thurlow first saw the report last July he didn't recognize the mission it contained. The Kerry campaign pointed to Mr. Thurlow's own citation referring to his being "under constant enemy small arms fire" as well when the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth first contested Mr. Kerry's account in August.

As the commander of the mission, normally Mr. Thurlow would have filed the disputed after-action report. But he denies writing it. And the "MARKET TIME Spot Report" supports his denial. It was written by someone designated "TE 194.5.4.4/1." An operations order re-sent two months earlier, on January 3, by Admiral Hoffman, set the format for the designation. The operations order procedures, originated by the operational commander of the Coastal 11 An Thoi unit Mr. Kerry served with, Commander Adrian Lonsdale, were the basis for the terms of designation used in this kind of report subsequently. Upon seeing the report Mr. Lonsdale recognized it and recalled the procedures it required as being followed in his command.

"TE" for example refers to a "task element," which is defined by the numbers to the right that shows the command structure over the task element in action. "194" is Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, commander of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam; "5" is Admiral Roy Hoffman's Swift boat command; "4" is Commander Adrian Lonsdale's command; the last "4" is Captain George Elliot's Swift boat base at An Thoi, where the boats on this mission were based. And the final "/1" indicates someone other than the commander of the mission. If the report had been submitted by the mission commander, in this case Larry Thurlow, according to the operations order, it would have begun with a "C" for commander of the Task Element, and the sender would have been "CTE 194.5.4.4."

According to a Navy communications expert, Troy Jenkins, who has examined the message traffic, the report in question was sent from the USCGC Spencer, Commander Lonsdale's command ship, at 11:20 that night. Only three of the officers on the mission that day were on the Spencer: John Kerry, Dick Pease, and Donald Droz. Droz took the wounded from the mine explosion to be examined and treated at the Spencer, including the third officer, the severely wounded Dick Pease. Since the Spencer had no helipad for the evacuation of the wounded, Mr. Droz then had to return to the USS Washtenaw County, an LST stationed about 25 nautical miles away, for medevac, leaving only Mr. Kerry aboard the Spencer at the time the message was sent at 11:20 that night.

Could Mr. Droz have somehow written the report? Mr. Lonsdale said he thinks that command precedence of days in Swift boat service alone rules this out: "According to the command procedure I set down, Kerry would have been the only logical candidate. Kerry had been in Viet Nam since November. Droz just arrived at An Thoi in February."

Larry Thurlow adds, "I never liked the paperwork anyway. I was happy to have Kerry write them up."

And there is another factor. Mr. Thurlow ordered Mr. Droz to take care of the wounded after the action on the Bay Hap. Mr. Droz had ferried them 40 miles out to the Spencer and now had to take them 25 miles back to the LST. Moving wounded on and off a 327-foot- long Coast Guard cutter from a 50-foot Swift boat on the open sea was not something Mr. Droz was likely to leave unsupervised long enough to dash off a report. Mr. Kerry had no duties other than reporting to the sick bay, where according to his doctor recently he was seen at 7 that night. And he spent the night on the Spencer.

The head of the Operational Archives Branch of the Naval Historical Center in Washington, Kathy Lloyd, has verified the operations order of January 3, 1969. Neither the Kerry campaign nor its Swift Boat Veteran critics contest the validity of the after-action report by "TE 194.5.4.4/1."

Kerry spokesmen have repeatedly insisted that Mr. Kerry denies writing the report and that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were arguing with the official Navy record. But if "the official Navy record" now turns out to have been written by Mr. Kerry himself, the principal beneficiary of its glowing references to his performance, the Swift Boat critics' charges look far more consequential.

After all, the report completely leaves out how Kerry's own boat, PCF 94, ran downriver, leaving James Rassman overboard and the other three boats to deal with the ambush and the sinking PCF 3. All the living boat commanders on that mission are in firm agreement on that action by Kerry and agree that the report is a fraudulent misrepresentation of an action they remember well.

This article was published by The New York Sun.
http://swift4.he.net/~swift4/article.php?story=200410010639384

posted October 05, 2004 08:15 PM              

Sunday, August 22, 2004

A Vietnam veteran who served with Sen. John Kerry in a swift boat group broke a 35-year silence this weekend to back Kerry's version of events from one of their missions together and to chastise veterans critical of the senator as having "splashed doubt on all of us."

The veteran, William B. Rood, is now an editor at the Chicago Tribune, which ran a first-person article in which he recounted the mission. His account added to a growing debate over the most serious claims from the group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. And it ensured that questions swirling around the veracity of its charges, and the Kerry campaign's charges that it was a front for Bush, would dominate the campaign for yet another day.

Rood stepped forward after Kerry called him in recent days as members of the swift boat group blanketed cable TV and talk radio to repeat their claim, also made in a book, that Kerry fabricated his military accomplishments to win medals.

The Kerry campaign also fought back by releasing a new Internet advertisement on Saturday highlighting charges made against Sen. John McCain by military supporters of Bush in 2000 and a public call by Kerry's running mate, Sen. John Edwards, for Bush to tell the group -- much of whose initial financial support came from men who have supported Bush and his father's political endeavors -- to cease running advertisements against Kerry.

The swift boat group defended itself, providing a statement on Saturday that Rood's article was politically motivated. The group continues to raise money and on Friday introduced a new advertisement in which former prisoners of war recount the pain Kerry's 1971 anti-war comments caused them when they were being held by the Viet Cong.

Bush's campaign confirmed an allegation by the Kerry campaign on Saturday that one of the veterans who appears in the group's latest television advertisement was a member of the campaign's veterans' advisory committee. The campaign said that it dismissed Kenneth Cordier after learning he was part of the swift boat group.

The Bush campaign denies involvement with the group and on Saturday released a statement to the Federal Election Commission saying the Kerry campaign's charges of coordination were untrue and unfounded. The Bush camp has declined to tell the group to stop running ads, but aides said Kerry should join Bush in calling for all outside groups to stop advertising.

In his article, Rood disputed a claim made by the swift boat group in its book, "Unfit for Command," that Kerry had received his Silver Star for chasing down a lone Viet Cong teenager "in a loincloth" who may or may not have been armed on Feb. 28, 1969.

Rood was the skipper of one of the three boats involved in the mission with Kerry to conduct a sweep through a tributary of the Bay Hap River for enemy. He added, referring to John O'Neill, a co-author of "Unfit for Command" and a leader of the swift boat group: "The man Kerry chased was not the 'lone' attacker at that site, as O'Neill suggests. There were others who fled."

The swift boat group released a statement on Saturday from O'Neill, in which he stood by its account.

The Kerry campaign sent out a new Internet advertisement to its supporters highlighting an exchange between McCain and Bush during a 2000 debate in which McCain confronted Bush for hosting an event at which the leader of a veterans group that McCain characterized as a "fringe" group questioned McCain's commitment to veterans.

The spot includes an on-screen heading that says, "George Bush is up to his old tricks."

posted October 05, 2004 08:24 PM              

By FORREST ROSE
Published Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Every four years, we decry the current presidential campaign as the most negative ever, even though the political history of the United States tells us otherwise.

Statesmen in knee breeches thought nothing of publicly questioning a rival’s valor, honesty and ancestry. The offended party in turn could resort to the code duello, with a fair hope of silencing his critic once and for all.

I’ll bet John Kerry wishes he had that option. Or maybe he’d prefer to exercise another time-honored political tradition and administer a public caning to the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, or Swift Liars to Elect Bush, as I like to call ’em.

Kerry’s real antagonist in this matter is in the White House, smirking behind his hand, several stages safely removed from the vomitory ad blitz denigrating Kerry’s Vietnam War service. George W. Bush knows how to distance himself from anything involving Vietnam. The record is clear on that.

The record also shows Kerry’s accounts of these historical events are accurate, by and large - although recollections vary because of what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld rightly called "the fog of war."

Seizing on this ambiguity, John O’Neal, founder of the Swift Liars, began dogging Kerry in the early ’70s, when the medaled hero returned from Southeast Asia and denounced the war. O’Neal now has the backing of a right-wing Texas millionaire and a national-size target in candidate Kerry. This is pie for him.

The Swift Liars’ accounts contradict the record at almost every point, but they are protected by the First Amendment. It allows anyone to say anything about a political figure. If the target can prove the slander was known to be untrue and motivated by malice, he can sue later.

The mainstream news media, which derive the major benefit from this reading of the Constitution, have ignored the inherent tradeoff - namely that they have the obligation to ferret out the provable facts from the scurrilous propaganda. So far, the media have lacked the courage or the capacity to expose the Swift Liars as the partisan assassins of character that they are. Such an exposé might be perceived as somehow liberal.

Accordingly, the purveyors of news dutifully report the latest smears along with the latest denials and let opposing "spokesmen" battle it out on the cable networks in "he-said-he-said" formats that clarify nothing.

Others are joining the malevolent chorus. Bob Dole, a reliable Republican hatchet man back in his salad days, had mellowed in 30 years into a respected former solon, failed presidential candidate and doe-eyed Viagra pitchman. Last week, Dole showed a bit of his old form, raring up to say Kerry "never bled" and he should apologize to Vietnam veterans for suggesting in 1971 that atrocities had been committed there.

Maybe Dole has been drinking too much of that stiffener juice, or perhaps he’s aggravated because his own war wounds were more serious than Kerry’s. Kerry, however, does carry shards of shrapnel in his leg, so he must have bled. Maybe the evil Viet Cong were using magic shrapnel; Dole doesn’t get into details.

And is he seriously suggesting U.S. troops committed no atrocities during all those years of war? That would be a delusion on par with Holocaust denial. Why hasn’t Dan Rather pointed this out?

When Kerry spoke out in ’71, he told his countrymen things they needed to hear, even if they didn’t particularly welcome the news. In a way, that was more courageous and patriotic than his battle exploits. Such revelations - like the more recent abuses at Abu Ghraib prison - are guaranteed to cause discomfort, but they are absolutely crucial in a democracy. The acknowledgement of horrible realities is the price we pay for self-rule.

Kerry invited scrutiny of his military record when he played it up so relentlessly at his nominating convention. That vainglorious approach made me roll my eyes like a ham actor, but I figured it would at least inoculate the candidate against charges of insufficient manliness.

Who knew the corporate-owned media would not dare to observe the evidence overwhelmingly indicates O’Neal and his crew are a pack of partisan hacks who wouldn’t know the truth if they stubbed their toe on it? Now Kerry has to buy ad time to refute their canards.

The president has refused to denounce the sleaze-ball ads, despite calls for him to do so. Under the circumstances, that amounts to an endorsement. People might remember that when they tire of the dirt and the mud, the clever distortions and deceptions that distinguish modern political campaigns.

Bush had a chance to speak against the sleaze, and he didn’t do it.

posted October 05, 2004 08:28 PM              

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 22, 2004; Page A01

When John F. Kerry rescued Jim Rassmann from the Bay Hap River in the jungles of Vietnam in March 1969, neither man could possibly have imagined that the episode would become a much-disputed focus of an American presidential campaign 35 years later.

For Kerry, then a green and gangly Navy lieutenant junior grade and now the Democratic challenger to a wartime Republican president, that tale of heroism under fire has become integral to his campaign. A centerpiece of public rallies, videos and a new campaign advertisement, it has helped distinguish the candidate from his Democratic primary rivals and from President Bush, who spent the war at home as a member of the Texas Air National Guard.

For the Massachusetts senator's critics, who include three of the five Swift boat skippers who were present that day, the incident demonstrates why Kerry does not deserve to be commander in chief. They accuse him of cowardice, hogging the limelight and lying. Far from displaying coolness under fire, they say, Kerry was never fired upon and fled the scene at the moment of maximum danger.

Establishing the facts is complicated not merely by fading memories and sometimes ambiguous archival evidence, but also by the bitterly partisan nature of the presidential campaign.

An investigation by The Washington Post into what happened that day suggests that both sides have withheld information from the public record and provided an incomplete, and sometimes inaccurate, picture of what took place. But although Kerry's accusers have succeeded in raising doubts about his war record, they have failed to come up with sufficient evidence to prove him a liar.

Two best-selling books have formed the basis for public discussion of the events of March 13, 1969, as a result of which Kerry won a Bronze Star and his third Purple Heart. The fullest account of Kerry's experience in Vietnam is "Tour of Duty" by prominent presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. It was written with Kerry's cooperation and with exclusive access to his diaries and other writings about the Vietnam War. "Unfit for Command," by John E. O'Neill, who succeeded Kerry as commander of his Swift boat, and Jerome R. Corsi, lays out a detailed attack on Kerry's record.

The Post's research shows that both accounts contain significant flaws and factual errors. This reconstruction of the climactic day in Kerry's military career is based on more than two dozen interviews with former crewmates and officers who served with him, as well as research in the Naval Historical Center here, where the Swift boat records are preserved. Kerry himself was the only surviving skipper on the river that day who declined a request for an interview.

On the core issue of whether Kerry was wounded under enemy fire, thereby qualifying for a third Purple Heart, the Navy records clearly favor Kerry. Several documents, including the after-action report and the Bronze Star citation for a Swift boat skipper who has accused Kerry of lying, refer to "all units" coming under "automatic and small-weapons fire."

The eyewitness accounts, on the other hand, are conflicting. Kerry's former crew members support his version, as does Rassmann, the Special Forces officer rescued from the river. But many of the other skippers and enlisted men who were on the river that day dispute Kerry's account and have signed up with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a public advocacy group that has aired television advertisements accusing Kerry of lying about his wartime service.

From an outsider's perspective, the flotilla of five 50-foot Swift boats that followed the Bay Hap River that humid March day has spawned two competing bands of brothers. One is fiercely loyal to Kerry and frequently appears with him at campaign events. The other dislikes him intensely and is doing everything it can to block his election.

Many Swift boat veterans opposed to Kerry acknowledge that their disgust with him was fueled by his involvement in the antiwar movement. When they returned from Vietnam, they say, they were dogged by accusations of atrocities. While Kerry went on to make a prominent political career, they got jobs as teachers, accountants, surveyors and oil field workers. When he ran for president, partly on the strength of his war record, their resentment exploded.

At one level, an attempt to establish what happened during a Vietcong ambush on the Bay Hap River 35 years ago is a simple search for facts. At another, it is the story of the divisions that tore the United States, and its armed forces, into two opposing camps at the time of the Vietnam War -- tensions that have resurfaced with a vengeance during the current political campaign.

"The old wounds have been reopened, and they still bleed," said Larry Thurlow, one of Kerry's accusers, who was awarded a Bronze Star for heroism for going to the rescue of a boat that was rocked by a mine explosion that day. He says he got involved with the anti-Kerry campaign organized by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth because Kerry's distortion of the truth about the Vietnam War "makes me madder than hell."

"We decided we aren't going to take it anymore."

Boats Thrown Into Fight

When Kerry signed up to command a Swift boat in the summer of 1968, he was inspired by the example of his hero, John F. Kennedy, who had commanded the PT-109 patrol boat in the Pacific in World War II. But Kerry had little expectation of seeing serious action. At the time the Swift boats -- or PCFs (patrol craft fast), in Navy jargon -- were largely restricted to coastal patrols. "I didn't really want to get involved in the war," Kerry wrote in a book of war reminiscences published in 1986.

The role of the Swift boats changed dramatically toward the end of 1968, when Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., commander of U.S. naval forces in South Vietnam, decided to use them to block Vietcong supply routes through the Mekong Delta. Hundreds of young men such as Kerry, with little combat experience, suddenly found themselves face to face with the enemy.

Taking a 50-foot aluminum boat up a river or canal was replete with danger, ranging from ambushes to booby traps to mines. Kerry and his comrades would experience all these risks on March 13, 1969. The purpose of the mission was twofold: to insert pro-government forces upriver in a group of Vietcong-controlled villages; and more generally to show the flag, keeping the waterways free for commerce.

In some ways, it was a day like any other. The previous day, Kerry had taken part in a Swift boat expedition that had come under fire, and several windows of Kerry's boat were blown out. A friend, Lt. j.g. William B. Rood, almost lost an eye in the ambush. [Now an editor with the Chicago Tribune, Rood yesterday broke three decades of public silence to support Kerry's version of how he won the Silver Star on Feb. 28. Rood has no firsthand knowledge of the Bronze Star incident.]

In other respects, March 13 would mark the culmination of Kerry's Vietnam War career. With three Purple Hearts, he became eligible for reassignment. Within three weeks, he was out of Vietnam and headed home after a truncated four-month combat tour.

As commander of PCF-94, Kerry was responsible for ferrying a group of Chinese Vietnamese mercenaries, known as Nung, eight miles up the Bay Hap River, and then five miles up the winding Dong Cung Canal to suspected Vietcong villages. His passengers included Rassmann, the Special Forces officer, who had run into Kerry at a party a couple of weeks before and remembered him as "a tall, skinny guy with this humongous jaw."

The expedition began to go wrong soon after they inserted the Nung troops into a deserted village off the Dong Cung Canal. As the mercenaries searched from house to house, Rassmann recalled, one reached for a cloth bag at the base of a coconut tree and was blown to pieces. It was a booby trap. Kerry, who arrived on the scene soon after, helped wrap the body in a poncho and drag it back to the boat, diving into a ditch when he thought he was under fire.

"I never want to see anything like it again," Kerry wrote later. "What was left was human, and yet it wasn't -- a person had been there only a few moments earlier and . . . now it was a horrible mass of torn flesh and broken bones."

In "Tour of Duty," these thoughts are attributed to a "diary" kept by Kerry. But the endnotes to Brinkley's book say that Kerry "did not keep diaries in these weeks in February and March 1969 when the fighting was most intense." In the acknowledgments to his book, Brinkley suggests that he took at least some of the passages from an unfinished book proposal Kerry prepared sometime after November 1971, more than two years after he had returned home from Vietnam.

In his book, Brinkley writes that a skipper who remains friendly to Kerry, Skip Barker, took part in the March 13 raid. But there is no documentary evidence of Barker's participation. Barker could not be reached for comment.

Brinkley, who is director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans, did not reply to messages left with his office, publisher and cell phone. The Kerry campaign has refused to make available Kerry's journals and other writings to The Post, saying the senator remains bound by an exclusivity agreement with Brinkley. A Kerry spokesman, Michael Meehan, said he did not know when Kerry wrote down his reminiscences.

As they were heading back to the boat, Kerry and Rassmann decided to blow up a five-ton rice bin to deny food to the Vietcong. In an interview last week, Rassmann recalled that they climbed on top of the huge pile and dug a hole in the rice. On the count of three, they tossed their grenades into the hole and ran.

Evidently, Kerry did not run fast enough. "He got some frags and pieces of rice in his rear end," Rassmann said with a laugh. "It was more embarrassing than painful." At the time, the incident did not seem significant, and Kerry did not mention it to anyone when he got back on the boat. An unsigned "personnel casualty report," however, erroneously implies that Kerry suffered "shrapnel wounds in his left buttocks" later in the day, following the mine explosion incident, when he also received "contusions to his right forearm."

Anti-Kerry veterans have accused Kerry of conflating the two injuries to strengthen his case for a Bronze Star and Purple Heart. Kerry's Bronze Star citation, however, refers only to his arm injury.

At 2:45 p.m., according to Navy records, Kerry was joined by four other Swift boats for the Bay Hap trip. Kerry led the way on the right-hand side of the river, in PCF-94, followed 15 yards behind by one of his best friends in Vietnam, Don Droz, in PCF-43. A procession of three boats on the left side of the river was led by Richard Pees on PCF-3, followed by Jack Chenoweth on PCF-23 and Thurlow on PCF-51.

Ahead of them was a fishing weir, a series of wooden posts across the river. That morning, the Swiftees had noticed Vietnamese children in sampans attaching nets to the posts and had thought little of it. To get through the weir, their boats had to pass to the left or to the right of the fishing nets.

Just as the Kerry and Pees boats reached the weir, there was a devastating explosion, lifting Pees's boat, PCF-3, three feet out of the water.

Witness Accounts Diverge

"My God, I've never seen anything like it," Chenoweth wrote in what he says is a diary recorded soon after the events. "There was a fantastic flash, a boom, then the 3 boat disappeared in a fountain of water and debris. I was only 30 yards behind." Assuming that they had run into a Vietcong ambush, Chenoweth wrote, "we unleashed everything into the banks."

A later intelligence report established that the mine was probably detonated by a Vietcong sympathizer in a foxhole who hit a plunger as the Swift boats passed through the fishing weir.

Aboard the 3 boat, Pees remembered in an interview being "thrown up in the air" into the windscreen of his pilothouse and landing "kind of dazed," his legs numb, lap covered with blood. When it was over, Pees and three members of his crew would be medevaced to a Coast Guard cutter offshore with serious head and back injuries.

"When the mine went off, we were still going full speed," recalled Michael Medeiros, one of Kerry's crew members. Kerry's boat raced off down the river, away from the ambush zone.

It is at this point that the eyewitness accounts begin to diverge sharply. Everybody agrees that a mine exploded under the 3 boat. There is no argument that Rassmann fell into the river and that Kerry fished him out. Nor is there any dispute that Kerry was hurt in the arm, although the anti-Kerry camp claims he exaggerated the nature of his injury. Much else is hotly contested.

When the first explosion occurred, Rassmann was seated next to the pilothouse on the starboard, or right, side of Kerry's boat, munching a chocolate chip cookie that he recalls having "ripped off from someone's Care package." He saw the 3 boat lift out of the water. Almost simultaneously, Kerry's forward gunner, Tommy Belodeau, began screaming for a replacement for his machine gun, which had jammed. Rassmann grabbed an M-16 and worked his way sideways along the deck, which was only seven inches wide in places.

At this point, Kerry crew members say their boat was hit by a second explosion. Although Kerry's injury report speaks of a mine that "detonated close aboard PCF-94," helmsman Del Sandusky believes it was more likely a rocket or rocket-propelled grenade, as a mine would have inflicted more damage. Whatever it was, the explosion rammed Kerry into the wall of his pilothouse, injuring his right forearm.

The second explosion "blew me right off the boat," Rassmann recalled. Frightened that he might be struck by the propellers of one of the boats, he dived to the bottom of the river, where he dumped his weapons and rucksack. When he surfaced, he said, bullets were "snapping overhead," as well as hitting the water around him.

At first, nobody noticed what had happened to Rassmann. But then Medeiros, who was standing at the stern, saw him bobbing up and down in the water and shouted, "Man overboard." Around this time, crew members said, Kerry decided to go back to help the crippled 3 boat. It is unclear how far down the river Kerry's boat was when he turned around. It could have been anywhere from a few hundred yards to a mile.

O'Neill claims that Kerry "fled the scene" despite the absence of hostile fire. Kerry, in a purported journal entry cited in Brinkley's "Tour of Duty," maintains that he wanted to get his troops ashore "on the outskirts of the ambush."

The Kerry/Rassmann version of what happened next has been retold many times, in TV advertisements and campaign appearances: Rassmann struggling to climb up a scramble net, Kerry leaning over the bow of the boat and pulling him up with his injured arm. As Kerry later recalled, in notes cited by Brinkley, "Somehow we got him on board and I didn't get the bullet in the head that I expected, and we managed to move down near the 3 boat that was still crawling a snail-like zig-zag through the river."

Rassmann remembers several boats coming back up the river toward him. But Chenoweth believes that the rescue must have taken place fairly close to the other boats, which had been drifting slowly downriver. In his diary, he said, he wrote that "we spotted a man overboard, started to pick him up, but 94 [Kerry's boat] got there first."

While Kerry was rescuing Rassmann, the other Swift boats had gone to the assistance of Pees and the 3 boat. Thurlow, in particular, distinguished himself by leaping onto the 3 boat and administering first aid, according to his Bronze Star citation. At one point, he, too, was knocked overboard when the boat hit a sandbar, but he was rescued by crewmates.

The Kerry and anti-Kerry camps differ sharply on whether the flotilla came under enemy fire after the explosion that crippled the 3 boat. Everybody aboard Kerry's boat, including Rassmann, says there was fire from both riverbanks, and the official after-action report speaks of all boats receiving "heavy a/w [automatic weapons] and s/a [small arms] from both banks." The Bronze Star citations for Kerry and Thurlow also speak of prolonged enemy fire.

A report on "battle damage" to Thurlow's boat mentions "three 30 cal bullet holes about super structure." According to Thurlow, at least one of the bullet holes was the result of action the previous day, when he ran into another Vietcong ambush.

Thurlow, Chenoweth, Pees and several of their crew members who belong to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth say neither they nor Kerry came under fire. "If there was fire, I would have made some notation in my journal," Chenoweth said. "But it didn't happen that way. There wasn't any fire." Although he read his diary entry to a reporter over the phone, he declined to supply a copy.

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Rassmann said, "are not just questioning Kerry's account, they are questioning my account. I take that very personally. No one can tell me that we were not under fire. I saw it, I heard the splashes, and I was scared to death. For them to come back 35 years after the fact to tarnish not only Kerry's record, but my veracity, is unconscionable."

Until now, eyewitness evidence supporting Kerry's version had come only from his own crewmen. But yesterday, The Post independently contacted a participant who has not spoken out so far in favor of either camp who remembers coming under enemy fire. "There was a lot of firing going on, and it came from both sides of the river," said Wayne D. Langhofer, who manned a machine gun aboard PCF-43, the boat that was directly behind Kerry's.

Langhofer said he distinctly remembered the "clack, clack, clack" of enemy AK-47s, as well as muzzle flashes from the riverbanks. Langhofer, who now works at a Kansas gunpowder plant, said he was approached several months ago by leaders of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth but declined their requests to speak out against Kerry.

Who Initialed Navy Report?

Much of the debate over who is telling the truth boils down to whether the two-page after-action report and other Navy records are accurate or whether they have been embellished by Kerry or someone else. In "Unfit for Command," O'Neill describes the after-action report as "Kerry's report." He contends that language in Thurlow's Bronze Star citation referring to "enemy bullets flying about him" must also have come from "Kerry's after-action report."

O'Neill has said that the initials "KJW" on the bottom of the report "identified" it as having been written by Kerry. It is unclear why this should be so, as Kerry's initials are JFK. A review of other Swift boat after-action reports at the Naval Historical Center here reveals several that include the initials "KJW" but describe incidents at which Kerry was not present.

Other Swift boat veterans, including Thurlow and Chenoweth, have said they believe that Kerry wrote the March 13 report. "I didn't like to write reports," said Thurlow, who was the senior officer in the five-boat flotilla. "John would write the thing up in longhand, and it would then be typed up and sent up the line."

Even if Kerry did write the March 13 after-action report, it seems unlikely that he would have been the source of the information about "enemy bullets" flying around Thurlow. The official witness to those events, according to Thurlow's medal recommendation form, was his own leading petty officer, Robert Lambert, who himself won a Bronze Star for "courage under fire" in going to Thurlow's rescue after he fell into the river. Lambert, who lives in California, declined to comment.

In a telephone interview, the head of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, retired Adm. Roy Hoffmann, who commanded all Swift boats in Vietnam, said he believed that Kerry wrote the March 13 after-action report on the basis of numerical identifiers at the top of the form. He later acknowledged that the numbers referred to the Swift boat unit, and not to Kerry personally. "It's not cast-iron," he said.

Some of the mystery surrounding exactly what happened on the Bay Hap River in March 1969 could be resolved by the full release of all relevant records and personal diaries. Much information is available from the Web sites of the Kerry campaign and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and the Navy archives. But both the Kerry and anti-Kerry camps continue to deny or ignore requests for other relevant documents, including Kerry's personal reminiscences (shared only with biographer Brinkley), the boat log of PCF-94 compiled by Medeiros (shared only with Brinkley) and the Chenoweth diary.

Although Kerry campaign officials insist that they have published Kerry's full military records on their Web site (with the exception of medical records shown briefly to reporters earlier this year), they have not permitted independent access to his original Navy records. A Freedom of Information Act request by The Post for Kerry's records produced six pages of information. A spokesman for the Navy Personnel Command, Mike McClellan, said he was not authorized to release the full file, which consists of at least a hundred pages.

Some Felt Betrayed

Kerry's reunion with Rassmann in January this year, nearly 35 years after he pulled the former Green Beret from the river, was a defining moment of his presidential campaign. Many political observers believed that the images of the two men embracing helped Kerry win the Iowa Democratic caucuses. The "No Man Left Behind" theme has become a recurring image of pro-Kerry advertising.

But many of the men Kerry served with in Vietnam feel betrayed and left behind by him. Soon after Kerry returned to the United States, he began organizing antiwar rallies. Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, he appeared to endorse accusations that U.S. troops in Vietnam had committed war crimes "with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

The anti-Kerry veterans began mobilizing earlier this year, following publication of the Brinkley biography and the nationwide publicity given to Kerry's emotional reunion with Rassmann. Many of the veterans were contacted personally by Hoffmann, a gung-ho naval officer compared unflatteringly in "Tour of Duty" to the out-of-control lieutenant colonel in the movie "Apocalypse Now" who talked about how he loved "the smell of napalm in the morning."

Hoffmann, who was already angry with Kerry for his antiwar activities on his return from Vietnam, said in an interview that he was "appalled" to find out from reading "Tour of Duty" that Kerry was "considered to be a Navy hero." "I thought there was a tremendous amount of gross exaggeration in the book and, in some places, downright lies. So I started contacting some of my former shipmates," he said.

One of the men Hoffmann contacted was O'Neill, a longtime Kerry critic who debated Kerry on television in 1971. O'Neill put Hoffmann in touch with some wealthy Republican Party contributors. One of O'Neill's contacts was Texas millionaire Bob Perry, who has contributed $200,000 to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Perry has also contributed to the Bush campaign.

"I'd met him three or four times and represented people he knew," said O'Neill, who has practiced law in Houston for nearly 30 years.

In addition to helping to organize the anti-Kerry campaign, O'Neill wrote his own book about the senator's wartime record, which soared to the top of the Amazon.com best-seller list before its publication earlier this month.

With the exception of a sailor named Stephen Gardner, who served with Kerry in late 1968 on PCF-44, Kerry's own crew members have remained loyal to him. "If it wasn't for some of his decisions, we would probably be some of the names in that wall," said Gene Thorson, the engineman on PCF-94, referring to the Vietnam War Memorial. "I respect him very much."

Others who served on boats that operated alongside Kerry on that fateful day in March 1969 say they cannot stand the man who is now challenging George W. Bush for the presidency.

"I think that Kerry's behavior was abominable," said Pees, the commander of the boat that hit the mine. "His actions after the war were particularly disgusting. He distorted the truth when he talked about atrocities. We went out of our way to protect civilians. To suggest otherwise is a grotesque lie. As far as I am concerned, he did not speak the truth about how we conducted operations in Vietnam."

"A lot of people just can't forgive and forget," countered Kerry crew member Medeiros. "He was a great commander. I would have no trouble following him anywhere."

Staff writer Linton Weeks contributed to this report.

posted October 05, 2004 11:08 PM            

I believe we now have conclusive proof that:

(1) Dan Rather is not an honest newsman who was simply duped by extremely clever forgeries; and

(2) We could have won the Vietnam War.

A basic canon of journalism is not to place all your faith in a lunatic stuck on something that happened years ago who hates the target of your story and has been babbling nonsense about him for years. And that's true even if you yourself are a lunatic stuck on something that happened years ago (an on-air paddling from Bush 41) who hates the target of your own story and has been babbling nonsense about him for years, Dan.

CBS' sole source authenticating the forged National Guard documents is Bill Burkett, who's about as sane as Margot Kidder was when they dragged her filthy, toothless butt out of somebody's shrubs a few years back. Burkett has compared Bush to Hitler and Napoleon, and rambles on about Bush's "demonic personality shortcomings." (This would put Burkett on roughly the same page as Al Gore.)

According to USA Today, an interview with Burkett ended when he "suffered a violent seizure and collapsed in his chair" – an exit strategy Dan Rather has been eyeing hungrily all week, I'm sure. Burkett admits to having nervous breakdowns and having been hospitalized for depression.

At a minimum, the viewing public should have been informed that CBS' sole "unimpeachable" source of the forged anti-Bush records was textbook crank Bill Burkett in order to evaluate the information. ("Oh no, not that guy again!") The public would know to use the same skeptical eye it uses to watch the "CBS Evening News With Dan Rather" itself.

Whoever forged these documents should not only be criminally prosecuted, but should also have his driver's license taken away for the stupidity of using Microsoft Word to forge 1971 documents.

And yet this was the evidence CBS relied on to accuse a sitting president of a court martial-level offense 50 days before a presidential election.

As of Sept. 20, Dan Rather says he still believes the documents are genuine and says he wants to be the one to break the story if the documents are fake. (Dan might want to attend to that story after his exclusive report on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.) Rather is also eagerly awaiting some other documents Burkett says he has that prove Bush is a brainwashed North Korean spy.

By now, the only possibilities are: (1) Dan Rather knew he was foisting forgeries on the nation to try to change a presidential election or (2) "Kenneth" inflicted some real brain damage when he hit Rather in the head back in 1986.

Liberals keep telling us to "move on" from the CBS scandal – which means we're really onto something. They act surprised and insist this incident was a freak occurrence – an unfortunate mistake in the twilight of a great newsman's career.

To the contrary, such an outrageous fraud was inevitable given the mendacity and outright partisanship of the press.

Burkett didn't come to CBS; CBS found Burkett. Rather's producer, Mary Mapes, called Joe Lockhart at the Kerry campaign and told him he needed to talk to Burkett. Lockhart himself is the apotheosis of the media-DNC complex, moving in and out of Democratic campaigns and jobs with the mainstream media, including at ABC, NBC and CNN.

CBS was attempting to manipulate a presidential election in wartime. What if CBS had used better forgeries? What if – like Bush's 30-year-old DUI charge – the media had waited 72 hours before the election to air this character assassination?

There is one reason CBS couldn't wait until just before the election to put these forgeries on the air: It would be too late. Kerry was crashing and burning – because of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. (Funny that the Swift Boat veterans haven't been able to get on Kerry PR agency CBS News.)

Despite a total blackout on the Swift Boat Veterans in the mainstream media, the Swifties had driven Kerry's poll numbers into the dirt long before the Republican National Convention – proving once again that it's almost impossible for liberals to brainwash people who can read.

Even the New York Times had to stop ignoring the No. 1 book on its own best-seller list, "Unfit for Command," in order to run front-page articles attacking the Swift Boat Veterans.

The "Today" show has given Kitty Kelley a chair next to Katie Couric until Election Day. (It's now Day Seven of Kelley's refusal to produce records concerning charges that she is in the final stages of syphilitic dementia.) At least they're more likely to get the truth in Kitty Kelley's book than in Doug Brinkley's "Tour of Duty." But Katie hasn't had time to interview the Swift Boat veterans.

CBS showcased laughable forgeries obtained from a man literally foaming at the mouth in order to accuse the president of malfeasance. But CBS would never put a single one of the 264 Vietnam veterans on the air to say what they knew about Kerry.

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth show the role of the individual in history. It wasn't Republican strategists who finished Kerry off two months before the election; it was the American people. The Swift Boat veterans came along and kicked Kerry in the shins and no matter how much heat they took, they were brave and wouldn't give up. The veterans who served with Kerry told the truth and the American people listened (as soon as they managed to locate a copy of "Unfit for Command" hidden on one of the back shelves at their local bookstores).

CBS was forced to run a fake story so early in the campaign that it was exposed as a fraud – only because of the Swift Boat vets. These brave men, many of them decorated war heroes, have now not only won the election for Bush, they have ended Dan Rather's career.

It's often said that we never lost a battle in Vietnam, but that the war was lost at home by a seditious media demoralizing the American people. Ironically, the leader of that effort was Rather's predecessor at CBS News, Walter Cronkite, president of the Ho Chi Minh Admiration Society.

It was Cronkite who went on air and lied about the Tet offensive, claiming it was a defeat for the Americans. He told the American people the war was over and we had lost. Ronald Reagan said CBS News officials should have been tried for treason for those broadcasts.

CBS has already lost one war for America. The Swift Boat Vets weren't going to let CBS lose another one.

This article was published by TownHall.com
http://swift4.he.net/~swift4/article.php?story=20040923090139679

posted October 05, 2004 11:11 PM            

John Kerry's decision to run for president on his record in Vietnam has ripped the scab off of the wounds that war inflicted on the American body politic. Some of Kerry's defenders have laid this charge at the feet of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, but the fact is that they were responding to what they perceived as an affront to their honor. This is why all the attempts to paint them as Republican stooges are so far off of the mark.

I believe my own motivation in publicizing Kerry's actions after the war is typical of most anti-Kerry veterans, including the Swifties. I would never have written my first NRO piece back in January had Kerry chosen to run on his Senate record. But to coin a phrase, his April 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is "seared in my memory" and I believe his attempt now to surround himself with people he had once described as war criminals represents the height of cynicism and hypocrisy.

BEFORE AND AFTER

Of course, the Kerry campaign and most of the press blew off the pieces I wrote for NRO in January and for National Review in February as an attempt to question his service in Vietnam. The volume of e-mails and phone calls I received from Vietnam veterans agreeing with me demonstrated that I was far from alone. But owing to a lack of media interest, the issue dropped off the scope, permitting Kerry and his apologists to avoid addressing it.

Enter the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. They were motivated not only by Kerry's actions after the war but by the hagiographic portrayal of his Vietnam service in Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty. Despite a desperate attempt to dismiss the Swifties as Republican goons, Kerry and his defenders in the media were forced to deal with the substance of the Swifties' charges. This they did with varying degrees of success, owing to the fact that men in battle often perceive the same event differently. It does seem clear that Kerry did not spend Christmas of 1968 in Cambodia as he claimed on numerous occasions. There are also legitimate questions about the circumstances surrounding his first Purple Heart and his rescue of Jim Rassmann.

But there would seem to be no argument about Kerry's actions after the war. He did leave the Navy early to pursue a political career; he did join the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW); he did claim during his 1971 Senate testimony that American soldiers committed atrocities in Vietnam on a regular basis; he did participate in numerous instances of "political theater" put on by the VVAW, including Dewey Canyon III; and he did meet with representatives of the North Vietnamese Communist government. These events may have brought him to political prominence in the United States, but at the cost of alienating a substantial number of Vietnam veterans who believed he besmirched their honor and whose resulting anger has simmered for three decades.

WEAK DEFENSE

The first attempt to defend Kerry on the substance of the charge that he had dishonored all of those who fought in Vietnam with his 1971 Senate testimony was a series of arguments claiming that he really didn't mean to include everyone in Vietnam when he made his claim of widespread atrocities. He was, so the argument went, merely relating stories told by others. But if so, he should have chosen his words more carefully. The commonsense meaning of the statement that "over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command" seems to be that these accounts represent only the tip of the iceberg and, more important, that such actions represented U.S. policy against the Vietnamese.

So indeed, the second attempt to defend Kerry is now in play. His defenders claim that he was telling the truth — that atrocities did take place in Vietnam. Of course, as anyone who has read my articles knows, there is no controversy about this point. But the trick here, most on display in Peter Beinart's "Apocalypse Redux" in the September 6 issue of The New Republic, is to suggest that those who criticize Kerry are somehow denying that atrocities occurred in Vietnam at all. Beinart argues that the second Swift Boat ad (recounting Kerry's Senate testimony) doesn't claim that Kerry's charges were false, but "merely suggests he was unpatriotic for leveling them." Beinart then goes on to cite a number of historians who, sure enough, assure us that atrocities did occur in Vietnam.

But this is missing the point — whether intentionally or not I cannot say. This is now my eighth piece on this topic since January for National Review, NRO, The Weekly Standard, and the Jerusalem Post. In every one of those pieces as well as many others I have written over the years about the Vietnam War, I have stated unequivocally that Americans committed atrocities in Vietnam. I have never tried to whitewash the record, as one of my correspondents claimed.

As is often the case, Jim Webb — a Marine hero of the Vietnam War (Navy Cross) and best-selling author whose novel Fields of Fire is the best book about Vietnam — got to the crux of the matter in a recent NPR commentary when he said that the "stories of atrocious conduct, repeated in lurid detail by Kerry before the Congress, represented not the typical experience of the American soldier, but its ugly extreme" (emphasis added).

THE WINTER SOLDIER DISCONTENT

Some of us who believe that the American soldier did not typically commit atrocities have called into question the credibility of many of the accounts upon which Kerry based his testimony — the "Winter Soldier Investigation" (WSI), an early 1971 event in Detroit organized by the VVAW and sponsored by Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory, and conspiracy theorist Mark Lane. I had read Lane's 1970 book, Conversations with Americans, and was struck by how implausible most of the atrocity claims were. I was not alone. Lane's book was panned by James Reston Jr. and Neil Sheehan, not exactly known as supporters of the Vietnam War. Sheehan in particular demonstrated that many of Lane's "eyewitnesses" either had never served in Vietnam or had not done so in the capacity they claimed.

The transcripts of the WSI struck me the same way. My own beliefs were reinforced several years later by the publication of Guenter Lewy's America in Vietnam, in which he related the difficulty that military investigators faced trying to get particulars. As I wrote in the February 23 issue of National Review, paraphrasing Lewy, when the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) attempted to interview those who allegedly had witnessed atrocities, most refused to cooperate, even after assurances that they would not be questioned about atrocities they might have committed personally. Those that did cooperate never provided details of actual crimes to investigators. The NIS also discovered that some of the most grisly testimony was given by fake witnesses who had appropriated the names of real Vietnam veterans.

The same thing happened with Army investigators. As Lewy wrote,

the refusal of [those who claimed to have witnessed atrocities] to give substantiating factual information in support of their atrocity allegations created a situation in which the accusers continued to reap generous publicity for their sensational charges while the Army in most cases could neither investigate nor refute them...As of April 1971, the CID (the Army's Criminal Investigative Division) had determined that [in one case] 7 of 16 allegations...which could be investigated were unfounded or unsubstantiated. Most of the allegations were so general as to defy investigation.

My skepticism about the WSI was further strengthened by the publication of Stolen Valor by B. G. Burkett and Genna Whitley. In the course of trying to raise money for a Texas Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Burkett discovered that reporters were only interested in homeless veterans and drug abuse and that the corporate leaders he approached had bought into the popular image of Vietnam veterans: They were not honorable men who took pride in their service, but whining welfare cases, bellyaching about what an immoral government did to them.

Fed up, Burkett did something that any reporter worth his or her salt could have done: He used the Freedom of Information Act to check the actual records of the "image makers" used by reporters to flesh out their stories on homelessness, Agent Orange, suicide, drug abuse, criminality, or alcoholism. What he found was astounding. More often than not, the showcase "veteran" who cried on camera — about his dead buddies, about committing or witnessing atrocities, or about some heroic action in combat that led him to the current dead end in his life — was an impostor.

Indeed, Burkett discovered that over the last decade, some 1,700 individuals, including some of the most prominent examples of the Vietnam-veteran-as-dysfunctional-loser, had fabricated their war stories. Many had never even been in the service. Others had been, but had never been in Vietnam.

Lewy's account recently has been called into question and Burkett has been criticized for simply accusing everyone who talks about atrocities as a phony or imposter. In the August 30 TNR Online, historian John Prados writes regarding the WSI atrocity accounts that "a handful of individual stories may have been called into question, but the main thrust of the [WSI] testimonies — that American atrocities were widespread in Vietnam — is today beyond dispute. Indeed the emergence of new evidence during the last 30 years has only solidified the winter soldiers' overall case." He then criticizes Lewy's account of the WSI:

Lewy's primary evidence consists of noting that VVAW members refused to give depositions. When the Naval Investigative Service tried to pull VVAW members into an inquiry, it found one Marine who either could not or would not give details of what he had seen and allegedly located several other veterans who said they had never gone to Detroit. (O'Neill had cited this same information in his televised debate with Kerry.) But even if true, these incidents were far too limited to establish anything in particular about the Winter Soldier Investigation; the fact that some of the winter soldiers declined to give depositions does not prove or disprove the legitimacy of the entire project. The VVAW leadership left it up to individual members to decide how to respond to requests for depositions. And veterans had good reasons to decline. For one thing, they argued that their purpose was to protest U.S. policy, not to draw attention to individual soldiers. What's more, with the VVAW under direct assault from the Nixon administration, it's understandable that the group's members were loath to cooperate with government investigators.

The debate turns, it seems to me, on Prados's assertion that it is today beyond dispute that "American atrocities were widespread in Vietnam." Again I stipulate that they did occur. Recent revelations include the Son Thang event described by Marine Corps veteran Gary D. Solis in his book Son Thang: An American War Crime and the more troubling "Tiger Force" story broken earlier this year by the Toledo Blade, which reported that members of an elite unit of the 327th Airborne Infantry in the Central Highlands in 1967 committed war crimes ranging from murder and assault to dereliction of duty.

Of course the best-known incident was the admission several years ago by Bob Kerrey, the highly respected former senator from Nebraska and Medal of Honor recipient, that the Navy SEAL team he led in Vietnam killed women and children during a nighttime mission some 32 years ago.

Kerrey's admission was prompted by a lengthy New York Times Magazine story by Gregory Vistica that went further than the charge that civilians died during this action. It contained the explosive claim that then-Lieutenant (j.g.) Kerrey had ordered the civilians to be rounded up and then shot point-blank to facilitate the SEAL team's escape. If this allegation is true, what happened that night in the Mekong Delta village of Thanh Phong was more than a terrible tragedy of war — it was a war crime.

KERRY, THE SOVIET PROPAGANDIST

These are all troubling events. But they do not prove that atrocities in Vietnam were more widespread than in previous wars. Additionally, there is no evidence that atrocities were a matter of policy, as suggested in this September 1970 VVAW flyer issued in conjunction with one of its stunts:

A
US Infantry
Company Just
Came through
Here!

If you had been Vietnamese —

We might have burned your house
We might have shot your dog
We might have shot you
We might have raped your wife and daughter
We might have turned you over to the government for torture
We might have taken souvenirs from your property
We might have shot things up a bit
We might have done all these things to you and your whole town

Let's put things in perspective. Some three million men served in Vietnam. Since the logistics tail of U.S. forces is fairly large, only about 25 percent, or 750,000, served in combat units. If we add up all of the atrocities, both proven and alleged, and multiply them by two as a hedge against under-reporting, the percentage of American combat soldiers who might have committed atrocities is still less than 1 percent of the total. I doubt that many armies in history could match that record.

I have tried on many occasions to get to the heart of why some Americans committed atrocities in Vietnam and others didn't. The fact is that anyone who has been in combat understands the thin line between permissible acts and atrocity. The first and potentially most powerful emotion in combat is fear arising from the instinct of self-preservation.

But in soldiers, fear is overcome by what the Greeks called thumos, spiritedness or righteous indignation. It is thumos, awakened by the death of his comrade Patroclus, that causes Achilles to quit sulking in his tent and wade into the Trojans, slaughtering them in great numbers. But unchecked, thumos can engender rage and frenzy. It is the role of leadership, which provides strategic context for killing and enforces discipline, to prevent this outcome. Such leadership was not in evidence at My Lai, or most of the other cases of atrocities.
In the May 3 issue of National Review, I suggested three reasons that explain the belief on the part of so many that atrocities in Vietnam were more frequent than in other wars and that they were a part of policy: 1) Soviet propaganda; 2) the belief on the part of the veterans who related atrocity stories that they were telling their listeners what they wanted to hear; and 3) liars and phonies.

In America in Vietnam, Lewy noted the establishment of a veritable war-crimes industry, supported by the USSR, as early as 1965. As Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former Romanian intelligence chief, has recounted, the Soviets set up permanent international organizations — including the International War Crimes Tribunal and the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam — "to aid or to conduct operations to help Americans dodge the draft or defect, to demoralize its army with anti-American propaganda, to conduct protests, demonstrations, and boycotts, and to sanction anyone connected with the war." Pacepa claims to have been responsible for fabricating stories about U.S. atrocities in Vietnam and "flacking" them to Western news organizations. Lewy writes that "the Communists made skillful use of their worldwide propaganda apparatus . . . and they found many Western intellectuals only too willing to accept every conceivable allegation of [American] wrongdoing at face value."

The VVAW, a small, radical group that never exceeded a membership of 7,000 (including John Kerry) from a pool of nearly three million Vietnam (and nine million Vietnam-era) veterans, essentially "Americanized" Soviet propaganda. When he testified before the Senate in 1971, Kerry was merely repeating charges that had been making the rounds since 1965.

To the anti-war Left, atrocities revealed the Nazi-like character of "Amerika." But, unlike their Nazi counterparts, U.S. soldiers could be redeemed: By confessing atrocities, the Vietnam veterans, once denigrated as "baby killers," were able to receive absolution from the Left, and were transmuted into innocent victims of a brutal war. American military sociologist Charles Moskos has suggested that atrocity stories out of Vietnam were the functional equivalent of heroic war stories from World War II: They provided a meaning to participation in Vietnam that resonated with those who opposed the war and were now judging the returning soldiers. Some atrocity claims were the product of outright fantasy, on the part of soldiers who returned from the war emotionally disturbed. The (anti-war) psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton wrote of a veteran who, after some time in group therapy, could "confess that he had been much less violent in Vietnam than he had implied. He had previously given the impression that he had killed many people there, whereas in actuality, despite extensive combat experience, he could not be certain he had killed anyone."

Third were the phonies: In response to the claim that some if not many of those who testified at the WSI event were exaggerating or even imposters, Prados writes that "every veteran who presented in Detroit had to show a copy of his military papers (the military form known as DD-214) to demonstrate that he had actually been present at the places and times he was speaking about."

Let me be clear. Not all atrocity stories can be pawned off as the work of phonies. But one of the most striking revelations of Stolen Valor is how easy it is to produce fraudulent records, including the DD-214. And anyone who served in Vietnam has no doubt at one time or another confronted a wannabe Vietnam vet. It has always amazed me how many people want to claim to have served in such an unpopular war.

I would add a fourth reason — the passing down of a story from soldier to soldier. According to FactCheck.org, Keith Nolan, author of ten published books on Vietnam, says he's heard many veterans describe atrocities just like those Kerry recounted from the Winter Soldier event. Since 1978, Nolan has interviewed roughly 1,000 veterans in depth for his books, and spoken to thousands of others. "I have heard the exact same stories dozens if not hundreds of times over," he said. "Wars produce atrocities. Frustrating guerrilla wars produce a particularly horrific number of atrocities. That some individual soldiers and certain units responded with excessive brutality in Vietnam shouldn't really surprise anyone."

Let me recount a personal anecdote that makes me question the idea that a story heard many times validates it. I didn't commit or witness atrocities during my tour as a Marine infantry platoon leader. As far as I know, neither did the other officers in my regiment and battalion. But I heard of an atrocity just after I joined the unit. A Marine who was scheduled to rotate soon recounted an incident that he claimed had occurred shortly after he had arrived in the unit about a year earlier.

According to the story, members of a sister company had killed some North Vietnamese soldiers after they had surrendered. Some months later, I heard another Marine who had joined my platoon after I took it over relate exactly the same story to some newly arrived men, only now it involved me and my platoon. I had a little chat with him and he cleared things up with the new men. But that episode has always made me wonder how many of the stories have been recycled and how many accounts of atrocities are based on what veterans heard as opposed to committed or witnessed. Of course, an account based on hearsay may be true. After all, the soldier who broke the My Lai story was not present during the massacre.

Unfortunately for the body politic, this issue is not going to go away. Too many veterans have long memories and they believe that Kerry sacrificed their honor on the altar of his political ambitions.

This article was published by The National Review Online
http://swift4.he.net/~swift4/article.php?story=20040921073433841

posted October 05, 2004 11:14 PM            

Dear Senator Kerry:

As you prepare for your address before the American Legion in Nashville, Tennessee, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth encourages you to use this opportunity to clarify your actions in Vietnam and your statements about your fellow Veterans and shipmates when you returned home. Since you have made your four-month tour in Vietnam the centerpiece of your campaign, we respectfully insist that you be truthful. The public is owed a full and honest accounting of your actions. Veterans are owed an apology from you and an acknowledgement that there was no basis in fact for the accusations you made against them.

We urge you to:

1. Apologize for your conduct once you returned from Vietnam. Your exaggerated testimony before the US Senate; the blanket indictment of your fellow veterans; throwing away medals and ribbons; all of these actions dishonored America and the armed forces. Your rhetoric and actions were not only wrong, they aided the enemy and brought great pain to POW's, veterans and their families.

2. Clarify the conflicting accounts involving the Bay Hap River incident of March 13, 1969 (Bronze Star and 3rd Purple Heart). You have now described three different versions of this incident. In the first version of this incident presented during the Democrat National Convention, you stated: "No man left behind," suggesting to the American people that you alone stayed on the river to rescue Mr. Rassmann. Later, when forced to acknowledge conflicting eyewitness testimony from fellow swift boat veterans, you said that your boat left the scene to return moments later to retrieve Jim Rassmann from the water. Yet, in another version of the same incident discovered in the Congressional Record, you reported that your boat struck a mine and Rassmann fell off the boat. Mr. Kerry, please explain to your fellow veterans and the American people which version is the truth.

3. Affirm that the injuries for which you received your purple hearts never required any medical treatment beyond perhaps a bandage and that, in all instances, these injuries were self-inflicted and came from your own weapon. Further, that if any of these purple hearts were falsely awarded, that you would not have been eligible to leave Vietnam after serving only four months.

4. Acknowledge what your own biographer is now saying, that the Christmas in Cambodia claim is "obviously wrong,” that you were never in Cambodia over Christmas or any other time during your brief, four-month tour in Vietnam and that your statements before the United States Senate in 1986 were false.

If you undertake these steps we will be satisfied that the American public has been sufficiently apprised as to these aspects of your career, and we will discontinue the media advertisements you have sought so fervently to silence.

Please know that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are eager to close our own personal chapters on Vietnam and instead focus on the war we're currently fighting—the ongoing war on terrorism. In the absence of full public disclosure and a public apology, we will continue efforts to carry our message to an ever-expanding base of grassroots supporters.

Senator Kerry, we want to get Vietnam behind us. But, we can only do so if the truth is told.

We respectfully await your reply.

Sincerely,

posted October 05, 2004 11:49 PM            

O’Neill: Yes, I really did, Lowell. It’s a shame. The problem they have is when you study the book Unfit For Command, the conclusions in the book are really difficult to assail. It’s pretty obvious that they’re the truth. And so, rather than attack the conclusions and the facts, what they try to do is attack the messenger. I didn’t mind so much Chris Matthews attacking me, but bitterly resented Chris Matthews’ treatment of Larry Thurlow, probably the greatest hero we ever had in swift boats. And I also thought that he acted like a clod in attacking Michelle Malkin, who defended us on his show and throwing her off. I think he should be ashamed of himself.

FPM: Well, he clearly should be. But he is a classic Democrat partisan, and frankly, to be fair to Matthews, Rick Kaplan was named the head of MSNBC a few months ago, so Matthews’ boss is someone who routinely used to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom with the Clintons. He is a far-left partisan, and this is the guy who runs MSNBC now.

O’Neill: I can tell you after what I saw on the Chris Matthews show, it’s not a place I’d ever go to anymore to pick up information or to get to the truth.

FPM: You’re a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, something leftist interviewers somehow go out of their way not to mention, and you commanded the same Swift boat as John Kerry, although not at the same time he was there.

O’Neill: That’s exactly right. Kerry bailed out of Vietnam after three months of combat, and one other month. Four months. In a strange sort of way I guess you could say I’m the guy who finished off his tour because I’m actually the guy who took over the swift boat PC94 that he would have otherwise been on. I actually finished up and served a whole year, as did everybody else in this swift boat division. Everybody else except Kerry.

FPM: We’ve been hearing that most members of “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” were not on Kerry’s boat itself, but on other boats. My impression is that they operate like a wolf pack. They operate very close together, sometimes only 10 or l5 yards apart, so the fact that you’re not on Kerry’s boat may not mean anymore than you were on a different airplane in a squadron of airplanes sent out to attack something.

O’Neill: Exactly right, Lowell. The officers on these boats, for example, all slept together in a common bunk room. On a normal night the enlisted guys did too. There were a few times that they might sleep apart on their boat. But most of the time they’d be at the Mother Ship. The boats operate in packs of two to six boats, much closer than airplanes, usually 10-15 yards apart. Everybody knew what was going on. The interesting thing about this is, in contrast to Kerry’s crew, some of whom only knew him as little as 6 days, most of the people in these other boats, particularly the officers and commanding officers, had a chance to see him for longer periods of time, up to 3 months.

FPM: The establishment, liberal media likes to tell us the people who were actually the crew on Kerry’s own boat have remained loyal to him and they knew him better than anyone.

O’Neill: First, they didn’t know him better than anyone, by a long shot. The two guys he had speak for him at the Democratic Convention were Jim Rassmann , who he knew for 2 days in Vietnam and David Alston, who he apparently knew for about six days in Vietnam. That contrasts with any number of people who worked with him day after day in Vietnam. This is truthfully a story that got made up by Washington lawyers that is really laughable to all the guys in our squadron and to most military people. It’s just ridiculous to think people in a Swift boat squadron don’t know each other. It’s like claiming that you have to be in the same tank to know the guys in a tank company, or in the same plane to know the guys in a plane squadron.

FPM: No, in this case it’s people like Chris Matthews who are in the tank with John Kerry…a different kind of tank, of course.

O’Neill: I don’t remember seeing him over there, and I’m not sure we would have wanted him based on what I saw.

FPM: Kerry’s chief spokesman for veterans on these shows seems to be someone from the Army who has never been on a Swift boat in his life. We’re talking about John Hurley.

O’Neill: That’s absolutely true, Lowell. It’s either John Hurley, or often they’re just Washington lawyers. Often they have Lanny Davis…

FPM: As opposed to Hurley, who is a Boston lawyer.

O’Neill: Yes. Hurley is a Boston lawyer who was in an engineering battalion in Vietnam and actually claimed that his own engineering battalion, in the book Tour of Duty, engaged in atrocities. He was hunted down by Tom Purdue (sp?) from that same engineering battalion and admitted that they had not engaged in atrocities, apologized to Purdue, and these words about atrocities are supposed to be removed from the next version of Kerry’s book Tour.

FPM: It’s interesting how history can be rewritten. Of course most people understand, who have read Tour of Duty, that actually, and correct me if I’m wrong, Douglas Brinkley, who is a historian in Louisiana and used to have a fairly good reputation, signed an agreement that in effect Kerry would have final edit of this book, meaning it’s really Kerry’s autobiography, written by somebody else. It deliberately omits anything Kerry did not want there.

O’Neill: Exactly right, Lowell. For example - you can pick a million examples in the book – the book is wildly inaccurate – Herodotus would not have been proud of this book. The one I think is short, funny, and easy to understand, is that for about a week or two Kerry used the call sign “Square Jaw.” So Brinkley has that fact in the book. For almost all the time Kerry was in Vietnam he used the call sign “Boston Strangler.” There’s absolutely no reference to that in the book, and the whole book is like that. It’s a very one-sided, dishonest book in my judgment.

FPM: Your book is full of specifics. The first thing that fascinates me about your book is the logic. I love that old liberal and debater’s adage: “If you can win on the facts, debate the facts; if you can win on the logic, debate the logic; if you can’t win on either the facts or the logic then try to smear the other guy.” Apparently they can’t win on the facts of the logic. So they’re trying to smear you.

O’Neill: What they’re really trying to do, sort of, is give ground, admit the points in the book are true, minimize them, and then sort of pick here or there where they can fight. For example, I think that they uniformly admit now that the story he told for 35 years on the floor of the Senate and everywhere else, and described as “the turning point of his life” – that he had spent Christmas and Christmas Eve illegally in Cambodia – they’ve admitted that was a fabrication. Now, they don’t say it like that, but they admit he made it up. Instead they say, “Some other time he may have been in Cambodia.” But they don’t identify when.

FPM: And that he was on a “secret mission” that cannot be documented in any way. But one of the examples, not just of fact that you deal with, but of logic, their current mode of attack apparently is to say you are “funded” by George W. Bush and Carl Rove and the Republicans. You are really doing their “dirty work,” in effect acting as puppets for them, but just in political logical terms, if Bush had a choice he would not fight on what is supposedly Kerry’s strong ground – the ground where Kerry may emerge looking like more of a hero. He would rather right on Kerry’s pathetic record of failure over 20 years in the U.S. Senate, wouldn’t he?

O’Neill: The truth is we don’t know. That’s not a calculation that’s entered into it. I’ve heard Dick Morris say that we’re probably hurting the Republican campaign, or that he thought we would. For us it’s a deeply personal matter. It goes way beyond politics. We lost 55 guys over there. I had 15 friends that died over there, and they were good guys. So this is a huge part of our life, the year we spent over there. A lot of the 60 people in our group got wounded over there and it really goes beyond politics. The lies he told about our unit, and the lies he told about his service in our unit, to us are very profound, independent of any political consideration. From those we think he would be a terrible Commander-In-Chief. But our object isn’t to try and get George Bush elected, or anybody else. It’s simply to educate the American People on this guy in areas we know a lot about: which is his service in Vietnam and his life after that.

FPM: The New York Times alleged this week that because your law firm had worked for the company in Texas that was founded by a prominent Republican, who may or may not have been there at the time you worked for them, therefore you are Republican-connected. But I have heard it said that you voted for Ross Perot.

O’Neill: I voted twice for Ross Perot and I voted for Al Gore. I could make a better case that I’m a Democrat. I’d be happy if I was a Republican. The truth is I’m just a “nothing,” I mean I just pick individual people. Our firm has more Democrats than Republicans. The charge is crazy. I have done large-scale commercial litigation. We represent a company called Falcon Seaboard. One of the guys there, some four or six years later would become involved in politics and run for Lt. Governor, many years after we represented the company. This is one of the pieces of “proof” in The New York Times. Another thing they have is that I have a partner who was a Republican and ran for office 10 years ago. The problem with that is they don’t identify their charge. He’s been dead for seven months, long before any of this began. A third claim is I’m a Republican because a law partner of mine – keep in mind we have l2 or l4 of them – used to be married, until 4 years ago, to a woman, Harriet O’Neill, not related to me, who was on the Texas Supreme Court. But he divorced her 4 years ago. That’s what they’ve got. It shouldn’t be in the green sheet.

FPM: I am old enough to remember when Democrats would denounce this sort of thing by calling it “McCarthyism” or “guilt by association.”

O’Neill: At least that involved trying to accuse someone of being something bad. I would be perfectly happy to acknowledge I was Republican or Democrat if that’s what I was. The other logical problem they have is there are 254 people in our organization. I’m not the chairman of it. I’m just one of the guys in it. I’m not sure where it gets them, even if they get there. The truth is, when you examine my record, I’ve given more money to Democrats, than to Republicans.

FPM: There it is. No evil deed goes unpunished. In my naivete, as someone who was for 15 years a Roving Editor at Reader’s Digest, I’m fascinated that the liberal establishment media has spent lots of time questioning your motives. But they haven’t shown any interest at all in scrutinizing the motives of the members of Kerry’s “Band of Brothers” who seem to have so much money that they can just take endless time away from work, travel with him and apparently stay in $1,000 a night, first-class hotel rooms.

O’Neill: Yes. What we know is none of them liked Kerry when they first got back from Vietnam. They said that he “turned their stomach,” he betrayed them, and the like. We all shared a common belief about what Kerry had done at one point. It’s apparent that in the last two years Kerry made an extensive effort to simply recruit the guys in his boat, and has done so. Why or what his arrangement with them is I don’t know. We haven’t attacked them. They are always surrounded by handlers, and when they let them speak, the Kerry campaign and Kerry get into terrible trouble. They tell the truth, at least some of them time. Recently for example, Del Sandusky disclosed that on the “no man left behind” incident, that far from all the boats fleeing and Kerry coming back, all the boats stayed and Kerry fled. That was not the story they actually wanted to tell and of course reveals that the story concluding the Democratic Convention was a complete lie.

FPM: I think Kerry now has had to acknowledge that there is at least some element of truth in the fact that he left and then came back.

O’Neill: He says he was half a mile to a mile away. The three-boat had been blown out of the water, was disabled, had swimmers in the water. All the other boats went to the three-boat to save it. Finally, Kerry came back. It wasn’t “no man left behind.” It was “one man left.” I can tell you at least once in Vietnam, and probably twice, that if I had been with somebody like Kerry, and they had left our boat in the circumstances we were in I wouldn’t be talking to you. There’d be a lot of good people not here today.

FPM: There are a lot of names on a black wall in Washington, D.C. because of what John Kerry did to encourage the Communist North Vietnamese to keep fighting, rather than reach peace. But I want to clarify: They talk about your motive as if there is something horribly sinister here. This book is apparently making a lot of money. How much of it are you keeping for yourself?

O’Neill: Zero. I gave away every penny. My total royalty from this book has been given to a military charity. I think I prefer not to name the charity until they formally accept the donation. But I have given every penny away and I won’t accept a penny from this book. [On Monday, August 23, O’Neill identified the charity as the Navy & Marine Relief Fund.]

FPM: Do you think they would be pressured politically not to accept it if that was announced?

O’Neill: That’s the only reason I don’t name them, Lowell. I really want them to get the money, it’s my first choice. If I mention them people will write letters to them, and that would be a shame.

FPM: I can understand how appalling pressure politics have become. I have a naïve question. Knowing very little about Swift boats, having been an Air Force ROTC person myself, when there is a combat incident, and we have all these disputes about what really happened, we’re told that it is your word, you 254 Swift boat veterans, versus actual U.S. Navy documents. How does a U.S. Navy document get created?

O’Neill: Lowell, let me say first, on most of the things covered in my book, the problem that Kerry has had is that the U.S. Navy documents support me and not him.

FPM: Why the media doesn’t tell us that?

O’Neill: Let me give you an example. Just picking one incident, there was this terrible tragedy on January 20, 1969 in which Kerry’s boat, under Kerry’s command, opened up on a sampan, and the sampan had a father, a mother, a baby, and a child. The father and the child were killed. What clearly happened is the sampan got too close to the swift boat, the crew member - at least one of them believes Kerry was not watching the radar and says Kerry was not around at all - they reached a split-second decision and fired, they thought, to save themselves.

FPM: Now you say, “They.” You mean the subordinate reached the decision?

O’Neill: Yes, the young gunners mate was the only one left because Kerry wasn’t around. It was Kerry’s job to be around.

FPM: Where was he? These boats aren’t that big?

O’Neill: I don’t know. He wasn’t there. Maybe he was asleep. But he clearly was not where he should have been. They killed a father and a son and rescued a mother and baby out of the sampan. In the course of war things like this happen, but what happened next was truly unbelievable. What I did was go to the Navy archives and obtain the report that Kerry actually filed on this incident. And by the way, as to the fact there was only a mother, a baby, and then the father and child were killed, Kerry’s autobiography says that, Tour. So there is no question there were four people in that…one family. In the Navy archives I obtained the actual report that he filed on this incident on January 20, 1969 in the name of PCF 44, his boat. What he reported to the Navy, and by the way he said that the face of the child he killed would be with him forever, and so on. When I got the actual report, what he reported to the Navy was that a squad of Viet Cong were there, 5 Viet Cong, that he’d killed all of them. The child who was killed disappeared from the report. The mother and the baby became 2 Viet Cong, captured in action. Even the little details, like there was 1,000 pounds of rice on the sampan, it got elevated to 5,000 pounds of rice. This report went to the Navy and went up the chain of command. Everyone said, “Kerry ‘Bravo Zulus’ Congratulations, congratulations” over what was in fact a terrible human tragedy, not a victory. And it was listed as one of the great accomplishments of our squadron in the first quarter of 1969. This is a victory that he achieved only with a pen and paper. He did it to stop people from asking, "Where were you?” “How did this happen?” “How did this kid get killed?” “Why weren’t you watching the radar?” “What occurred?” That was sort of typical of the thing that I found with Kerry.

FPM: To explain this, at least from my point of view, I never forget that John Kerry was the son of a State Department operative. He grew up with a father who was a bureaucrat who knew that paper does not necessarily match reality, but it’s the paper that lasts.

O’Neill: I agree completely. That’s what he mastered more than anything. These other guys were trying to fight a war. He was trying to pick up medals quick and leave. What’s very interesting is that even though the report is from his boat that night, and even though there’s no one else in the world who could have sent that report, other than the officer of his boat, he’s not willing to take it because it does not have his signature on it. I mean, literally, if that sounds crazy, that’s exactly what his spokesman said last night.

FPM: Well, if he knew it was full of falsehood, maybe he went out of his way not to put his signature on it.

O’Neill: A radio report is never signed. It’s simply sent. So what he basically is saying is because the transmissions were made by radio, he’s not responsible for them, even though there is no question but that he sent them. So, when they say the Naval records support them, the truth is in most cases the bulk of the Naval records support us. But this is a guy who did maneuver the records and lie in the records to support stories that were just crazy.

FPM: Okay, but the essential thing for people to understand is when he says, “The Navy documents support me,” it turns out that he was the highly literate, the Yale graduate, the person familiar with playing bureaucratic games, as he’d seen his family do, and so there would be an incident and he would file a report depicting himself as a glorious hero, and this would go to a Naval commander who wasn’t on the scene, who didn’t see what happened, and who just apparently, in many cases, took Kerry’s word for it.

O’Neill: Exactly. It happened over and over. For example, he picked up three Purple Hearts. None of them are real Purple Hearts that involve any kind of real wound. They are all “tweezer” and “band-aid.” What he would do - if we took his third Purple Heart - he filed a report showing a rice wound in his fanny as coming from a hostile water mine. So I guess the Naval report that he filed supports him in the sense that he filed one that says “rice wound,” I mean “shrapnel wound from water mine.” But when you look at his actual book, his own journal, repeated on page 313 and 317 of the book Tour, he says it resulted from a grenade that he threw with no hostile fire anywhere around and no enemy that morning. He simply threw a grenade into some rice, got a little bit of it in his fanny, then reported it to the Navy as if it came from a water mine. So his story that, “Oh yes, the reports support me,” I guess in that sense the report he filed supported him, but it’s completely at odds with his own account.

FPM: More than that, I understand from your book Unfit For Command, you point out that in one case John Kerry asked for a Purple Heart and he was turned down. What did he do then?

O’Neill: Without going through the circumstances, once again he was wounded by his own grenade in the absence of hostile fire on December 2nd. He went to the division commander and the guy said, “Forget it. There was no hostile fire.” He waited three months, until everybody who was knowledgeable about the incident had left Vietnam. He then, somehow in Saigon, in a way we can’t tell, he got a Naval officer, now deceased, who knew nothing about the incident, to sign a Purple Heart citation of the same kind that had been refused three months earlier.

FPM: So what do we make of someone who knew that this had been refused, and somehow he resubmitted it for consideration to people even less familiar with the circumstances? That doesn’t sound like a very honorable thing to do.

O’Neill: He was a man who “gamed the system.” You’ve got to understand, we were just Navy guys there. What we were trying to do was get through each day. We were trying to survive, we were trying to do a good job, trying to get our guys through. Nobody cared about medals. We just didn’t care at all, and it would never have occurred to anybody that another Naval officer would be filing false reports, would be lying, and so on, and gaming the system.

FPM: This is a man who your book also reveals brought an 8mm camera to Vietnam with him and re-enacted battles so he could have footage of himself looking heroic. One thing that fascinates me is that John Kerry says the documents are on his side, the Navy documents support him, and yet he seems unwilling to release all of his medical records, and so on, something that would only take one John Kerry signature on a form called a 180.

O’Neill: Exactly right, Lowell. He won’t do that. He has a journal that he pulls out every once in a while. For example, he apparently is going to try and use his journal to support a theory that he went to Cambodia some other time, after being caught lying on this “Christmas in Cambodia” story. But he won’t actually release the journal. He only gives a peek to his friends. The same thing is true of other records. He releases the ones he picks, but won’t allow the government itself to directly release all the records.

FPM: So in other words, Kerry himself is blocking the release of records about him.

O’Neill: Exactly. He acts as the gatekeeper. With Form 180 the Government would become the gatekeeper. In other words, if he executed Standard Form 180 any news organization could go down and get all the records relating to his military service or for his Vietnam period. Instead of that, he simply gets records and parcels out a few and says, “This is all the records.”

FPM: You would think if he was open and honest…By the way, speaking of open and honest, the liberal establishment media had no trouble forcing out the records of Larry Thurlow, who you mentioned. They had no trouble, for that matter, forcing out the sealed divorce proceeding records from a Republican Senate candidate in Illinois. But the media seems unwilling to lift a finger to go into Kerry’s sealed divorce records or his Navy records.

O’Neill: I think it’s fair to say that their intellectual interest has not been great in anything relating to Kerry’s background, other than simply portraying the same group of guys he shows up with, the same eight or nine, as opposed to the 254 of us who believe he lied about our unit and lied about his own record.

FPM: I heard you say on a talk show the other day that you spoke to a Washington Post reporter who was in the process of doing a basic hit-piece on Larry Thurlow, and you said to him, “Come down, join us today, you can meet with a large number of us actual swift vets.” What did the Washington Post reporter say?

O’Neill: “No.” He wouldn’t come. It was really funny.

FPM: Clearly he had a deep hunger and thirst for truth, didn’t he?

O’Neill: We had 50 swift boat guys from the Kerry period right here, making plans for what we were going to do. Actually, we had 6 who were direct witnesses to the March 13th “no man left behind” incident, and he wouldn’t come and talk to us.

FPM: We talked about Kerry’s veterans spokesman John Hurley, whose own atrocities claim was touched on in the Brinkley book. If we had time we could talk about Air Force General Merrill McPeak ( who in January The New York Times identified as a Howard Dean supporter) who has now gone over to John Kerry. But in Saturday’s Chicago Tribune, one of their own editors, William Rood has come forward saying he was a Swift boat commander on February 28, 1969, and after repeated calls by John Kerry, apparently imploring him to come forward on Kerry’s side, Mr. Rood decided to do so. Have you seen that article?

O’Neill: I actually haven’t seen the article. I understand what Rood has done is file an affidavit in connection with the Silver Star incident. But the first problem they’ve got with that is that the account in my book, Unfit for Command – basically what I did is simply assume after checking, a lot of checking – that the factual account contained in Boston Globe reporter Michael Kranish’s biography of Kerry was correct. I also assumed that the facts in Tour of Duty were correct….

FPM: This is the Michael Kranish, who denied that he was paid by the Kerry Campaign, after groups like Amazon.com had reprinted from a publisher’s press release that he had been employed to write the preface to that book.

O’Neill: Right. What they’re trying to do is slander Unfit For Command by claiming that the factual account of the Silver Star incident is not correct. Their problem is that I have used exactly the same account that was used in Kerry’s own autobiography, and the same one used by the Boston Globe in the friendly biography there. I checked it out, by the way, with a crewman right on Rood’s boat, but Rood himself would not speak to me. Evidently Kerry had better luck.

FPM: It’s interesting because Rood himself, in his Chicago Tribune piece, says, “I can’t pretend those calls from John Kerry had no effect on me.” In other words, he was persuaded by Kerry leaning on him.

O’Neill: Apparently he did. I haven’t seen the article. What does he say exactly?

FPM: Rood cites rather small differences. He said he didn’t think that the man Kerry shot in the back was a boy in a loincloth, that he looked like an ordinary VC to us. He said that we thought we were under enemy fire from the opposite bank, we were certainly returning fire or using suppressing fire in that direction. But he didn’t talk about how much fire, and he talked about two Vietcong who basically had run away and this one VC was left. So it’s all rather vague and amorphous. It’s just, “The Swiftboat vets are wrong, they’re telling falsehoods. John Kerry called me. I’m coming forward.” But he doesn’t lay out any highly-detailed contrary facts. At least that’s how I read it as a professional journalist.

O’Neill: It’s interesting because I tried to call Rood and he wouldn’t return the call. And whether the Vietcong was a man in pajamas or a teenager in a loincloth doesn’t seem to be very significant, but the way I got teenager in a loincloth was first from the Kranish biography, and second from various people on the scene.

FPM: Rood also got a Bronze Star that day. They were involved in beaching their boats in combat, something contrary to military policy at the time. So maybe Rood has his own reasons for supporting John Kerry’s version of events. Thank you, John O’Neill, for your service for America.

This article was published by FrontPage Magazine
http://swift4.he.net/~swift4/article.php?story=20040828080030401

posted October 05, 2004 11:53 PM            

Kerry Crew Member and Supporter Does Not “Recall” Senator In Cambodia

Washington, DC – Swift Boat Veterans for Truth today called again on Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry to set the record straight on whether he was, or was not, in Cambodia.

In today’s Boston Globe, an article by Michael Kranish further calls into question whether Kerry was ever in Cambodia.

“Michael Medeiros, who served aboard the No. 94 with Kerry and appeared with him at the Democratic National Convention, vividly recalled an occasion on which Kerry and the crew chased an enemy to the Cambodian border but did not go beyond the border," the Globe's Kranish writes. "Yet Medeiros said he could not recall dropping off special forces in Cambodia or going inside Cambodia with Kerry.” (Boston Globe, August 18th, 2004)

When pressed further about this incident, Michael Meehan, a spokesman for Senator Kerry, could not produce any documentation supporting Kerry’s claim that he was in Cambodia.

posted October 07, 2004 03:06 PM            

John Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia

On October 14, 1979, John Kerry described a remarkable event from his days as a Swift boat officer for the Boston Herald:

"I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon [sic] claimed there were no American troops was very real."

-- President Nixon, of course, did not assume office until January of 1969.

On March 27, 1986, during a speech opposing President Reagan's policy in Central America, Senator John Kerry had this to say:

"Mr. President, I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared -— seared -— in me, that says to me, before we send another generation into harm's way we have a responsibility in the U.S. Senate to go the last step, to make the best effort possible in order to avoid that kind of conflict." [see Congressional Record - Senate of March 27, 1986, page 3594]

And again, in a 1992 article by the Associated Press:

"But for Kerry, who spent six violent months [sic] commanding a patrol boat on the Mekong River, there's always been a ring of truth to allegations of abandoned Americans. By Christmas 1968, part of Kerry's patrol extended across the border of South Vietnam into Cambodia.

"We were told, `Just go up there and do your patrol. Everybody was over there (in Cambodia). Nobody thought twice about it," Kerry said. One of the missions, which Kerry, at the time, was ordered not to discuss, involved taking CIA operatives into Cambodia to search for enemy enclaves.

"I can remember wondering, `If you're going to go, what happens to you,"' Kerry said.

As recently as May of 2000, U.S. News and World Report stated that, "Sen. John Kerry made his first forays into Cambodia during the Vietnam War as a Navy lieutenant on clandestine missions to deliver weapons to anticommunist forces."

Interestingly, Kerry's Cambodian sojourn, though "seared" into his memory by 1986, somehow failed to rate a mention in Kerry's own contemporary journal.

In "Unfit for Command," authors John O'Neill and Dr. Jerome Corsi document the impossibility of Kerry's story:

Despite the dramatic memories of his Christmas in Cambodia, Kerry’s statements are complete lies. Kerry was never in Cambodia during Christmas 1968, or at all during the Vietnam War. In reality, during Christmas 1968, he was more than fifty miles away from Cambodia. Kerry was never ordered into Cambodia by anyone and would have been court-martialed had he gone there.

During Christmas 1968, Kerry was stationed at Coastal Division 13 in Cat Lo. Coastal Division 13’s patrol areas extended to Sa Dec, about fifty-five miles from the Cambodian border. Areas closer than fifty-five miles to the Cambodian border in the area of the Mekong River were patrolled by PBRs, a small river patrol craft, and not by Swift Boats. Preventing border crossings was considered so important at the time that an LCU (a large, mechanized landing craft) and several PBRs were stationed to ensure that no one could cross the border.

A large sign at the border prohibited entry. Tom Anderson, Commander of River Division 531, who was in charge of the PBRs, confirmed that there were no Swifts anywhere in the area and that they would have been stopped had they appeared.

All the living commanders in Kerry’s chain of command—Joe Streuhli (Commander of CosDiv 13), George Elliott (Commander of CosDiv 11), Adrian Lonsdale (Captain, USCG and Commander, Coastal Surveillance Center at An Thoi), Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann (Commander, Coastal Surveillance Force Vietnam, CTF 115), and Rear Admiral Art Price (Commander of River Patrol Force, CTF 116)—deny that Kerry was ever ordered to Cambodia. They indicate that Kerry would have been seriously disciplined or court-martialed had he gone there. At least three of the five crewmen on Kerry’s PCF 44 boat—Bill Zaldonis, Steven Hatch, and Steve Gardner—deny that they or their boat were ever in Cambodia. The remaining two crewmen declined to be interviewed for this book. Gardner, in particular, will never forget those days in late December when he was wounded on PCF 44, not in Cambodia, but many miles away in Vietnam.

As part of the supporting documentation given to station managers for our television ad, "Any Questions?" we provided this regarding John Kerry's "Christmas in Cambodia":

The story is a total preposterous fabrication by Kerry. Exhibit 8 is an affidavit by the Commander of the Swift boats in Vietnam, Admiral Roy Hoffmann, stating that Kerry's claim to be in Cambodia for Christmas Eve and Christmas of 1968 is a total lie. If necessary, similar affidavits are available from the entire chain of command. In reality, Kerry was at Sa Dec -- easily locatable on any map more than fifty miles from Cambodia. Kerry himself inadvertently admits that he was in Sa Dec for Christmas Eve and Christmas and not in Cambodia, as he had stated for so many years on the Senate Floor, in the newspapers, and elsewhere. Exhibit 27, Tour, pp. 213-219. Sa Dec is hardly "close" to the Cambodian border. In reality, far from being ordered secretly to Cambodia, Kerry spent a pleasant night at Sa Dec with "visions of sugar plums" dancing in his head. Exhibit 27, p. 219. At Sa Dec where the Swift boat patrol area ended, there were many miles of other boats (PBR's) leading to the Cambodian border. There were also gunboats on the border to prevent any crossing. If Kerry tried to get through, he would have been arrested. Obviously, Kerry has hardly been honest about his service in Vietnam.

John Kerry was never shot at by Khmer Rouge and Cambodians. He never took CIA operatives into Cambodia to search for enemy enclaves. In fact, John Kerry's boat never came within 50 miles of Cambodia.
http://swift4.he.net/~swift4/staticpages/index.php?page=Christmas