GOP Lies - The Facts of Kerry's Military Service & Anti-War Activities

[69forever]

So, I've been reading the mud-slinging going on over John Kerry's Vietnam War record and his subsequent participation with Vietnam Veterans Against the War in opposing the war.

Bob Dole calling on him to "apologize" to the rest of the vet's for his Un-American testimony before the Senate Foreign Relation's Committee in 1971.

Sinse when is it Un-American to voice your disapproval with what you believe and have seen firsthand to be a grievous error committed on America's behalf? Errors that have led us to the denigrated status in world opinion we are today....

The personal attacks on Senator Kerry's war record by the Swift Boat Vets. More comes to light everyday linking the Bush Campaign with this group.

This thread is meant to present facts and testimony about the true nature of John Kerry's Vietnam service and his affiliation with the VVAW until 1972, when he went his own way. Having been a member of VVAW for several years, I can say that it is not, nor has it ever been a fringe "left" political organization. Any questions or comments....feel free. That's what we fought for.

Peace.

~S~

 

[69forever]

The Testimony....

Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement by John Kerry to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations
April 23, 1971


I would like to talk on behalf of all those veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit - the emotions in the room and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told stories that at times they 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 Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

We call this investigation the Winter Soldier Investigation. The term Winter Soldier is a play on words of Thomas Paine's in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriots and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.

We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out....

In our opinion and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.

We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.

We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American.

We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search and destroy missions, as well as by Viet Cong terrorism - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.

We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.

We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.

We watched the United States falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings." We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater. We watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese. We watched pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point, and so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 81s and Fire Base 6s, and so many others.

Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.

Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?....We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country - the question of racism which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions such as the use of weapons; the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything.

An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation of Alcatraz put it to me very succinctly. He told me how as a boy on an Indian reservation he had watched television and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped in Vietnam and he said, "my God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people," and he stopped. And that is what we are trying to say, that we think this thing has to end.

We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country....

We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission - to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so when thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

 

[69forever]

Some interesting background...

Defending VVAW Against Swift Boat Vets Lies
By Keith Nolan


There exists a website (wintersoldier.com) whose sole purpose is to bash VVAW. Keith Nolan, author of ten books on the Vietnam War, took offense at the tactics used at wintersoldier.com and attempted to post a message at the website's message board. The administrator refused to post Nolan's message. Nolan's message, and the administrator's response follow.

NOLAN TO WINTERSOLDIER:
Please consider this letter a protest against the one-sided arguments and underhanded tactics deployed at this website in order to bash John Kerry and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

It is one thing to disagree with the political philosophy of the VVAW, or to argue that the organization drew false conclusions about genocide-as-policy based on the isolated war crimes its members saw in Vietnam.

It is another thing entirely, however, to defame those combat veterans who joined the VVAW as misfits, frauds, liars, traitors, and dupes of the KGB. What rubbish. You would never know from this website that General David Shoup, USMC (Ret), who earned the Medal of Honor in WWII, publicly supported John Kerry and the VVAW in 1971.

Every veterans organization attracts a certain fringe element, and I don't doubt, as is charged here, that a charlatan like Mark Lane included false testimony in his book about Vietnam. It is also charged here, however, that numerous phonies gave false testimony at the VVAW's Winter Soldiers Investigation in Detroit, and that only about thirty-percent of the men who participated in Operation Dewey Canyon III were genuine veterans of the Vietnam War. This I very much doubt, and I have searched this website in vain for even a shred of proof to back up these very serious charges.

All this website really has to offer are the personal opinions of historians Burkett and Lewy, who seem to have had no personal contact with VVAW members and are instead relying on information from the Nixon Whitehouse. For obvious political reasons, the Nixon administration did its best in 1971 to discredit Kerry and the VVAW. They came up with one VVAW leader (Al Hubbard) who had lied about his rank and exaggerated his military service. And that was it. They did not identify any other phony veterans, nor did they identify by name a single fraud who provided testimony in Detroit.

Who were all the liars and frauds in the VVAW? No one seems to know. And what exactly were they lying about in Detroit? One or two possibly exaggerated stories aside, the great majority of those who testified in Detroit described the exact same kind of abuses and atrocities that show up in the court-martial record of the war, in memoirs written by Vietnam veterans, and in histories written by academics. I don't understand how this website can so blithely dismiss the Detroit testimony when the stories told in Detroit mirror the documented war crimes committed at places like My Lai, My Khe, and Son Thang, and the documented illegal behavior of units like Task Force Barker and the Tiger Force of the 1-327th Airborne Infantry.

I've personally heard the same kind of stories about burned villages, mistreated civilians, and summarily executed prisoners dozens of times over from Vietnam veterans who have no political sympathy for the left-wing politics of the VVAW. 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. I know many good men who stayed true to their moral compass in Vietnam and served with distinction and honor. I also know many good men who have spent their lives regretting the things they did under the pressure of combat back when they were nineteen- and twenty-year-old grunts in Vietnam.

And why the desire at this website to whitewash the counterproductive brutality of General Westmoreland's search-and-destroy strategy? As has been noted by many disgusted infantry officers, Westmoreland's search-and-destroy strategy resulted in thousands of destroyed villages, tens of thousands of civilian casualties, hundreds of thousands of refugees, and drove the rural population of Vietnam into the arms of the Viet Cong. Kerry was only speaking the truth when he said that "We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them."

Good men are allowed to disagree on something as tragic as the Vietnam War without one side condemning those on the other side of the political line as being liars and frauds. Too bad that VVAW members like Barry Romo, James Duffy, Mark Lenix, Nathan Hale, Charles Stephens, Gary Keyes, Michael Hunter, Mike McCusker, Scott Moore, Donald Duncan, Steve Pitkin, and Kenneth Ruth aren't here to defend themselves against the charge that they never served in combat and invented their stories about Vietnam.
*************************************************

Keith Nolan
(author of RIPCORD, OPERATION BUFFALO, SAPPERS IN THE WIRE, etc.)
**************************************************

Here's the response I got from the website administrator:

WINTERSOLDIER TO NOLAN:
Sorry, but we feel no obligation to provide space for those who wish to denigrate and marginalize what we're trying to accomplish. Consider writing your own web site. Admin

 

[69forever]

John Kerry and War Crimes in Vietnam
By Jan Barry

[Note: Jan Barry was a founder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, after resigning from West Point.]
*************************************************
What the national news media has not reported in the current controversy - just as was not widely reported in 1971 - are the crimes of war that Kerry summarized in his antiwar speech to Congress.
**************************************************

John Kerry and War Crimes in Vietnam

An outraged buzz is circulating in political circles that John Kerry is unfit to run for president because as an antiwar activist he accused Vietnam veterans of committing war crimes. In a long-simmering reaction to Kerry's 1971 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, "many critics see Mr. Kerry's words as impugning the honor of all who served in Vietnam," as the New York Times put it. This, to put it mildly, is a gross distortion of what Kerry actually said and what the war crimes hearings were about.

"Summarizing the accounts of American soldiers he had heard at an antiwar conference in Detroit weeks earlier, Mr. Kerry said the men told how 'they 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 a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.' " the Times reported in a February 28 retrospective on Kerry's Vietnam war protests.

"But Gary Solis, a former Marine lieutenant colonel, Vietnam veteran and expert on war crimes who is an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center here, said Mr. Kerry had made a grave error. 'Sure it's true,' Mr. Solis said. 'Sure there were people raped, ears cut off and so on. Each one of the things that he mentioned happened, in some cases I know, and in others I'm confident. But when you put them all together in one sentence and say this was well known at every level of command, it impugns, it seems to me, everyone who fought over there and it gives the impression that everyone who fought over there was a war criminal and that's just not true,' " the Times report concluded.

What the national news media has not reported in the current controversy - just as was not widely reported in 1971 - are the crimes of war that Kerry summarized in his antiwar speech to Congress. When it comes to war crimes, the news world seems to prefer quoting opinions rather than presenting facts.

The fact is that the testimony on war crimes presented by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Detroit, Michigan, was read into the Congressional Record, spurred Congressional hearings into the conduct of the war in Vietnam, and echoed the conclusions of Brigadier General Telford Taylor, who prosecuted Nazi war criminals after World War II, that in Vietnam "we failed ourselves to learn the lessons we undertook to teach at Nuremberg, and that failure is today's American tragedy" (Nuremberg and Vietnam, 1970).

The hearings in Detroit, called the Winter Soldier Investigation, were designed to counter what many veterans saw as government officials scapegoating GIs for the widespread death and destruction of civilians and villages in Vietnam. "This group's efforts to document such testimony followed the well-known 1968 massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. By the 1971 VVAW hearings, the trial of Lt. William L. Calley by the Army was planned. The 1968 My Lai incident clearly resulted in more antiwar sentiment here in the United States, including these efforts of Vietnam veterans to describe vividly their personal experiences," University of Richmond history professor Ernest Bolt stated in a 1999 essay on the war crimes hearings.

"The Winter Soldier Investigation is not a mock trial. There will be no phony indictments; there will be no verdict against Uncle Sam," William Crandall, a former infantry platoon leader in the Americal Division in Vietnam, said in the event's introduction. "In these three days, over a hundred Vietnam veterans will present straightforward testimony - direct testimony - about acts which are war crimes under international law. Acts which these men have seen and participated in. Acts which are the inexorable result of national policy. The vets will testify in panels arranged by the combat units in which they fought so that it will be easy to see the policy of each division and thus the larger policy."

"We intend to show that the policies of Americal Division which inevitably resulted in My Lai were the policies of other Army and Marine Divisions as well. We intend to show that war crimes in Vietnam did not start in March 1968, or in the village of Son My or with one Lt. William Calley. We intend to indict those really responsible for My Lai, for Vietnam, for attempted genocide . . . We are here to bear witness not against America, but against those policy makers who are perverting America."

In a closing statement, Donald Duncan, a former Army Special Forces master sergeant, said "We have presented testimony for three days covering a wide range of war crimes. We have covered a period by actual firsthand testimony from 1963 to 1970 - seven years. We find: that in 1963, we were displacing population, we were murdering prisoners, we were turning prisoners over to somebody else to be tortured. We were committing murder then, and in 1970 we find nothing has changed. Every law of Land Warfare has been violated and been testified to here in the past three days. It has been done systematically, deliberately, and continuously. It has been done with the full knowledge of those who, in fact, make policy for this country. No active step has ever been taken to curtain those acts in Vietnam"

"We built forts in Vietnam to protect villages, or so we told the Vietnamese. And at the first shot fired at Tet in 1968 we destroyed the villages to protect the fort. District Eight in Saigon was leveled brick by brick, to the ground, to secure an area where Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, and Catholics, had come to the south because that was something the Church had told them in 1954. We leveled that area to protect a bridge," Duncan said. "We have listened to some terrible stories here. We have found there are some wondrous ways indeed to inflict pain upon each other. We will call them atrocities, and we will call them war crimes. And to talk about those acts, I'm sure, has been almost as painful for those who have had to listen as for those who have talked about them."

In his testimony to Congress, Kerry went on to say: "We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong. We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum. We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals."

"Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese... Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say they we have made a mistake," Kerry said, emphasizing his call for supporting the troops by bringing them home from a hell of our creation. "Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, 'the first President to lose a war.' "

"We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying, as human beings, to communicate to people in this country - the question of racism, which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions, such as the use of weapons: the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war, when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free-fire zones; harassment-interdiction fire, search-and-destroy missions; the bombings; the torture of prisoners; all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say."

Shortly after Kerry's testimony, hearings on war crimes in Vietnam were held by an ad hoc committee chaired by Rep. Ronald Dellums of California. In summing up four days of testimony by West Point officers, pilots, POW interrogators,and infantrymen who served in various units in Vietnam, Dellums said: "My hope is no other young person will have to go through the same kind of evil, the same kind of insanity, the same kind of wanton death and destruction that you have been engaged in."

More than three decades later, in 2003 the Toledo Blade, a small daily newspaper in Ohio, published an expose on war crimes committed in Vietnam that military officials investigated and then covered up. "The records related to a four-and-a-half year government investigation into the actions of a platoon of soldiers from the elite 101st Airborne known as Tiger Force who allegedly killed and mutilated dozens of Vietnamese civilians during a seven-month period in 1967."

"The investigation apparently concluded that at least 18 soldiers committed war crimes . . . but nothing was ever publicly disclosed, no charges were filed, and the documents have remained classified since 1975. The Blade's investigation, adding to the military's findings, and based on interviews with Tiger Force soldiers and Vietnamese civilians, concluded that the unit killed hundreds of unarmed people," Editor & Publisher magazine noted.

"Many readers of a recent series revealing alleged war crimes in Vietnam 36 years ago must have wondered: Why now? And why in The Blade of Toledo, Ohio? It seems more like a New York Times or Washington Post kind of project," the Editor & Publisher writer wrote. But the national news media skirted covering crimes of war while GIs slogged through mud and blood in Vietnam, and it still skirts the reality of war today.

Yet in one corner of Ohio, and in many homes in America, the bitter reality of the war in Vietnam is all too real. Reporters for the Toledo Blade found numerous veterans with stories as gruesome as any that Kerry relayed to Congress. And the Ohio newspaper seriously examined Kerry's comments on war crimes as the presidential candidate sought Democrats' votes in the state.

"As Senator Kerry geared up for Tuesday primaries in Ohio and nine other states, he told The Blade last week that he stands by what he said in 1971 - insisting his comments never portrayed all veterans as war criminals. Any suggestion of such, he said, is just political posturing by his opponents: 'They're just trying to muddy the waters here.' "

"Senator Kerry said last week that he never meant to blame the soldiers. 'I have stood up and consistently defended the soldiers as innocent victims of civilian policy at higher levels,' he told The Blade. He has few regrets over what he said in 1971. 'I think that occasionally there was language that might have been a little hot here and there,' he said. 'But by and large, the facts I laid out and the basic criticism of the war has been documented by countless people.' "

The Toledo Blade report on John Kerry and war crimes concluded: "Just one day after the end of the Winter Soldier Hearings, on a Kentucky army base, a sergeant told Army investigators about a rumor of a member of an elite paratrooper unit who had beheaded a Vietnamese baby four years earlier. That statement would launch the longest war crimes investigation of the Vietnam War, substantiate the longest-known series of atrocities by a battle unit in Vietnam, and lead to a case that would be concealed from the public for 36 years."

 

[69forever]

Vietnam vet defends John Kerry's war record

CAROL GIACOMO
IN PITTSBURGH


A JOURNALIST who commanded a boat alongside John Kerry in Vietnam has broken his silence to defend the Democratic presidential candidate against Republican critics of his military service.

Weighing in on the most divisive issue of the presidential campaign so far, William Rood of the Chicago Tribune said the claims made by Mr Kerry’s detractors were untrue.

"There were three swift boats on the river that day in Vietnam more than 35 years ago - three officers and 15 crew members. Only two of those officers remain to talk about what happened on 28 February, 1969," he wrote in a story on the newspaper’s website on Saturday.

"One is John Kerry ... who won a Silver Star for what happened on that date. I am the other."

Before now, Mr Rood refused all interviews, wanting to put memories of war and killing behind him. "But Kerry’s critics, armed with stories I know to be untrue, have charged that the accounts of what happened were overblown," he wrote.

Mr Kerry, a former navy lieutenant, is a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, and his war service is seen by many as essential to his challenge to replace United States president George Bush as commander-in-chief when the United States is facing terrorism and other threats.

Increasingly, veterans opposed to Mr Kerry, led by a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, have tried to undermine Mr Kerry’s record and credibility.

Many veterans are bitter that after returning from Vietnam, Mr Kerry became one of the war’s most prominent critics.

Mr Kerry has been forced to launch a counter-attack after
polls showed the Massachusetts senator’s support among veterans slipping since the Democratic convention. On Friday, he accused the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth of collaborating with the Bush campaign and asked the Federal Election Commission to force the group to withdraw its adverts.

In the Chicago Tribune article, Mr Rood said Mr Kerry urged him to go public with his account.

"I can’t pretend those calls had no effect on me [but] what matters most to me is that this is hurting crewmen who are not public figures and who deserved to be honoured for what they did," Mr Rood wrote.

Mr Rood said he was part of the operation that led to Mr Kerry receiving the Silver Star and had no first-hand knowledge of events that resulted in his Purple Hearts or Bronze Star.

In that February 1969 operation, he said Mr Kerry came under rocket and automatic weapons fire from Viet Cong soldiers and Mr Kerry devised an aggressive and unusual attack strategy that was praised by their superiors.

Mr Rood said while ambushes were common, the difference in this fight was that Mr Kerry, who had tactical command of the operation, had talked to Mr Rood and other commanders beforehand about not responding the way they usually did to an ambush.

"We agreed that if we were not crippled by the initial volley and had a clear fix on the location of the ambush, we would turn directly into it, focusing the boats’ twin .50-caliber machine guns on the attackers and beaching the boats," Mr Rood said.

He said the first time they took fire Mr Kerry ordered a "turn 90" and the three boats roared in on the ambush.

The plan worked. "We routed the ambush, killing three of the attackers. The troops, led by an army adviser, jumped off the boats and began a sweep, which killed another half dozen VC, and wounded or captured others," Mr Rood said.

Mr Rood said then Captain and now retired Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann, the task force commander, congratulated the three swift boats, saying the tactic of charging the ambushes was a "shining example of completely overwhelming the enemy". Mr Hoffmann has become a Kerry critic and now says what the boats did that day showed Mr Kerry as impulsive.

In their book, Unfit for Command, Kerry critics John O’Neill and Jerome Corsi accuse Mr Kerry of exaggerating wartime events. They said Mr Kerry’s attack on the Viet Cong ambush displayed "stupidity, not courage".

Mr O’Neill issued a statement on Saturday saying that Mr Rood’s criticism of Unfit for Command was "extremely unfair".

 

[69forever]

Navy Report Supports Kerry's War Memories

Wednesday, August 25, 2004



WASHINGTON — The Navy task force overseeing John Kerry's (search) swift boat squadron in Vietnam reported that his group of boats came under enemy fire during a March 13, 1969, incident that three decades later is being challenged by the Democratic presidential nominee's critics.

The March 18, 1969, weekly report from Task Force 115, which was located by The Associated Press during a search of Navy archives, is the latest document to surface that supports Kerry's description of an event for which he won a Bronze Star and a third Purple Heart.

The Task Force report twice mentions the incident five days earlier and both times calls it "an enemy initiated firefight" that included automatic weapons fire and underwater mines used against a group of five boats that included Kerry's.

Task Force 115 was commanded at the time by retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffmann (search), the founder of the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (search), which has been running ads challenging Kerry's account of the episode.

A member of the group, Larry Thurlow (search), said Tuesday he stood by his assertion that there was no enemy fire that day. Thurlow, the commander of another boat who also won a Bronze Star, said task force commanders probably relied on the initial report of the incident. Thurlow says Kerry wrote that report.

The document, part of thousands of pages of records housed at the Naval Historical Center, is one of several that say Kerry and other servicemen were shot at from the banks of the Bay Hap River on March 13, 1969. The Associated Press located the document Tuesday during a search of available records.

Earlier this month, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth aired a television ad claiming Kerry lied about the circumstances surrounding his medals. Several members of the group who were aboard nearby boats that March 13 said in the ad and in affidavits that there was no enemy gunfire during the incident.

The anti-Kerry group has not produced any official Navy documents supporting that claim, however. The man Kerry rescued, Jim Rassmann, and the crew of Kerry's boat all say there was gunfire from both banks of the river at the time.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Ginsberg, a lawyer for the Bush campaign, acknowledged Tuesday that he has given legal advice to the anti-Kerry group. Ginsberg said he never told the Bush campaign what he discussed with the group or vice versa, and doesn't advise the group on ad strategies.

The Kerry campaign has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (search) accusing the Bush campaign and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth of illegally coordinating the group's ads. The Bush campaign and the veterans group say there was no coordination.

Kerry is the subject of complaints by the Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee accusing his campaign of illegally coordinating anti-Bush ads with outside groups on the Democratic side, allegations he and the groups deny.

Kerry has denounced the assertions from Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as lies made as part of a Republican smear campaign. Most of the group's members and early financial backers are Republicans and one member who appeared in an ad, Ken Cordier, was a volunteer member of the Bush campaign. The campaign cut its ties with Cordier last week.

President Bush has said his campaign had nothing to do with the veterans group and said all such advertising by outside groups should cease. An anti-Bush group has run television ads saying Bush shirked his duty in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam war.

Kerry highlighted his Vietnam service during the Democratic convention last month, recounting the March 13 incident and having Rassmann join him on stage.

On that day in 1969, Kerry's PCF-94 was part of a five-boat group heading downriver. An underwater mine exploded underneath another boat, PCF-3, injuring its entire crew. Kerry's boat was then hit by another explosion that knocked Rassmann, an Army Green Beret, into the water. Kerry hurt his right arm in the explosion.

Kerry turned his boat around to rescue Rassmann, pulling the soldier into the boat with his injured right arm, while the other boats rushed to help PCF-3. All the official Navy reports on the incident say the boats were under heavy fire from the riverbanks at the time. Those records include the official after-action report, citations for Bronze Stars awarded for heroism that day and now the Task Force 115 report.

The weekly report cites the incident twice, referring to its code name of Sea Lords 358. The first reference says the boats "encountered an enemy initiated firefight with water mines and automatic weapons fire." The second reference also mentions "an enemy initiated firefight ... with water mines and automatic weapons."

Thurlow, the commander of another swift boat who won a Bronze Star for helping the crew of PCF-3, insists there was no enemy gunfire during the incident. The citation and recommendation for Thurlow's Bronze Star, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, also mention enemy fire, however.

Thurlow's medal recommendation, for example, says he helped the PCF-3 crew "under constant enemy small arms fire." That recommendation is signed by George Elliott, another member of the anti-Kerry group. It lists as the only witness for the incident Robert Eugene Lambert, an enlisted man who was not on Kerry's boat who also won the Bronze Star that day.

Thurlow stood by his claim that there was no gunfire that day and said his Bronze Star documents were wrong.

Kerry's campaign has released copies of the after-action report and Kerry's Bronze Star nomination and citation for the incident, but not the weekly report.

 

[bigcpl4fun]

OK...here's the deal. I agree with you that this much ado about nothing vis-a-vis John Kerry's record.

However, the Deomocrats made a big deal about the first President Bush's medal and they dregged up some guys who didn;t like him and told stories about how it really wasn't the way he said it was. During the Clinton-Dole campaign, they actually had groups making fun of Dole's medal and wounding at Anzio, which was one of a few times during World War II that "hell on earth" was as true as possible. Then, they bashed the current Bush's National Guard service.

It's a little late in the game they started to begin wailing and gnashing their teeth about this kind of thing. Sorry, but what goes around comes around. This has been a part of politics in this country almost from the beginning.

No one is innocent in this abomination.

 

[Succulent-one]

Bashing Kerry's war record is a disgrace to every service man or woman who has given thier best for our country. Bush isn't a quarter of the man Kerry is......

 

[69forever]

OK...here's the deal. I agree with you that this much ado about nothing vis-a-vis John Kerry's record.

However, the Deomocrats made a big deal about the first President Bush's medal and they dregged up some guys who didn;t like him and told stories about how it really wasn't the way he said it was. During the Clinton-Dole campaign, they actually had groups making fun of Dole's medal and wounding at Anzio, which was one of a few times during World War II that "hell on earth" was as true as possible. Then, they bashed the current Bush's National Guard service.

It's a little late in the game they started to begin wailing and gnashing their teeth about this kind of thing. Sorry, but what goes around comes around. This has been a part of politics in this country almost from the beginning.

No one is innocent in this abomination.

I agree that this type of politics has and does continue to plague our electoral process. There are differences of substance to the charges leveled, and their bearing on the fitness of Bush or Kerry to be Commander in Chief.

Bush and Cheney both bought their way out of service to this country. Bush's payroll records for the time in question in the Guard, where he was accused of being AWOL, were conveniently destroyed in a fire. He had his other personal records sealed and hidden from public scutiny when he became Governor of Texas.
Cheney had 5 deferments from the draft. All legally bought and paid for. These facts were pursued in commercials apart from the DNC's official endorsement. The RNC calls foul. Because the truth is being told, and there is the difference.

Kerry's record of service and opposition to the war are a matter of historical and official record. It's there for anyone to see. Now a group of Republican puppet's come forth and try to sully that record with false accusations. NO proof whatsoever. Members of the Swift Boat Vet's who accepted medals they now claim were mistakenly given??? There again is the difference.

I smell a rat....and the stench leads to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. DC

 

[69forever]

Bashing Kerry's war record is a disgrace to every service man or woman who has given thier best for our country. Bush isn't a quarter of the man Kerry is......

I don't pretend to be unbiased in this matter. Here, here.

Lt. John Kerry was chosen to speak on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against the War to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for both his charisma and sincerity. There were and are members with much more direct firsthand knowlege of the complete disregard of our policy makers, at the highest levels, for even the most basic human rights of our "enemy's".

But that's another story....

 

[69forever]

After Decades, Renewed War On Old Conflict

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 28, 2004; Page A01
************************************************
After a coin toss to decide which decorated Vietnam War veteran would
speak first, talk show host Dick Cavett invited his guests to debate
the
issue that had divided America. The tall, long-haired veteran with the
big jaw denounced the war as immoral. His clean-cut rival spoke of
patriotism and sacrifice.
************************************************
More than three decades after their 1971 debate, John F. Kerry and John
E. O'Neill are back at it. This time around, however, Kerry is running
for president, and O'Neill has become one of his most prominent
detractors.

For the past few weeks, long-standing presidential campaign themes such
as the economy, health care and even the war in Iraq have been
effectively overwhelmed by angry charges and countercharges about what
Kerry did, or did not do, in a conflict that more than one eligible
voter
in three is too young to remember.

Now, O'Neill and his supporters from the political advocacy group Swift
Boat Veterans for Truth are focusing their efforts on the Massachusetts
senator's antiwar activities after he returned from Vietnam. Earlier
this
week, they released a new television ad accusing Kerry of "betraying"
his
comrades and "dishonoring" his country by making false accusations that
many of them had committed war crimes.

By his own account, Kerry returned from Vietnam "an angry young man"
determined to restore "morality" to U.S. foreign policy; O'Neill saw
Kerry's actions as an affront to his patriotism. That these two men
came
to such divergent views is especially striking, given that they
skippered
the same U.S. Navy Swift boat on the Mekong River, albeit at different
times. An examination of their postwar paths illuminates a much broader
cultural divide that was born out of the Vietnam trauma -- and is
haunting American politics once again.

Archival records show that O'Neill, who has been making the rounds of
the
TV talk shows this month to promote his best-selling anti-Kerry book,
"Unfit for Command," was encouraged to go on television in 1971 by
President Richard M. Nixon and his aide Charles W. Colson. Nixon
regarded
Kerry as the antiwar movement's most effective and articulate
spokesman,
and the president was desperate to undercut the activist's popular
appeal.

"Let's hear it from the O'Neills now," Nixon told his 25-year-old
protege, after warning him that the Cavett show's producers "inevitably
.
. . have it stacked against you." Colson later boasted to Nixon Chief
of
Staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman that O'Neill "has agreed that he will appear
anytime, anywhere that we program him," according to White House
records.

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth members acknowledge that their animus
toward Kerry stems in large part from the speeches and statements he
made
after the war, particularly his allegation that U.S. forces in Vietnam
routinely engaged in activities that would be considered war crimes by
the Geneva Conventions. They were particularly upset by his April 1971
appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in which he
recounted stories by other veterans that "they had personally raped,
cut
off ears, cut off heads . . . [and] razed villages in [a] fashion
reminiscent of Genghis Khan."

"He slandered us, and now he expects us to support him or remain
quiet,"
said Joe Ponder, a disabled Swift boat veteran who appears in the most
recent anti-Kerry ad. "He discredited a whole generation of service
people. He said these things happened on a day-to-day basis with the
blessing of our commanders."

Veterans who are sympathetic to Kerry say that the Democratic
presidential candidate is vulnerable to political attacks on his
antiwar
activities because of an extensive public record that his opponents are
now combing for any inconsistency. Kerry has already backed away from
some of his more inflammatory antiwar statements and an earlier claim
that he was not present at a meeting that debated a proposal to
assassinate government officials and take over the Statue of Liberty.

Many of Kerry's former colleagues in the antiwar movement continue to
support him, arguing that President Bush has taken the United States
into
a war as devastating in its own way to U.S. prestige and moral
authority
around the world as Vietnam. Others bemoan what they see as Kerry's
transformation from an impassioned, conviction-oriented leader into a
more cautious politician who tailors his message to what works with
focus
groups and public opinion polls.

This reconstruction of the postwar careers of Kerry and the man who has
led the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth assault on him is based on more
than 20 interviews, research in the National Archives in College Park,
and a review of dozens of books and newspaper articles. Kerry declined
a
request for an interview; O'Neill accepted.

'More Believable'

The spring of 1971 marked the peak of the antiwar movement in the
United
States and Kerry's emergence as one of its stars. Nixon was attempting
to
salvage "peace with honor" in Vietnam through a policy of
"Vietnamization," which involved a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops
from
the country and political and military support for the anti-Communist
government in Saigon. The protesters wanted Nixon to announce an
immediate end to the war.

Kerry burst into the public consciousness when he was invited to
address
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22 by its chairman, J.
William Fulbright (D-Ark.). Dressed in olive-green fatigues and combat
ribbons, Kerry accused Nixon of sacrificing thousands of lives in a
hopeless cause and delivered his celebrated line "How do you ask a man
to
be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Kerry's eloquence and youthful good looks worried Nixon and his aides.
As
Kerry was addressing the senators beneath the glare of the television
lights, tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans were camped on the Mall,
in
defiance of government and Supreme Court orders. The following day,
Nixon
expressed concern to Haldeman that Kerry had been "extremely
effective."

According to a tape recording of the Oval Office conversation, Haldeman
described Kerry as "a Kennedy-type guy" with "a bundle of lettuce up
here," meaning medals. "He looks like a Kennedy, and he talks exactly
like a Kennedy."

Nixon: "Where did he serve?"

"He was a Navy lieutenant, j.g., on a gunboat, and he used, uh, to run
his gunboat up and shoot at, uh, shoot babies out of women's arms,"
replied Haldeman, fancifully embroidering Kerry's testimony of the
previous day.

White House records show that Nixon and his advisers were so concerned
about Kerry they immediately began looking around for other Vietnam
veterans who would counter his popular appeal. One they came up with
was
O'Neill, described by Colson in a memo as "a very attractive dedicated
young man -- short hair, very square, very patriotic." Haldeman told
Nixon that O'Neill ("a great little sharp-looking guy") was not "as
eloquent as Kerry" but was "more believable."

O'Neill, who had returned from Vietnam in June 1970, belonged to a
group
called Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace, identified by Colson in a
memo
to Nixon as "an organization specifically set up to counter Kerry." He
started making the rounds of the TV studios, delighting the White House
with his fiery denunciations of Kerry and support for Nixon's
Vietnamization policy.

After one such appearance, on June 6, Colson talked enthusiastically to
Nixon about "this boy O'Neill," saying, "You'd just be proud of him."
In
conversations with Colson, Nixon referred to O'Neill as "your young
man."


Colson, who now heads an organization called Prison Fellowship
Ministries, declined to be interviewed, explaining through an aide that
he did not want to be drawn into the current campaign. But he confirmed
the accuracy of a quotation in the Dec. 2, 2002, New Yorker magazine in
which he said that Nixon aides had "formed" Vietnam Veterans for a Just
Peace as "a counterfoil" to Kerry and did everything they could to
boost
the group.

In an interview this week, O'Neill denied that Vietnam Veterans for a
Just Peace was a front organization for the White House. He said the
group got started "a little bit before Colson knew who we were" and
received support from Democrats as well as Republicans.

"They were probably thrilled with what we were doing," said O'Neill,
referring to Nixon and his aides. "But to say that they were using us
implies that they were getting us to accomplish something we did not
want
to accomplish, which is not true. We were doing things we wanted to
do."

By mid-June, according to a White House memo, O'Neill was beginning to
feel "very discouraged" about his reception on TV. He had been booed by
a
hostile crowd on the Cavett show and wanted "to go home to Texas and
get
away from the eastern establishment." Colson urged Nixon to see O'Neill
to boost his spirits.

Their June 16 meeting in the Oval Office was scheduled for 10 minutes,
but Nixon was so engrossed in the conversation that it lasted 45
minutes.
Pacing behind his desk, Nixon tried to encourage O'Neill by citing his
own effort to prosecute State Department official Alger Hiss as a
Soviet
spy in 1948, an event that was pivotal to Nixon's political career.
"Don't worry about being on the winning side," he told O'Neill. "Only
worry about doing what is right."

According to a Colson memo, an awestruck O'Neill left the Oval Office
saying "he had just been with the most magnificent man he had ever met
in
his life." ("Totally untrue," O'Neill says now.) Colson also quoted
O'Neill as promising to "spend every waking moment campaigning for
Richard Nixon."

White House memos show that Colson was working behind the scenes to
push
for a Kerry-O'Neill debate on nationwide television. "Let's destroy
this
young demagogue before he becomes another Ralph Nader," he wrote,
referring to Kerry.

Kerry finally accepted a challenge from O'Neill to appear with him on
Cavett's show on ABC on June 30. From today's perspective, their debate
seems gloriously old-fashioned. Instead of boiling down their points to
15-second sound bites, the network gave the two veterans 90 minutes to
talk about the burning issue of the day, interrupted only by Cavett
reading ads for Calgon Bath Oil Beads ("Leaves you radiant and
refreshed!").

The debate ended without a decisive victory for either side. O'Neill
accused Kerry of "the big lie," arguing that he had "murdered" the
reputations of 2 1/2 million service members by accusing them of war
crimes. Dressed in a well-cut blue suit, Kerry told the audience he had
personally participated in "search-and-destroy missions in which the
houses of noncombatants were burned to the ground" and asked O'Neill if
he had ever "burned a village."

"No, I never burned a village," replied O'Neill, who was wearing his
only
suit, a blue-and-white seersucker, with matching white socks.

After a cameo role at the 1972 Republican National Convention, when he
was one of several Democrats nominating Nixon for president, O'Neill
dropped out of politics, attending law school and then clerking for
then-Associate Justice William H. Rehnquist at the Supreme Court. He
later became a successful lawyer in Houston. It was not until the his
old
adversary locked up the Democratic nomination for president that he
reentered the public stage.

'Top-Downers'

Within Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), as the leading antiwar
veterans organization was known, Kerry was regarded as moderate and
politically ambitious. Other, less well-connected vets were uneasy
about
his patrician manners, "JFK"-monogrammed sweaters and Gucci shoes. The
leaders of the movement appreciated his public speaking skills and
appointed him their principal spokesman. Lower down, there was
resentment
over the amount of media attention he was getting.

According to historian Gerald Nicosia, whose "Home to War" is the
authoritative account of the movement, VVAW was becoming increasingly
divided by 1971. The officer class -- referred to as "top-downers" --
believed in working within the political system. The grunts, or
"bottom-uppers," wanted to challenge the system, sometimes by civil
disobedience or violence. Kerry was very much a "top-downer," although
he
worked hard to preserve the unity of the movement.

Jan Barry, the founder and former president of VVAW, has a vivid memory
of Kerry's performance at the "Winter Soldier" hearings in Detroit in
January 1971, when more than 100 veterans gave accounts of gruesome
atrocities and war crimes they had committed. "You had a room full of
veterans who had bared their souls and were angry that nobody wanted to
listen to them," Barry said. "Kerry stood up in front of this angry
group
of people and convinced them to take their anger to Washington and to
Congress."

Kerry was referring to the testimony at the Winter Soldier hearings
when
he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971 that he
had
heard accounts of American servicemen ravaging villages and cutting off
heads and ears. The current ads by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth imply
that Kerry was making these accusations himself, when in fact he was
relating other people's accounts.

In an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press" earlier this year, Kerry
described his 1971 testimony as "honest" but "a little bit over the
top."
"Those were the words of an angry young man," he told moderator Tim
Russert.

According to FBI records first released to Nicosia, Kerry sometimes
expressed fairly radical points of view. For example, he described
North
Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh as "the George Washington of
Vietnam." He also noted with some bitterness that out "of 234
congressmen's sons eligible for service in Vietnam, only 24 went there,
and only one of them was wounded."

The FBI kept careful tabs on the protesters through a network of
informers, who tracked Kerry's movements. The FBI records help to
disprove a long-standing claim by Kerry that he resigned from the VVAW
leadership in the summer of 1971, before the organization began to
flirt
with proposals for radical civil disobedience and even violence.

The FBI records show that Kerry was present for a particularly
contentious meeting in Kansas City, Mo., in November 1971, at which
plans
were discussed for the assassination or kidnapping of government
officials or the takeover of the Statue of Liberty. The proposal was
overwhelmingly voted down, and the files record that Kerry wanted VVAW
"to stay strictly non-violent." According to the FBI files, he resigned
from the organization in Kansas City after an angry showdown with
radicals led by a firebrand named Al Hubbard.

Told about the FBI records earlier this year, Kerry said through a
spokesman that he now accepted he must have been in Kansas City for the
November meeting while continuing to insist that he had "no personal
recollection" of the contentious debate. Many people associated with
VVAW
find this difficult to believe.

"There was no way he would have forgotten about being in Kansas City,"
said Nicosia, who is generally sympathetic to Kerry.

Former VVAW Kansas state coordinator John Musgrave, who served with the
Marines in Vietnam, expressed extreme doubt about Kerry's stated
recollection. "He had a tremendous confrontation with Hubbard at that
meeting. How can he claim not to have any memory of it?"

"These meetings were chaotic, confused and very noisy," countered John
Hurley, director of the Veterans for Kerry movement, which claims a
membership of 300,000. According to Hurley, it was easy to confuse one
meeting with another as Kerry was "flying all over the country from one
college campus to another."

More than three decades later, the anti-Vietnam War movement remains
split between "top-downers" and "bottom-uppers." Many VVAW members
interpret Kerry's answers to Russert as a signal that he has moved away
from his youthful ideals. But they are divided over whether this is a
tactical concession or a deeper political betrayal.

"He doesn't have the same courage of his convictions he had back then,"
said Musgrave, referring to Kerry's appearance before the Senate
Foreign
Relations Committee. "When he gave that speech, he spoke for all of us.
He should either stand up for it, or explain why he no longer agrees
with
it. He is doing neither, as far as I can see."

"The John Kerry of 2004 is not the same as the John Kerry of 1971,"
said
David Cline, a southern VVAW organizer. "I think he was more truthful
in
1971. Having said that, I know who I want to be president. The sad
reality of American politics is that any candidate has to go for the
center."

 

[GeorgeWBush]

I like john McCain he has said that kerry earned that right and he as not said anything bad about him or kerry about him but bush bashed mcCain earlier in the year.

But bush when he was in the air corp failed to take a drug test twice that is why he was not flying.

The mudsling is worst this year the republicans except a few that has asked the swifties to stop and evev aske the prez. to tell them one was pappa bush he is totaly against it.

But i am voting for kerry the main reason is the religiuos right has taken partial control in the white house and several republicans are mad about along with voters.

 

[Joey3308]

I like john McCain he has said that kerry earned that right and he as not said anything bad about him or kerry about him but bush bashed mcCain earlier in the year.

But bush when he was in the air corp failed to take a drug test twice that is why he was not flying.

The mudsling is worst this year the republicans except a few that has asked the swifties to stop and evev aske the prez. to tell them one was pappa bush he is totaly against it.

But i am voting for kerry the main reason is the religiuos right has taken partial control in the white house and several republicans are mad about along with voters.

You just might be a bit more convicing if you learn how to spell and write a complete sentence

As far as what the boys did many years ago.....who cares. Kerry obviously did his four month tour to create some great photo ops for use in later campaigns and Georgie Porgie played it cool and did his time in a safe place.

I have to look at what is happening now and I think President Chaney is doing a great job

 

[69forever]

You just might be a bit more convicing if you learn how to spell and write a complete sentence

As far as what the boys did many years ago.....who cares. Kerry obviously did his four month tour to create some great photo ops for use in later campaigns and Georgie Porgie played it cool and did his time in a safe place.

I have to look at what is happening now and I think President Chaney is doing a great job

Glad to see you are feeling up to your old self Joey!!! ^5's

<snickers> Yup, let me on a 50' aluminum boat that makes enough noise to wake the dead, cruising up a river with no place to run and hide....for a photo-op to run for office years later......

Ahhhh, fuck....might as well get hit with shrapnel a few times too

 

[Joey3308]

 

[69forever]

Eloquent.....

Is not even the word for this brothers observations. I've yet to hear a shred of proof or intelligent response from shreiking Republican buzzards. Maybe, just maybe, they don't have any.

Imagine that.....

Exploiting The Pain of Vietnam Veterans

Commentary / Commentary
Date: Sep 01, 2004 - 01:21 AM
Those who thought they were too good to go to Vietnam are now
exploiting
those who did go to Vietnam.
By Brad Kennedy
**************************************************
It's been thirty-seven years since I was lucky and returned from
serving
in Vietnam. I volunteered for the draft and ultimately served as a
forward observer for the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. I still feel
the
horror of that war. Vietnam was like a bad dream where a monster was in
control, reaching in and ripping out hearts and heads or pulling off
arms and legs--American and Vietnamese. We never knew who was next. To
escape its grasp was just the luck of the draw.

The longer we were in that dream, the clearer we saw there were
actually
four monsters--North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, Viet Cong, and
American. We came to see ourselves as tiny parts of the American
monster. Some made up the legs, others the arms and the brain. We
forward observers were the eyes. Together, we were perpetrating
outrages
as surely as the other monsters were. These acts were against our will,
for certain. We were a monster run amok.

In our fear and our horror, we had only one thing going for us--each
other. No matter where or what unit an American was from, he was our
brother. Creed or color or mother country were of no account. Our bonds
of brotherhood seemed like they would last forever. Forged of love,
they
were our best hope for salvation. It was like we all had the same DNA,
though that of a monster.

Maybe because I have spent so much time thinking and writing about the
war, I've become addicted to its pain. I see Vietnamese smiling in a
hootch one moment, shrieking and flailing amid flaming havoc the next.
I
hear my friends laughing one second, then see them frozen in
timelessness forever. But now, only now after all these years, I sense
a
new pain, a different one but one every bit as mournful. It is the pain
of our veterans' bonds of brotherhood being torn apart. Where is the
love and hope we prayed would save us from being cast to the wind? The
monster stirs in the night when we savor our hard-earned sleep,
contriving movements to tear us asunder. All over the country others
feel it, too. This is no dream.

Who causes this pain? Some of us say John Kerry is to blame. They say
he
accepted medals he did not deserve and call him a liar. They tarred him
for two weeks with these charges but couldn't make the feathers stick.
By now overwhelming new evidence has appeared in support of the
official
records and against their allegations. The accusers neither apologize
nor recant, seemingly because it never was about the award of his
medals. Several of them freely admit their actions and allegations have
far more to do with what Kerry did with his medals afterwards.
Principally, they object to his throwing them over the Capitol
building's fence in protest of the war, his public appearance(s) with
Jane Fonda, and his raising the subject of war crimes in his testimony
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. The war crimes
statement seems to be the flash-point issue.

These matters are filled with high-octane emotional charge, especially
for Vietnam veterans. But righteous indignation is justified only when
it's right. Sincere folks have two reasons to be wary:

First, the people attacking Kerry already have shown they will make
false charges against him by their distortions about how he got his
medals.

Second, their charges are made in the context of a national election
for
the purpose of influencing votes.

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad takes excerpts from Kerry's
testimony before the Fulbright Committee out of context in such a way
that they easily can be misunderstood. The voiceover for the ad says he
accused all Viet vets of war crimes. In truth, Kerry made clear that he
was reporting what decorated vets had said about themselves in sworn
testimony and that he was not accusing others. He bore testimony to the
failures of the policymakers in Washington.

It is also true that supporters of President Bush have advised,
assisted, and bankrolled the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. It is they,
not John Kerry, who thirty years after the fact have brought up these
distortions about war crimes in Vietnam and repeated them over and over
and over again. It is these wizards behind the curtain, who were too
good to serve in Vietnam, who now manipulate for partisan purpose the
pain and grief this issue causes those of us who did. They have no
shame
and they envy our honor. Fellow veterans, stand your watch.

Why did John Kerry protest the war when he returned home? I can only
speak for myself, since I did the same. I became convinced that Vietnam
was not necessary to our national security, that we were doing more
harm
than good there, and that it was only a matter of time before the
American people turned on a policy that claimed as many as five hundred
American lives every week. Given that view, which history has
sustained,
it would have been a breach of the bonds of brotherhood I felt for the
American troops still in Vietnam for me not to do all I could within
our
democratic system to correct an errant policy and bring them home
alive.
I protested out of love for my brothers-in-arms.

When I visualize a sailor turning his boat back into gunfire to save a
soldier from the water, I know that brotherly love steered that ship.
One night John Kerry pulled one soldier from dangerous waters, the next
he tried to pull hundreds of thousands more back to the safety of our
own shores.
*************************************************
Brad Kennedy lives in New Jersey and served in the US Army in Vietnam
from August 1966 to July 1967. He is the author of the forthcoming
novel
Blood and Country: A Soldier's Call.
*************************************************

Fuck No - We Won't Go!!!!
Bring the Troops Home Now!!!!

 

[69Muffin]

Thought this went hand in hand with the subject of your thread.

Bush's Missing Records
Reports on Missing Service Time So Far Not Found
By MATT KELLEY, AP

WASHINGTON - Documents that should have been written to explain gaps in President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service are missing from the military records released about his service in 1972 and 1973, according to regulations and outside experts.



AP
George W. Bush poses in his Texas Air National Guard uniform.

For example, Air National Guard regulations at the time required commanders to write an investigative report for the Air Force when Bush missed his annual medical exam in 1972. The regulations also required commanders to confirm in writing that Bush received counseling after missing five months of drills.

No such records have been made public and the government told The Associated Press in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that it has released all records it can find.

Outside experts suggest that National Guard commanders may not have produced documentation required by their own regulations.

"One of the downfalls back then in the National Guard was that not everyone wanted to be chief of staff of the Air Force. They just wanted to fly or maintain airplanes. So the record keeping could have been better,'' said retired Maj. Gen. Paul A. Weaver Jr., a former head of the Air National Guard. He said the documents may not have been kept in the first place.


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Challenging the government's declaration that no more documents exist, the AP identified five categories of records that should have been generated after Bush skipped his pilot's physical and missed five months of training.

"Each of these actions by any member of the National Guard should have generated the creation of many documents that have yet to be produced,'' AP lawyer David Schulz wrote the Justice Department Aug. 26.

White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said there were no other documents to explain discrepancies in Bush's files.

Military service during the Vietnam War has become an issue in the presidential election as both candidates debate the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Democrat John Kerry commanded a Navy Swift boat in Vietnam and was awarded five medals, including a Silver Star. But his heroism has been challenged in ads by some veterans who support Bush.

The president served stateside in the Air National Guard during Vietnam. Democrats have accused him of shirking his Guard service and getting favored treatment as the son of a prominent Washington figure.

The AP talked to experts unaffiliated with either campaign who have reviewed Bush's files for missing documents. They said it was not unusual for guard commanders to ignore deficiencies by junior officers such as Bush. But they said missing a physical exam, which caused him to be grounded, was not common.

"It's sort of like a code of honor that you didn't go DNF (duty not including flying),'' said retired Air Force Col. Leonard Walls, who flew 181 combat missions over Vietnam. "There was a lot of pride in keeping combat-ready status.''

Bush has said he fulfilled all his obligations. He was in the Texas Air National Guard from 1968 to 1973 and was trained to fly F-102 fighters.

"I'm proud of my service,'' Bush told a rally last weekend in Lima, Ohio.

Records of Bush's service have significant gaps, starting in 1972. Bush has said he left Texas that year to work on the unsuccessful Senate campaign in Alabama of family friend Winton Blount.

The five kinds of missing files are:

A report from the Texas Air National Guard to Bush's local draft board certifying that Bush remained in good standing. The government has released copies of those DD Form 44 documents for Bush for 1971 and earlier years but not for 1972 or 1973. Records from Bush's draft board in Houston do not show his draft status changed after he joined the guard in 1968. The AP obtained the draft board records Aug. 27 under the Freedom of Information Act.

Records of a required investigation into why Bush lost flight status. When Bush skipped his 1972 physical, regulations required his Texas commanders to "direct an investigation as to why the individual failed to accomplish the medical examination,'' according to the Air Force manual at the time. An investigative report was supposed to be forwarded "with the command recommendation'' to Air Force officials "for final determination.''

Bush's spokesmen have said he skipped the exam because he knew he would be doing desk duty in Alabama. But Bush was required to take the physical by the end of July 1972, more than a month before he won final approval to train in Alabama.

A written acknowledgment from Bush that he had received the orders grounding him. His Texas commanders were ordered to have Bush sign such a document; but none has been released.

Reports of formal counseling sessions Bush was required to have after missing more than three training sessions. Bush missed at least five months' worth of National Guard training in 1972. No documents have surfaced indicating Bush was counseled or had written authorization to skip that training or make it up later. Commanders did have broad discretion to allow guardsmen to make up for missed training sessions, said Weaver and Lawrence Korb, Pentagon personnel chief during the Reagan administration from 1981 to 1985.

"If you missed it, you could make it up,'' said Korb, who now works for the Center for American Progress, which supports Kerry.

A signed statement from Bush acknowledging he could be called to active duty if he did not promptly transfer to another guard unit after leaving Texas. The statement was required as part of a Vietnam-era crackdown on no-show guardsmen. Bush was approved in September 1972 to train with the Alabama unit, more than four months after he left Texas.

Bush was approved to train in September, October and November 1972 with the Alabama Air National Guard's 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group. The only record tying Bush to that unit is a dental exam at the group's Montgomery base in January 1973. No records have been released giving Bush permission to train with the 187th after November 1972.

Walls, the Air Force combat veteran, was assigned to the 187th in 1972 and 1973 to train its pilots to fly the F-4 Phantom. Walls and more than a dozen other members of the 187th say they never saw Bush. One member of the unit, retired Lt. Col. John Calhoun, has said he remembers Bush showing up for training with the 187th.

Pay records show Bush was credited for training in January, April and May 1973; other files indicate that service was outside Texas.

A May 1973 yearly evaluation from Bush's Texas unit gives the future president no ratings and stated Bush had not been seen at the Texas base since April 1972. In a directive from June 29, 1973, an Air Force personnel official pressed Bush's unit for information about his Alabama service.

"This officer should have been reassigned in May 1972,'' wrote Master Sgt. Daniel P. Harkness, "since he no longer is training in his AFSC (Air Force Service Category, or job title) or with his unit of assignment.''

Then-Maj. Rufus G. Martin replied Nov. 12, 1973: "Not rated for the period 1 May 72 through 30 Apr 73. Report for this period not available for administrative reasons.''

By then, Texas Air National Guard officials had approved Bush's request to leave the guard to attend Harvard Business School; his last days of duty were in July 1973.


09/05/04 23:57 EDT

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.

 

[69Muffin]

And THIS sorry excuse for a human being has the nerve to question ANYONE'S military record?! My father served in WWII and I KNOW is turning in his grave at the audacity.

 

[69forever]

And THIS sorry excuse for a human being has the nerve to question ANYONE'S military record?! My father served in WWII and I KNOW is turning in his grave at the audacity.

Thanks {{{{ Muffy }}}} There is always the danger of when you have ambitions for career advancement or political office.... of things from your past coming back to bite you in the ass!!!!

I got this news release today.....seems Ret. Adm. Hoffman, head of the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" would have been guilty of a war crime himself. If the boat commander hadn't refused the order to fire on unarmed fishermen in '69.....

It's a bitch when you try to re-write history and there are still people to set the record straight!!!
************************************************
Forwarded from networker Dave Collins to all on VVAWNET:

**********************************************
Reconstructing one day on a Swift boat

Posted: Saturday September 4th, 2004, 9:30 PM
Last Updated: Saturday September 4th, 2004, 9:30 PM

Bill Means needed to talk to me, he said. Right away.

I didn't ask why; I figured it had something to do with Vietnam. We'd
talked briefly a couple of months earlier about the war and about Swift
boats. Thirty-five years ago, as a Navy seaman, Means had patrolled the
southern coastline of the South China Sea and the mangrove-dense rivers
of the country's interior -- 12 months in all, mostly spent in the
pilot
house of one of those 55-foot, aluminum-hulled Navy fighting boats.

About a week ago, we made tentative plans to talk again. Then I didn't
hear from him until he called abruptly, urgency in his voice.

We sat down together and, agitated and emotional, he laid it all out
for
me.

It bothered him, seeing Vietnam brought back into play as a political
game piece. The left had done it to war veterans three decades ago.
Returning servicemen had been vilified -- spat upon, in fact, as if
they'd been the architects of U.S. foreign policy rather than just the
young men and women obligated by law and duty to carry it out.

Now the right had seized upon the Vietnam War, too -- specifically the
role, in uniform and out, of Sen. John Kerry. And to Means, it seemed
just as wrong.

Means, a 55-year-old investigator for several Bakersfield law firms,
was
particularly annoyed by the words of one retired admiral. Roy F.
"Latch"
Hoffman, one of the co-founders of the pro-George W. Bush group Swift
Boat Veterans for Truth, had publicly criticized Kerry, a former Swift
boat commander, for having brought back stories about alleged war
crimes
by U.S. forces -- often carried out, Kerry said in 1971, "with the full
awareness of officers at all levels."

Seemed to him, Means said, his own Swift boat crew had come close to
committing a war crime themselves one day. A senior officer, hitching a
ride up the coast aboard their Swift boat, had ordered the crew to fire
on a small group of unarmed Vietnamese fishermen working their nets in
unrestricted waters, Means said. The boat's commanding officer had
refused to comply.

Was that the way the boat's commander remembered the incident too, all
these years later? Means had to know.

So he got on the Internet and hunted down Thomas W.L. "Tad" McCall, the
retired Navy captain who'd commanded Means' boat, PCF 88, as a newly
minted ensign. Means called him.

Not only did McCall remember the day in question, and that
confrontation
off the coast of South Vietnam, he remembered the name of the officer
who had given the command to shoot: "Latch" Hoffman himself, then a
Navy
captain in charge of the entire Swift boat task force in Vietnam.

The next morning Means told me the whole story. Then I called McCall
myself.

McCall, now 60, remembers March 14, 1969, because it was his 25th
birthday. He'd only been running a Swift boat for a few weeks, having
arrived in Vietnam in January 1969, the same month as Means.

At the time, McCall said, the Navy was having trouble finding qualified
officers to command those hazardous-duty patrol boats; lieutenant
j.g.'s
were in increasingly short supply. McCall, the son of Oregon's sitting
governor, Republican Tom McCall, was only an ensign. That, the Navy was
beginning to realize, would have to do.

"I was really green," said McCall, who joined the Navy as an enlisted
man in 1967 and retired in March 1992 as a captain and a JAG, or
military attorney.

McCall's crew was supposed to be off duty that day. But McCall was told
Hoffman needed a ride up the coast to the base at Nha Trang to visit a
seriously wounded Navy SEAL.

"I was excited, nervous and kind of pleased we were going to get to
take
the commander of the task force up the coast, an hour and a half each
way," McCall said. "A beautiful trip, an honor for us. The crew didn't
think it was an honor, though. They thought it was a pain in the butt."

Hoffman got to the boat at mid-morning, a distinguished-looking officer
in brown camouflage.

From the start, Hoffman made it clear the trip would be no pleasure
cruise. He wanted to search every Vietnamese boat they passed, it
seemed. McCall protested mildly; he knew many of those boats from
having
patrolled those same waters almost daily.

Then Hoffman set his attention on a small cluster of fishing boats,
four
small vessels with perhaps 10 fishermen, about 1,000 yards offshore.
"We
had seen them in the water there many, many times," McCall said. "They
were fishing at a good fishing place ... in traditional fishing waters.
'Another patrol is coming up behind us soon,' I told him. 'We're taking
you for a ride, not patrolling.'"

But Hoffman ordered a crewman to hail the fishing boats on a bullhorn.
The fishermen didn't respond. So Hoffman ordered a crewman to fire his
M-16 in their direction, splashing the water around them. The
fishermen,
perhaps not understanding what they were supposed to do, still didn't
respond.

"Shoot closer," McCall remembers Hoffman saying.

"I can't shoot closer, sir, I'll hit them," the crewman said.

"Well, do it," Hoffman said.

The meaning of those words were clear to everyone aboard PCF 88, McCall
said. Hoffman was ordering the fishing party destroyed, the fishermen
killed.

The officers argued policy; McCall realized it was ultimately his call.

He ordered his men to stand down, leave the fishermen alone and move
on.
He sent Hoffman below deck, and the captain, cursing, complied.

"From that day on," said Means, who witnessed the exchange from his
post
at the wheel, "McCall was our hero."

When McCall got back to the base at Cam Ranh Bay, he was told he would
receive an administrative punishment -- a 30-day benching known as
being
"in hack," for which official records were not kept.

"There was no animosity afterward," McCall said, noting that when
Hoffman left Vietnam, the sailors at Cam Ranh Bay threw him a party.

"I think, if I remember right, he gave me a hug," McCall said. "He was
a
rascal, a colorful guy. We had an amicable parting of the ways. I just
thought his leadership at the time was misguided."

Hoffman did not return my e-mail message asking for his comment.

After leaving the Navy, McCall served as a deputy assistant secretary
of
the Air Force, a civilian post, from 1994 to 2001. Since that time he
has worked as a consultant to the Army on environmental matters.

He has been approached by representatives of the Kerry campaign about
telling his story, he said. He's not particularly political, so he's
not
interested.

Means feels the same -- to a point.

"We weren't Republicans and Democrats on those Swift boats," he said.
"We were (expletive) trying to stay alive. (Things) happened, but we
can't go back and reconstruct it from 35 years ago."

But if others, whatever their motivation, insist on trying to do so
now,
Means is willing to try too. In his view, his commanding officer did
the
right thing 35 years ago by speaking up. Speaking up himself, Bill
Means
believes, is the least he can do today.