SwiftVets.com

[FredRum]

from National Review Online's Kerry Spot

3/4 THROUGH 'UNFIT FOR COMMAND' [08/15 11:28 AM]

So, while flying down to Hilton Head, I read through the first three quarters of “Unfit For Command.” Impressions so far:

Book reviews won’t do justice to the charges in this book. Excerpts, the free chapter distributed online by Regnery, blog discussions… none of them can really give a full and comprehensive picture of the case that John O’Neill and Jerome Corsi lay out in these 185 pages. If you really want to understand the depth and breadth of their argument, you’ll have to pick it up yourself.

We’ve heard and read a lot about Kerry’s third purple heart. According to the testimony collected in this book, all of Kerry’s medals were given under questionable circumstances, with citations describing much more intense and dramatic battle scenes than the memories of the men there. On his first Purple Heart, there’s scant evidence from testimony that Kerry’s wound was a result of enemy fire. (In fact, the authors note that even in the account in the Boston Globe biography, it’s not all that clear that there was enemy fire, and they note that Kerry refused to be interviewed about that incident.)

Kerry’s Silver Star citation is for “personally leading a landing party ashore in pursuit of the enemy… attacking a numerically superior force in the face of intense fire.” Men who were with him say his combat consisted of killing one wounded teenage Viet Cong, fleeing with a rocket launcher that may or may not have been loaded. Many men had fought around him and before he had grounded his boat in the shoreline and charged with his rifle, but only Kerry got the Silver Star.

Chapter Four, “War Crimes,” portrays Kerry as being reckless and trigger-happy. (Odd little note: Did you know Kerry’s call sign was “Boston Strangler”?)

Again, many of these men’s testimony directly contradicts Kerry’s records, commendations, and diary entries. To those who would wonder why they didn’t object to inaccurate record keeping and allegedly undeserved medals the time, the authors and the sailors quoted describe the reaction to Kerry’s third purple heart as largely, “Great, now we’ve got that guy out of our hair.”

Then there are the sections about Kerry’s anti-war testimony, and his allegations of war crimes, and how the North Vietnamese used his testimony in attempts to break the spirit of POWs, and tried to get the prisoners to admit to war crimes. In light of this, Kerry is lucky that these men, whose ordeal in the hands of the enemy was exacerbated by Kerry’s overheated antiwar rhetoric and secondhand allegations, are merely calling him unfit to be commander in chief, instead of tracking him down and beating the heck out of him.

For a certain segment of the population, O’Neill, Corsi, and the 250some other Swift Boat Vets will always be dismissed as nuts, Karl Rove’s hypnotized zombies, cynical liars trying to take down a man who has surpassed them in life, etc. For another segment, every word they say is God’s honest truth.

Then are those of us in the middle, who wonder how Kerry could have been such a lousy sailor, such a lousy leader, such a self-aggrandizing, glory-hogging, lying jerk and yet somehow establish an entire political career based on a reputation as a war hero. There are those of us who wonder if the Swift Boat Vets’ memories are reliable, if some of this is present perceptions altering recollections of the past. Who wonder how, if all of this is true, the dozen or so “band of brothers” could publicly praise a man who was nothing like the war hero he has repeatedly portrayed himself as.

But O’Neill and Corsi have laid out their detailed case in the form of this book. And the Kerry Team’s response has been that Corsi is a bigot, based on what he wrote on FreeRepublic.com. Having had a few phone conversations with Corsi earlier this year, I buy into the idea that he’s a strongly opinionated, sharp-tongued, hyperbole-inclined conservative, whose skin crawls when he hears John Kerry speak. But “opinionated” is not the same as “dishonest.” Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

If the Kerry camp were smart, they would fill out Standard Form 180 and release all of Kerry’s military records, then go through this book, and address each allegation, refute each charge, offer his side to every story. If O’Neill and Corsi are the liars that the DNC and the Kerry backers charge, then it shouldn’t be that hard to prove it.

The Swift Boat Vets contend that fewer than 10 percent of the Vietnam Vets they contacted refused to sign on to their cause. This means either they were very careful and specific in their invitations, or the vast majority of men who came in contact with Kerry during his Vietnam days shared their low opinion of him.

Between the Brinkley book and the O’Neill book, the American public has been given two completely contradictory portraits of Kerry’s four months in Vietnam. The voters deserve to know which one is right.
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