SwiftVets.com

[Terrence Patrick]

Here are excerpts from a NYTimes interview with Kerry in '71. This is nothing shattering here, but at least puts things in perspective: * he went into Navy ONLY after getting draft notice. * he volunteered for Vietnam to see what was happening from a relatively safe distance.

ANGRY WAR VETERAN

WASHINGTON, April 22 - Early in 1968, not long after his graduation from the Navy's officer candidate school, Lieut. j.g. John Forbes Kerry visited Vietnam for the first time when his ship stopped over in Danang after a brief tour in the Golf of Tonkin...

His plans to study abroad were quashed by a notice from his draft board that he would probably be called to service. Neither jail nor self-exile appealed to him, he said, and "although I did have some doubts about the war...I enlisted in the Navy."...

That first trip to Vietnam pique his curiousity - "I wanted to go back and see for myself what was going on, but I didn't really want to get involved in the war." So, in late 1968 he volunteered for an assignment on "swift boats" - the short fast aluminum craft that were then used for patrol duty off the Vietnam coast.

Two weeks before he arrived in Vietnam as a swift boat commander, he said, "they changed the policy on the use of the boats - deciding to send them up rivers to show the Vietcong that they didn't own the rivers."

[brotherofvietvet]

This is a far cry from "Send Me" ala Clinton ********. Can you source the page date and department of the NYT's???

This sounds like some little thing that is useful in a debate to kill Kerrys credibility, as if he ever had any.

[Anker-Klanker]

Notice that this could also be used effectively as more evidence of his spinning differently at different times for different audiences. By 1971, the date of the article, it wasn't cool among the unwashed to admit to having volunteered (which he didn't do in the first place).

[Terrence Patrick]

The actual date of the article was April 23, 1971. You can go to the NYTIMES.com and under archives they have every article ever written since 1851. It is a remarkable feature. It will cost you about a $1 to view the page in its entirety.

To be fair -- in the article Kerry send he joined out of a committment to service, and he certainly does not come across as a pacifist or a rabid anti-American like a Ron Kovik. However, it is clear that he joined only when he knew he'd be drafted, and he volunteered for swift boats not to fight but to see what was going on since the swifties only patrolled the beaches of S. Vietnam at the time he volunteered.

Again, there is nothing daming in what the article says but it does put this notion of Kerry begging to engage the enemy in perspective. The article also points out that he protested the war at Yale.