SwiftVets.com

[Nate]

I saw a piece on the internet the other day that John Kerry's 'Honorable Discharge' was not issued until March 2001. The speculation was that his 'discharge' back in the 70's did not carry the word 'honorable' (ie, possibly 'administrative') as the result of his treasonous acts while in the service - and that Clinton 'fixed it up' just before he left office.

This certainly would explain Kerry's refusal to make his military records fully available - in addition to the damaging evidence that must be there on the medals as well.

Does anyone have any info/confirmation on this? Isn't it worth looking into? I continue to be amazed that he has not been prosecuted under the UCMJ for his actions with the North Vietnamese while still a Navy commissioned officer in the service of his country. And that his actions with the Viet Cong in Paris have not disqualified him from eligibility to serve as either U.S. Senator or Congressman as specified Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Sure was happy to read in a post on the site that an indictment will be delivered on this to the US Senate and Justice Dept on October 12. Sure do hope it happens!

Keep up the great work,
_________________
U.S. Navy Vet from 50's (Destroyers)

[Navy_Navy_Navy]

There are a lot of people speculating about this on the internet, but we try to avoid speculation and rely on comparing facts and comparing other people's theories, here.

We have some real brains on this forum who can take things apart to get at the truth, whether it ends up being "nothing" or "something."

There are many discussions about this here on this board, especially here in the R&R section. Unfortunately phpBB has a search function that ranges from "very helpful" to "useless," just depending it seems, on its cyber-mood.

You might have to dig a bit. Or a lot. (The latter is what most of us do.)

If somebody could put a post together with all of the previous discussions and add it to the Consolidation - Best Links thread here in R&R and to the FAQ, as well, it would be most helpful!

Thanks!
_________________
~ Echo Juliet ~
Altering course to starboard - On Fire, Keep Clear
Navy woman, Navy wife, Navy mother

[gleanerl]

i looked at kerry's discharge on his own website.
unless i'm blind, there is no date on it, or it is the part that is redacted?
what's the scoop?
_________________
_________________
Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
William Safire (1929 - )

[Nate]

[gleanerl]

so how do we find out?
_________________
_________________
Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
William Safire (1929 - )

[air_vet]

The "honorable discharge issue" is an urban legend.

Candidate Kerry was issued an Honorable Discharge 16 Feb 78 when he left the Navy Reserve and gave up his commission - probably because he was passed over for promotion to O-4 because of non-participation in the Reserves.


BTW, the document is on his website as Honorable_Discharge_From_Reserve.pdf

[Nate]

[BuffaloJack]

There are 5 types of discharge from the service
1. Honorable
2. General (under honorable conditions)
3. Other than honorable
4. Bad conduct
5. Dishonorable
Which type do you think Kerry originally received ???

[Nate]

[air_vet]

[Hondo]

A couple of points re: Kerry’s discharge.

1. The DD214 releasing him from active duty in Jan 1970 is posted on Kerry’s web site. It characterizes his service as “honorable”.

2. An officer is not routinely discharged at the end of his/her obligated service (as a few US Army Reservists have recently found out to their chagrin). An officer has to resign his/her commission. If not, he/she is retained in Inactive Reserve status until he/she is discharged for other reasons. Such reasons are typically age, years of commissioned service, or 2x nonselection for promotion.

3. A reservist is subject to the UCMJ only when serving on active duty and/or performing inactive duty. Kerry never appears to have served on active duty or to have performed inactive duty, such as drills, after Jan 1970. It is thus extremely unlikely to legally impossible for him to have done anything during the period Jan 1970 to Feb 1978 that would have caused the Navy to issue him an administrative discharge of any type other than “honorable”. We may all believe he deserved a punitive discharge for his antiwar activities, but it seems to me unlikely that this actually happened. It’s possible that doing so would have required him to be ordered to active duty and an administrative board convened.

4. The timing of Kerry’s release in 1978 would be consistent with 2x nonselection for promotion to LCDR. If he was unaware he was still being carried on USNR rolls (or just didn’t give a $#!t and never bothered to resign his commission), a discharge for 2x nonselection for promotion in 1978 would have been virtually guaranteed due to nonparticipation. That’s my guess.

Bottom line: without some hard evidence, this line of inquiry is probably not worth pursuing. Kerry was released from active duty in Jan 1970; his service at that time was characterized as honorable. He does not appear to have been subject to the UCMJ after that time. Large bureaucracies, such as the Navy, generally do not go out of their way to make problems or extra work for themselves by doing things out of the ordinary. Trying to "nail" someone who was already effectively out of the Navy for conduct not prosecutable under the UCMJ strikes to me improbable. Had the Navy wanted to do that, they would have ordered Kerry back to active duty for failure to perform USNR duties, or would have at least ordered him to perform drills. Had that happened - and Kerry refused to participate when so ordered - I doubt he'd have been retained in the USNR for 8 more years.

Unless someone comes up with evidence to the contrary, my best guess is that Kerry received an honorable discharge in 1978 after 2x nonselection for promotion for LCDR.

Sure would like to see his whole file, though.
_________________
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse."
-- John Stuart Mill

[SBD]

The problem is that in his letter requesting an early discharge to run for Congress, he lied by saying that his term would be completed in a few months. Someone surely caught this during his VVAW participation especially since the FBI and the White House showed such an interest in him.

My guess is that his discharge was changed to dishonarable due to the above and Carter gave him a way to change it to Honorable. I started reading the Congressional record for this blanket Amnesty that Carter gave to those who fled to Canada and it seems that those who participated in anti-war activities may have been included.

SBD

[Guest]

[Mary Ann Parker]

Here is an article on this subject.
It asks the right questions.
Will we get the right answers in time

Read the whole thing for perspective.
Make it a great day!
Mary Ann Parker
*************

Title: Mystery Surrounds Kerry's Navy Discharge
Source: The New York Sun
URL Source: http://www.nysun.com/article/3107
Published: Oct 13, 2004
Author: THOMAS LIPSCOMB
Post Date: 2004-10-13 06:13:54 by donna
5 Comments


An official Navy document on Senator Kerry's campaign Web site listed as Mr. Kerry's "Honorable Discharge from the Reserves" opens a door on a well kept secret about his military service.

The document is a form cover letter in the name of the Carter administration's secretary of the Navy, W. Graham Claytor. It describes Mr. Kerry's discharge as being subsequent to the review of "a board of officers." This in it self is unusual. There is nothing about an ordinary honorable discharge action in the Navy that requires a review by a board of officers.

According to the secretary of the Navy's document, the "authority of reference" this board was using in considering Mr. Kerry's record was "Title 10, U.S. Code Section 1162 and 1163. "This section refers to the grounds for involuntary separation from the service. What was being reviewed, then, was Mr. Kerry's involuntary separation from the service. And it couldn't have been an honorable discharge, or there would have been no point in any review at all. The review was likely held to improve Mr. Kerry's status of discharge from a less than honorable discharge to an honorable discharge.

A Kerry campaign spokesman, David Wade, was asked whether Mr. Kerry had ever been a victim of an attempt to deny him an honorable discharge. There has been no response to that inquiry.

The document is dated February 16, 1978. But Mr. Kerry's military commitment began with his six-year enlistment contract with the Navy on February 18, 1966. His commitment should have terminated in 1972. It is highly unlikely that either the man who at that time was a Vietnam Veterans Against the War leader, John Kerry, requested or the Navy accepted an additional six year reserve commitment. And the Claytor document indicates proceedings to reverse a less than honorable discharge that took place sometime prior to February 1978.

The most routine time for Mr. Kerry's discharge would have been at the end of his six-year obligation, in 1972. But how was it most likely to have come about?

NBC's release this March of some of the Nixon White House tapes about Mr. Kerry show a great deal of interest in Mr. Kerry by Nixon and his executive staff, including, perhaps most importantly, Nixon's special counsel, Charles Colson. In a meeting the day after Mr. Kerry's Senate testimony, April 23, 1971, Mr. Colson attacks Mr. Kerry as a "complete opportunist...We'll keep hitting him, Mr. President."

Mr. Colson was still on the case two months later, according to a memo he wrote on June 15,1971, that was brought to the surface by the Houston Chronicle. "Let's destroy this young demagogue before he becomes another Ralph Nader." Nixon had been a naval officer in World War II. Mr. Colson was a former Marine captain. Mr. Colson had been prodded to find "dirt" on Mr. Kerry, but reported that he couldn't find any.

The Nixon administration ran FBI surveillance on Mr. Kerry from September 1970 until August 1972. Finding grounds for an other than honorable discharge, however, for a leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, given his numerous activities while still a reserve officer of the Navy, was easier than finding "dirt."

For example, while America was still at war, Mr. Kerry had met with the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong delegation to the Paris Peace talks in May 1970 and then held a demonstration in July 1971 in Washington to try to get Congress to accept the enemy's seven point peace proposal without a single change. Woodrow Wilson threw Eugene Debs, a former presidential candidate, in prison just for demonstrating for peace negotiations with Germany during World War I. No court overturned his imprisonment. He had to receive a pardon from President Harding.

Mr. Colson refused to answer any questions about his activities regarding Mr. Kerry during his time in the Nixon White House. The secretary of the Navy at the time during the Nixon presidency is the current chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Warner. A spokesman for the senator, John Ullyot, said, "Senator Warner has no recollection that would either confirm or challenge any representation that Senator Kerry received a less than honorable discharge."

The "board of officers" review reported in the Claytor document is even more extraordinary because it came about "by direction of the President." No normal honorable discharge requires the direction of the president. The president at that time was James Carter. This adds another twist to the story of Mr. Kerry's hidden military records.

Mr. Carter's first act as president was a general amnesty for draft dodgers and other war protesters. Less than an hour after his inauguration on January 21, 1977, while still in the Capitol building, Mr. Carter signed Executive Order 4483 empowering it. By the time it became a directive from the Defense Department in March 1977 it had been expanded to include other offenders who may have had general, bad conduct, dishonorable discharges, and any other discharge or sentence with negative effect on military records. In those cases the directive outlined a procedure for appeal on a case by case basis before a board of officers. A satisfactory appeal would result in an improvement of discharge status or an honorable discharge.

Mr. Kerry has repeatedly refused to sign Standard Form 180, which would allow the release of all his military records. And some of his various spokesmen have claimed that all his records are already posted on his Web site. But the Washington Post already noted that the Naval Personnel Office admitted that they were still withholding about 100 pages of files.

If Mr. Kerry was the victim of a Nixon "enemies list" hit, one might have expected him to wear it like a badge of honor, like many others such as his friend Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, CBS's Daniel Schorr, or the actor Paul Newman, who had made Mr. Colson's original list of 20 "enemies."

There are a number of categories of discharges besides honorable. There are general discharges, medical discharges, bad conduct discharges, as well as other than honorable and dishonorable discharges.
There is one odd coincidence that gives some weight to the possibility that Mr. Kerry was dishonorably discharged.
Mr. Kerry has claimed that he lost his medal certificates and that is why he asked that they be reissued.
But when a dishonorable discharge is issued, all pay benefits, and allowances, and all medals and honors are revoked as well.
And five months after Mr. Kerry joined the U.S. Senate in 1985,
on one single day, June 4, all of Mr. Kerry's medals were reissued.

[Largebill]

Contrary to the claim in the article, a "medical discharge" is not a discharge type in the way an Honorable or General is considered. Honorable or Dishonorable refer to the characterization of service. Medical refers to the reason for separation just as completion of required service etc.

Having said all that, I doubt he had been Dishonorably Discharged. Both a Dishonorable and a BCD (Bad Conduct Discharge) are considered punative discharges and can only be issued by a Courts Martial. There is more to the story but it is not anything as big as a Dishonorable.