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84rules
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Joined: 26 Jul 2004
Posts: 53
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 Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2004 9:00 pm Post subject: Lag time: 1st PH action vs. First PH award |
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How is it that the officers of Coastal Division 14 refused Kerry's first request for a Purple Heart for action on December 2, 1968 but the officers of Coastal Division 11 did approve it? There was a two month lag between the action and the award.
Who was it at CD 11 that pushed this up the chain of command? Is that person still living? Someone there must have seen it. Who?
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rb325th
Admiral
Joined: 21 Aug 2004
Posts: 1334
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| Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2004 10:37 pm Post subject: |
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The Kerry Campaign admitted today that it is quite possible that Kerrys first PH was from an "unintentional self inflicted wound", this was in response to questions from Fox News. The questions related to Kerrys Journal Entry 9 days after that injury that stated his boat and crew had yet to come under fire!!
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U.S. Army 1983-1995, 11C1P/11H2P NBTDT |
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OEF Vet
Seaman Recruit
Joined: 18 Aug 2004
Posts: 9
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| Posted: Tue Aug 24, 2004 1:15 pm Post subject: |
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| rb325th wrote: | | The Kerry Campaign admitted today that it is quite possible that Kerrys first PH was from an "unintentional self inflicted wound", this was in response to questions from Fox News. The questions related to Kerrys Journal Entry 9 days after that injury that stated his boat and crew had yet to come under fire!! |
That's BIG news!!! Where did you see it? |
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EndTimeTruth
Seaman Recruit
Joined: 12 Aug 2004
Posts: 5
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| Posted: Tue Aug 24, 2004 7:03 pm Post subject: From Kerry's OWN Diaries |
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| OEF Vet wrote: | | rb325th wrote: | | The Kerry Campaign admitted today that it is quite possible that Kerrys first PH was from an "unintentional self inflicted wound", this was in response to questions from Fox News. The questions related to Kerrys Journal Entry 9 days after that injury that stated his boat and crew had yet to come under fire!! |
That's BIG news!!! Where did you see it? |
As told by Cockburn and St. Clair, in "an entry from his diary about a subsequent excursion, written on December 11, 1968, nine days after the incident that got Kerry his medal," Kerry asserted that his crew remained cocky and feeling invincible "because we hadn't been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven't been shot at yet are allowed to be cocky." Brinkley cites this same entry, but avoids assigning it a date. That might be too obvious, apparently.
Regardless, this plainly reads as an admission that two weeks after a purported firefight, Kerry in fact remained an American at war who had yet to face combat. Given that Kerry's boatmates that night also question the presence of hostile fire, this should settle things. Voters can be spared surrogates lacking first-hand knowledge who are sent to shout down eyewitness testimony.
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPrint.asp?Page=%5CCommentary%5Carchive%5C200408%5CCOM20040820b.html
Cockburn and St. Clair are Leftists who have no time for Kerry's Lies. Good article.
Hail, the Conquering War Criminal Comes!
What Kerry Really Did in Vietnam
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
July 29, 2004
(snip)
On December 2, Kerry went on his first patrol up one of the canals. It was near midnight when the crew caught sight of a sampan. Rules of engagement required no challenge, no effort to see who was on board the sampan. Kerry sent up a flare, signal for his crew to start blazing away with the boat's two machineguns and M16 rifles. Kerry described the fishermen "running away like gazelles".
Kerry sustained a very minor wound to his arm, probably caused by debris from his own boat's salvoes. The scratch earned him his first Purple Heart, a medal awarded for those wounded in combat. Actually there's no evidence that anyone had fired back, or that Kerry had been in combat, as becomes obvious when we read an entry from his diary about a subsequent excursion, written on December 11, 1968, nine days after the incident that got Kerry his medal. "A cocky air of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel, because we hadn't been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven't been shot at are allowed to be cocky."
He got two more Purple Hearts, both for relatively minor wounds. Indeed Kerry never missed a day of duty for any of the medal-earning wounds.
(snip)
It's very striking how we never find, in any of Kerry's diaries or letters, the slightest expression of contrition or remorse--and Brinkley would surely have cited them had Kerry ever written such words. Nor did Kerry, in his later career as a self-promoting star of the antiwar movement, ever go beyond generalized verbiage about accidents of war, even as many vets were baring their souls about the horrors they had perpetrated.
(snip)
How He Won His Silver And Bronze Stars
The incident that won US Navy lieutenant John Kerry his Silver Star, thus lofting him to the useful status of "war hero", occurred on February 28, 1969. His Swift boat was ferrying US "explosives experts" and some South Vietnamese soldiers up the Dong Cung river. After dropping them off, Kerry's boat came under small arms fire. Kerry turned the boat toward the source of the shots, beached the boat and opened up at the forest with the boat's .50 and .60 caliber machine guns.
By beaching the boat Kerry was disobeying standard orders forbidding this on the grounds that it made the craft and its crew a sitting duck. Kerry's motive? As crew member Michael "Duke" Medeiros explained it to Kerry's biographer, Douglas Brinkley, it was a matter of verifying kills. "We never knew whether we killed any VC or not. When fired upon, he [Kerry] wanted to beach the boat and go get the enemy."
The boat's machine-guns had in fact killed a Vietnamese, described as "a VC guerilla", and they took evidence [undescribed] from the body.
The boat continued downstream and was fired on once more, by a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Here's where accounts of the event diverge markedly, depending on the interests of the various narrators. The citation for Kerry's Silver Star describes the event this way: "With utter disregard for his own safety and the enemy rockets, he again ordered a charge on the enemy, beached his boat only ten feet from the VC rocket position, and personally led a landing party ashore in pursuit of the enemy. Upon sweeping the area an immediate search uncovered an enemy rest and supply area which was destroyed. The extraordinary daring and personal courage of Lieutenant (junior grade) KERRY in attacking the n numerically superior force in the face of intense fire were responsible for the highly successful mission."
This citation, issued by Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, was based on the incident report, written by John Kerry. Missing from the Zumwalt version was a dramatic confrontation described by Kerry 27 years later in 1996, in the heat of a nasty relection fight against Republican William Weld, when Kerry was seeking a third senate term. Kerry imparted to Jonathan Carroll, writing for the New Yorker, a story going as follows: he had faced down a Viet Cong standing a few feet from him with a B-40 rocket launcher; "It was either going to be him or it was going to be us", Kerry told Carroll. "It was that simple. I don't know why it wasn't us--I mean, to this day. He had a rocket pointed right at our boat. He stood up out of that hole, and none of us saw him until he was standing in front of us, aiming a rocket right at us, and, for whatever reason, he didn't pull the trigger--he turned and ran. He was shocked to see our boat right in front him. If he'd pulled the trigger, we'd all be dead. I just won't talk about all of it. I don't and I can't. The things that probably really turn me I've never told anybody. Nobody would understand."
(He may not have wanted to talk but he certainly liked to screen. The first time Kerry took Hollywood star Dana Delany to his home in the Eighties she says his big move was showing her video clips taken of him in the Navy when he was in Vietnam. She never went out with him again. (As he prepared to make his grand entry to the Democratic convention in Boston, stories circulqatyed that Kerry had reenacted his skirmishes, filming them with an 8mm camera for later political use.)
(snip)
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn07292004.html
Editing to say that this is my first post here and hello. Great forum and high time this stuff got mainstream attention. |
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