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Issue Date: September 27, 2004
Kerry feels heat for actions while in Vietnam — and after
by William H. McMichael
Times Staff Writer
Air Force Times

George W. Bush was on the hot seat early in the current presidential campaign over his Vietnam-era National Guard service and questions over whether he sometimes shirked his duties. Who would have thought that months later, it would be his Democratic opponent in this fall’s election, Vietnam veteran Sen. John Kerry, who would be feeling heat over his military service?

Yet, to date, that is exactly what has happened, due to the efforts of a group of Navy veterans who have raised questions about Kerry’s naval service in Vietnam and several of the medals, which include a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Members of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth say Kerry took credit where he shouldn’t have and they have raised doubts about Kerry’s character and fitness to be president and commander in chief of U.S. armed forces.

But who’s telling the truth? Is there any validity to charges raised by the Swift Boat Veterans, who say Kerry lied about his exploits and obtained his medals through clever administrative manipulation? Or is this effort, as a veteran Republican campaigner told The Washington Post in an Aug. 24 article, “a professional hit”?

It’s just about impossible to tell. The official documentary record, while incomplete, favors Kerry’s version of events. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have no records to contradict those documents. But the group cites veterans who served at or near the time Kerry served and who recall events in a radically different way.

Belated objections

Swift Boat Veterans argue that many of Kerry’s awards were based on after-action reports written by Kerry — begging the question of why their objections weren’t raised 35 years ago. Yet some documents appear to contradict some of the Swift Boat Veterans’ current recollections, and past pro-Kerry comments by some members of the group seem contradicted by their current stances. Kerry has a vocal group of veterans in his corner who back his versions of events. The Swift Boat Vets say their former comrades are mistaken — or are lying.

The result is a classic “he said, she said” confrontation.

“To be honest with you, I’m not sure this is ever going to be resolved to anyone’s satisfaction,” said Jack Chenoweth, like Kerry a Navy lieutenant junior grade and swift boat officer-in-charge who was present the day for which Kerry was awarded a Bronze Star and his third Purple Heart. He says Kerry’s version of events is “riddled with fraud and deceit and outright lies.”

In interviews with Navy Times, members of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth say they are motivated to speak out against Kerry as much or more over his postwar activity. Kerry, as president of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1971 about war crimes described by other veterans, and on his views on the conduct and morality of the war itself. SBV members say that by doing so while the war raged on, Kerry betrayed his country and those who were fighting or imprisoned in Vietnam.

“The main thing that ticks me off was his outrageous claims in 1971,” said retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffman, who founded the swift boat group in January.

Why speak out now? Said Chenoweth, “He didn’t run for president until now.”

The heavy political overtones of this debate cannot be overlooked. Former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes raises money for the Kerry campaign. The first Swift Boat Veterans ads were paid for in large part by a major Republican donor and Bush backer. Yet the group denies it is affiliated with the party.

Bush has publicly rejected the Swift Boat Veterans’ central claim that Kerry lied about his record, but refuses to condemn the Swift Boat Vets’ ads, saying instead that all ads paid for by groups not affiliated with the campaigns — such as those sponsored by the liberal group moveon.org — should be banned. He also said he’d agreed to join Sen. John McCain, R- Ariz., in a lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission to bar the groups.

For his part, McCain, who is actively campaigning for Bush, has expressed anger about the ads.

“I think these ads are dishonest and dishonorable,” McCain said in an Aug. 30 interview on CBS’s “The Early Show.” But, he added, “What John Kerry did after the war is very legitimate political discussion.”

Assessing the evidence

In the debate over John Kerry’s military awards, the documentary evidence is on Kerry’s side (view documents online at www.airforcetimes.com). Posted documents include many of Kerry’s service records, such as fitness reports, selected after-action reports and citations for all his awards.

Nothing in the record, however, backs up Kerry’s claim that his boat at the time, PCF-44, and crew went to the Cambodian border on Christmas Eve 1968.

John O'Neill, co-author of a best-selling book on Kerry, “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry,” says his research shows Kerry couldn’t have made it that far upriver because U.S. gunboats prevented any such incursions.

On the other hand, the present-day words of some anti-Kerry swift boat vets appear to be contradicted by official Navy documents. Like Kerry, former swift boat officer-in-charge Larry Thurlow earned a Bronze Star with “V” device” on March 13, 1969. Thurlow and others are adamant that after one of the five boats moving down the river that day was struck by a mine, there was no further enemy fire — an assertion repeated in O’Neill’s book. In their view, if there was no gunfire, then Kerry didn’t deserve his Purple Heart.

The Special Forces soldier who Kerry pulled from the water that day, former 1st Lt. Jim Rassmann, said, “I was taking fire. There were rounds were cracking by me. … If you’ve been shot at, you’re not quite likely to forget it.”

In addition, Thurlow’s own Bronze Star citation states that after the first explosion, “all units began receiving enemy small arms and automatic weapons fire from the river banks.” Thurlow explains that by saying that as Kerry’s senior, he had Kerry write up the after-action report that formed the basis of the citation narrative. Yet the initials at the bottom of most of the available reports, “KJW,” do not match Kerry’s “JFK.”

Asked how he could in good conscience accept an award based on such a faulty premise, Thurlow said that when he received it at a Reserve center after leaving active duty, he thought, “Hmm … quite a story but not true.” Then, he said, “I just put it away.” Now, Thurlow says he wishes he’d objected to the language in the citation.

Then and now

There are other contradictions.

Retired Cmdr. Adrian Lonsdale said in a Swift Boat Veterans ad that Kerry “lacks the capacity to lead.” However, while explaining the success of the river operations during Kerry’s 1996 Senate race, he told reporters, “It was because of the bravery and the courage of the young officers that ran boats … the swift boats and the Coast Guard cutters, and Senator Kerry was no exception.”

Retired Capt. George Elliott, Kerry’s commanding officer in Coastal Division 11 from January through May 1969, signed the original May 4 letter the Swift Boat Veterans sent Kerry to launch its campaign. The group asked Kerry to “correct the misconceptions” about his conduct in Vietnam and raised “substantive concerns” about his ability to serve as president.

But in his December 1969 fitness report on Kerry — written eight months after Kerry left Vietnam — Elliott wrote:

“In a combat environment often requiring independent, decisive action, LTJG Kerry was unsurpassed. On one occasion, while in tactical command of a three boat operation his units were taken under fire from ambush. LTJG Kerry rapidly assessed the situation and ordered his units to turn directly into the ambush. This decision resulted in routing the attackers with several KIA. LTJG Kerry emerges as the acknowledged leader in his peer group.”

Kerry put in for an early release after receiving his third Purple Heart, per squadron policy. He decided, he told O’Neill during the 1971 debate, “I felt I could do more against the war back here.”

His doing so angers some vets, who say his wound wasn’t life-threatening and that he should have stayed with his crew until the end of his 12-month tour instead of leaving after four months. (Kerry had previously served 13 months aboard the frigate Gridley, four of them on a Western Pacific cruise to Vietnam. It was during this cruise that Kerry volunteered for swift boat duty.)

But beyond the conflicting war stories, there is the even greater anger over the war-crimes charges Kerry made before the Senate. As president of the VVAW, he told the senators he’d heard from “over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans” who’d related stories of individual war crimes. He also talked about “the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging, which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”

The words make clear that Kerry was talking about the stories these veterans had told — people O’Neill has discredited in his book — and not all those who took part in the war. Kerry went on to argue that the atrocities, including “free-fire zones” (shooting “anything that moves” in a given area; Kerry admitted during the 1971 debate taking part in this practice), were the result of a failed and immoral U.S. policy.

A statement that rankles

In the minds of the Swift Boat Veterans, that statement smeared all who served in Vietnam.

“Yeah, there was the My Lai incident,” Hoffman said. “Everybody knows that. There were probably some other atrocities. But on a day-to-day basis, with full knowledge of the chain of command … nowhere did we ever authorize … criminal activity.”

Thurlow, Chenoweth and nearly all the Swift Boat and pro-Kerry vets, answer even the toughest questions with calm and assuredness. Memories, however — even those made in the eye-opening arena of combat — can be faulty, for a variety of reasons.

“There could be some out-and-out political lying going on,” said Elizabeth Loftus, a psychology professor at the University of California-Irvine and a nationally recognized expert on the fallibility of memory and eyewitness testimony.

“A plausible alternative way to think about this is that people are distorting their memories in a direction that serves some purpose for them,” she said. “And instead of thinking one person’s right and one person’s wrong, they actually can both be distorted in a direction that serves some purpose — even in the mind of somebody who’s trying to be as honest and accurate as possible.”

William Rood, who was officer in charge of PCF-23, one of the three boats on the river the day Kerry’s reaction to an ambush resulted in the award of the Silver Star, said in a first-person account published in the Chicago Tribune that there was “at least one” mistake in the citation for the Bronze Star he was awarded for that day’s actions.

“It incorrectly identifies the river where the main action occurred, a reminder that such documents were often done in haste and sometimes authored for their signers by staffers,” said Rood, now a Tribune editor.

“It’s a cautionary note for those trying to piece it all together. There’s no final authority on something that happened so long ago — not the documents and not even the strained recollections of those of us who were there.”

(all emphasis mine)

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