-- by Gil Spencer
The Comfort Inn in Philadelphia is no Four Seasons, but it’s a whole lot better than the Hanoi Hilton where Mike Cronin spent six years of his life. The Hanoi Hilton is the name American prisoners of war in Vietnam gave the prison where they were held, interrogated and tortured by their jailers. Cronin, a Navy pilot, was one of those prisoners. So were Jim Warner and Ken Cordier. They all came in to Philadelphia Sunday night to get ready for a press conference they had planned for the next morning to talk about their beef with John Kerry.
They were joined by fellow veterans Andy Horne, Dick Pees, and Ken Briggs, all members of "Swiftboat Veterans for Truth," who share an equally dim view of the Democratic presidential nominee.
I met them in the hotel’s little lobby bar.
Earlier in the day I watched "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal" the documentary about what some of these men went through during their years in captivity and the effect that John Kerry’s anti-war activities had on them while they were still in enemy hands.
It is a devastating indictment made all the more powerful by John Kerry’s own recorded 1971 testimony before a U.S. Senate committee, falsely charging his fellow soldiers with routinely committing atrocities and war crimes against the people of Southeast Asia.
In that testimony, Kerry said to the world that his fellow veterans had raped women, cut off people’s heads, shot dogs, burned villages, etc., and that such atrocities were routine and countenanced up and down the military chain of command.
"I was outraged and still am," Ken Cordier says in the film, "that he willingly said things that were untrue, the very same points that we took torture not to write and say. They tortured us and made us write a war crimes confession to be used later where we admitted and confessed to committing war crimes, that we condemned our government for being in Vietnam and we asked their forgiveness. And it was gall in my mouth to write these words but I couldn’t take any more of the torture."
For John Kerry to say "these outrageous things ..to me it’s the measure of the man."
Sunday night, I asked Cordier, a retired colonel, what he wanted to accomplish with his visit here.
"The goal is to inform the electorate so that they will make an informed choice," he said. "And if they vote for Sen. Kerry at least I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that they knew they were voting for a treasonous liar."
Mike Cronin looked over at Cordier and smiled.
"Why not tell him how you really feel, Ken?"
Cronin is one of many POWs who don’t appear in the film, but who are nonetheless supporting the effort to get the story out about the effect of Kerry’s Vietnam-era actions on his fellow combatants.
But it’s a story that few mainstream media outlets have been very willing to report.
When thousands of veterans gathered in Washington, D.C., a few weeks ago to express their disdain for Kerry’s candidacy, it went lightly covered nationally. Cronin, an attorney who lives in Maryland, said the only paper in which he saw significant coverage was the conservative Washington Times.
Why is the mainstream press downplaying if not ignoring this outraged group of veterans? These guys have a theory. It’s because the old media was complicit in the same anti-Vietnam War movement that John Kerry helped lead when he returned from his four-month tour of duty. Papers like the New York Times and networks like CBS bought and perpetuated the myth of Vietnam veterans as drug-addled and crazed losers. And they continue to have a stake in sustaining that myth. The media’s version of that war is now the country’s official version and they don’t want it changed.
Now along come men like Jim Warner, Ken Cordier, Congressional Medal of Honor Winner Leo Thorsness, and hundreds, thousands of others, to say they got it wrong. And that nobody got it more wrong than John Kerry.
It would be one thing, if Kerry had simply protested the war as wrong-headed and unwinnable. But that’s not all he did.
He slandered the men he served with and he provided the enemy with ammunition to psychologically and physically torture our POWs.
You cannot watch ‘‘Stolen Honor’’ and not understand why men like Cordier feel the way they do.
Tonight, John Kerry and George W. Bush will hold their last debate before Election Day. It is unlikely the subject of Kerry’s Vietnam-era activities will come up. And maybe it shouldn’t. Presidential elections are about the future, not the past.
But it was John Kerry who made his Vietnam service the central argument at the Democratic Convention that he could be trusted to be America’s commander-in-chief.
These men beg to disagree. Their service and sacrifice demands we, at least, give them a fair hearing.
This article was published by The Delaware County (Pennsylvania) Times.
http://horse.he.net/~swiftpow/article.php?story=20041015100225877