Far from being the war hero a campaign ad depicts him, John Kerry fled in an act of cowardice when a fellow swift boat struck an underwater mine in Vietnam, says the author of "Unfit for Command."

In one ad titled "No Man Left Behind," Kerry is portrayed as a commander who heroically made a speedy turn after a swift boat was disabled by a mine and retrieved Jim Rassman from the water in a hail of enemy fire.

"That story is a complete lie," John O'Neill told The Register-Herald in a Wednesday interview from his Chicago hotel.

When the boat hit the mine, it began to sink, and other crews were scrambling to rescue four men trapped on board by armaments, but Kerry blasted away, spilling Rassman into the Bay Hop River.

An ex-shipmate campaigning for Kerry in West Virginia this week maintained Kerry was merely turning around to effect a rescue in the March 13, 1969, incident, but O'Neill laughed off this explanation.

"It takes only about three seconds to turn those boats around," he said. "It took Kerry five minutes to turn. That was the longest turn in history."

All the while, crews from the other vessels are frantically patching the boat by hand, he said.

"If it sinks, the guys are going to die," he said. "They are retrieving people in the water. No one knows Rassman fell off. He's 80 yards away."

When he finally is spotted, a boat moves into position to get him, but Kerry by now has returned to fetch him, O'Neill said.

O'Neill says his biggest complaint with Kerry is not his four-month tour of duty in Vietnam, but his anti-war antics upon returning to the United States and his rendezvous with communist leaders in North Vietnam without the Navy's knowledge or approval.

Kerry not only asserted the war was wrong, but falsely accused Vietnam troops of baseless atrocities, claiming they occurred routinely with the approval of superior officers, O'Neill said.

"We'll never forget this as long as we live," O'Neill said. "I remember it like the Kennedy assassination and the Challenger explosion. It was so untrue."

As for his highly touted Purple Hearts, O'Neill characterized two as outright shams.

The first cited a Dec. 2, 1968, incident where Kerry unleashed a grenade too close to a whaler, at a time no one witnessed any enemy gunfire, O'Neill said.

An admiral serving there said Kerry wounded himself with M-79 shrapnel and compared the cut to that one gets from a rose thorn, O'Neill said, adding there was no casualty report and no logs of any hostile activity that night.

Kerry provided two varying accounts of an incident that led to his third Purple Heart, the author said. One is he suffered a minor arm bruise that was treated with a cold cloth, the other involved a wound of buttocks, ostensibly from enemy shrapnel.

What really occurred was that Kerry, ashore in the March 13 incident, tossed a grenade into a cache of rice, but the senator claimed he got shrapnel from an underwater mine, O'Neill said.

This article was published by the Beckley, West Virginia Register-Herald.