By now, John Kerry must rue the day that he and his campaign strategists decided to make his four months in Vietnam the centerpiece of his campaign.

On Aug. 31, Senator John Kerry was given a golden opportunity to silence his most vocal and most persistent critics.

The day before Kerry's address to the American Legion convention in Nashville, Tenn., Swift Boat Veterans for Truth delivered a letter to his campaign. We stated that our advertising would cease -- if he clarified his actions in Vietnam and his statements about fellow veterans and shipmates after he returned home from Vietnam.

CINCINNATI - A heckler who briefly interrupted a speech by Democrat John Kerry on Wednesday said he was assaulted by two men near him in the crowd before others shouted him down with cries of "Kerry, Kerry."

Police said Michael Russell, 48, of Foster, Ky., complained that his neck was hurt by a man who put him in a headlock after Russell started to yell about Kerry's allegation of war atrocities after returning from Navy service in Vietnam.

There's been a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth among the Democrats since Vice President Cheney said if the country makes the wrong choice on Election Day, "then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States." (I mean there is weeping among Democrats who aren't actually rooting for us to get hit again because "we deserve it!")

I believe this is one of those "issues" Democrats claim to be champing at the bit to discuss -- in lieu of discussing the charges of the Swift Boat veterans. In fact, there is no more important issue in this election: Which candidate will best protect America from terrorist attack? Hint: It's not the guy whose running mate (sounding so much like Sean Hayes from "Will and Grace" it was eerie) said their message to the terrorists was: "We will destroy youuuuuuu!"

Dear Joe:

The major issue in the Swiftboat stories is, and always has been, what John Kerry did in 1971 after he returned from Vietnam. Kerry cast a long dark shadow over all Vietnam Veterans with his outright perjury before the Senate concerning atrocities in Vietnam. His stories to the Senate committee were absolute lies… fabrications… perjury… fantasies, with NO substance. That dark shadow has defamed the entire Vietnam War veteran population, and given "Aid and Comfort" to our enemies... the Vietnamese Communists. Kerry's stories were outright fabrications, and were intended for political gain with the radical left… McGovern, Teddy and Bobby Kennedy followers, Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, and the radical left who fantasized that George McGovern was going to be elected in 1972. Little wonder that returning soldiers from Vietnam were spit upon and castigated as "baby killers".

-- interview by Lisa Myers of NBC:

Myers: When did you first meet John Kerry?

Adm. William Schachte (U.S. Navy, ret.): In Vietnam in 1968. I was – like everyone, by the way, serving on small boats in combat in Vietnam – I was a volunteer. When John reported aboard, I was then the lieutenant and the senior, second in command officer of Coastal Division 14. I was also the operations officer, and John reported sometime in mid-November – as an officer in charge under training. And that's the first time I met him.

Myers: And so you were his superior?

Schachte: Yeah, I was one of his superiors, yes.

We will not quickly join those who march on Veterans' Day waving small flags, calling to memory those thousands who died for the "greater glory of the United States." We will not accept the rhetoric. We will not readily join the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars--in fact, we will find it hard to join anything at all and when we do, we will demand relevancy such as other organizations have recently been unable to provide. We will not take solace from the creation of monuments or the naming of parks after a select few of the thousands of dead Americans and Vietnamese. We will not uphold the traditions which decorously memorialize that which was base and grim. . . . We are asking America to turn from false glory, hollow victory, fabricated foreign threats, fear which threatens us as a nation, shallow pride which feeds of fear.

John F. Kerry
Epilogue to The New Soldier (1971)

WHEN THE VIETNAM VETERANS' MEMORIAL was unveiled in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, there was a great deal of talk about "healing" the divisions of the Vietnam war. The controversy generated by the anti-Kerry book Unfit for Command and ads run by an organization called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth criticizing John Kerry's record in Vietnam and his actions after he returned indicates that there is still a lot of "healing" to do. Indeed, the divisions over the Vietnam war may well never heal as long as those who fought it and those who protested it are still alive. This is because the very act of remembering Vietnam places one in the midst of a culture war.

-- by Jonathan V. Last

DURING THE AUGUST 19 edition of PBS's NewsHour, Tom Oliphant unspooled. "The standard of clear and convincing evidence--and it's easy when you leave out the exculpatory stuff--is what keeps this story in the tabloids," the Boston Globe columnist sputtered, "because it does not meet basic standards." "This story" (shades of "that woman") is the story of the Swift boat veterans who have raised a number of troubling allegations against John Kerry. Sitting across from John O'Neill, coauthor of Unfit for Command and John Kerry's successor as commander of PCF-94 in Vietnam, Oliphant did a fair imitation of Al Gore--sighing, harumphing, and exhaling loudly--whenever O'Neill spoke.

August 27, 2004

As was true of all "Swiftees," I volunteered to serve in Vietnam and was assigned to Coastal Division 14 for a normal tour of duty.

I was a Lieutenant serving as Operations Officer and second in command at Coastal Division 14 when Lieutenant (junior grade) John Kerry reported to us in mid-November, 1968. Lt. (jg) Kerry was an Officer-in-Charge (O-in-C) under training in preparing to be assigned as one of our Swift Boat O-in-C's.

NEW YORK -- Retired Rear Adm. William L. Schachte Jr. said Thursday in his first on-the-record interview about the swift boat veterans dispute that "I was absolutely in the skimmer" in the early morning on Dec. 2, 1968, when Lt. (j.g.) John Kerry was involved in an incident that led to his first Purple Heart.

"Kerry nicked himself with a M-79 [grenade launcher]," Schachte said in a telephone interview from his home in Charleston, S.C. He said, "Kerry requested a Purple Heart."