SwiftVets.com

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http://www.wvmetronews.com/index_forsub.cfm?func=displayfullstory&storyid=9442
W.Va. Native Refutes Kerry
WCHS Radio Charleston
Go to site, Click the“LIVE AUDIO” icon to hear excerpt from CAPT. JACK CHENOWETH’S appearance on METRONEWS affiliate WCHS “58-LIVE” THURSDAY Aug 19
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one of..... We The People

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JOHN ONEILL on RUSH LIMBAUGH 8/23/04
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We'd like to not waste any time and welcome to the program John O'Neill, who is doing yeoman's work and some would say the Lord's work, in this presidential campaign. Mr. O'Neill, thanks so much for giving us some time. Let me ask you a question. I talked to my brother -- and I did not know this -- he said that you're in the middle of this intense book tour, and, of course, you've got everybody, half the country, the Democratic Party gunning for you. You just donated a kidney to your ailing wife and you're in the midst of your recovery still doing all this?

O'NEILL: I did. Rush, the greatest thing I ever did in my life. I gave my wife a kidney on February the 12th which was a fabulous thing for my wife and I, and something I'm very proud of. And this isn't perfect timing for me, but I've done fine with it all.

RUSH: Well, you're bearing up just marvelously well. I know you're everywhere, and you're in demand, and you're trying to meet as many requests as you've got. And I want to say at the outset that I haven't seen every performance or every appearance that you made, and I may ask you some questions that you've gotten before, and I'm sure that happens to you every time you go out there, and you're still plugging away at it, and I appreciate it and I beg your indulgence on that. Could you just give us an overview of where you are now, what you think of what all has gone on, what you thought was going to happen when all this started, if anything's been a surprise to you, things of those natures?

O'NEILL: Yes. We -- it's not simply me -- but Admiral Hoffman, our commanding officer in Vietnam, then a captain but now an admiral, started calling all of us basically last January and February. We got together in March, and what we did, naïve souls that we were, we issued a letter to John Kerry saying basically, "Kerry, please admit you lied about our record back in '71 and also in your book tour, and please straighten out your record and quit exaggerating it." We had a press conference in Washington. We thought that people would go ahead, it would be covered, and then the matter would be straightened out. Instead of that, it received a little coverage but not very much, and we realized that writing a book was the best possible way of getting what is complicated, but is pretty conclusive evidence, in front of the American people. So my job, then, was to go ahead and write the book, and I began and did write the book with the assistance of more than 60 guys who were right there with Kerry. I've given the royalties from the book away so that there won't be any question that I'm trying to exploit our unit like Kerry has, and the book is divided into two parts. Half deals with his actual service in Vietnam and half with what he did afterwards.

RUSH: Did all of the swiftvets that worked with you on this know fully well what you were getting involved in as you joined a presidential campaign, so to speak?

O'NEILL: I think I did. I think I knew that when we sailed our little boat up alongside his battleship, that he would attack us all just as he did in '71. To be fair, I don't think that some of our guys did. We have several people who have been very viciously attacked that, you know, are tremendous heroes of the United States. I mean, they're legends within the Navy, and I don't think that they knew quite the violence of the attack would be directed towards them.

RUSH: That's somewhat surprising given the attack machine that the Democratic Party has demonstrated it's capable of mounting, going back. I mean, you look at what happened to Monica Lewinsky, the Arkansas state troopers, Gary Aldrich. Now, these are single individuals and it was easy to attack them. You've either got a group of 60 or over 200 here. The thing I've noticed, Mr. O'Neill, about all of this is that your campaign, your effort is working. Now, when I look at these things impartially and I try to figure out when you have two virtually competing stories, when somebody starts changing theirs, it tells me that the first version isn't true. It seems to me that your story isn't changing. It seems to me that Senator Kerry is changing a lot of his story to the extent that he'll deal with it. What struck me is that if you guys are lying, if you guys are strictly a political organization that is working in cahoots with people, and he can disapprove it, then he would. He would have done it right out of the box and he would have gotten rid of you guys and maybe sailed away to the election in a landslide. But he doesn't address what you're saying. He changes his version of the story.

O'NEILL: That's what's amazing, Rush. Honestly, this guy pretends to be a war hero. Forget that he was no hero, but at least he could have the integrity to come out in a sensible way, admit where he lied, set forth a straightforward version. Instead, when I go on shows there's always some Washington lawyer on the other side or there's never anybody that was really there because they know, like his Christmas in Cambodia story, they'd all start laughing even on his side. This story that he told about "no man left behind" where all of our boats were supposed to have fled and he came back, and in reality he fled and everybody else stayed to save the three boat, the same thing is true. He won't ever find a swift boat guy that will say that, because it's a lie. Would have to change the physical facts of the three boat actually being blown up, unable to move and keep on the water.

RUSH: One of the things that has struck me about this is we have two competing sets of veterans. In your case the swift boat vets. John McCain and the mainstream press, Kerry allies, have come out and immediately assumed that you all are dishonorable, even though you personally have been following this course since 1971. Everybody that remembers your Dick Cavett Show debate (Video) with then-Vietnam vet against the war Kerry. But nobody to my knowledge is examining the honorable status of Kerry's band of brothers. This is disquieting. As I said to the audience on Friday, there's a part of me that resented Kerry reopening this whole Vietnam wound by making his four months there the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. The other side of me says, "No, that's good because those wounds have been festering and they haven't healed and this is evidence of it, and it's about time we square this." And I think that's the role you're playing here and it's a good one.

O'NEILL: I think that's really true, Rush. We haven't attacked. There are very few people from our division that support Kerry. I guess he had 12 or 13 people on the stage. He may be able to produce 15 or 20, or something. We have 254 I guess so far that have signed our letter, they include 17 of the 23 officers that bunked with him most nights there and during the limited period of time he was there and the whole chain of command, most of the sailors.

I think it's very, very important for two reasons. First, I don't think you can have someone as commander-in-chief of the United States that comes back and fabricates war crimes charges against the people that he was there with and against everybody else. I just can't conceive that in a free democracy, forget anything else or forget any party, that we would ever make someone like that president of the United States, particularly after they admit that the charges they made were exaggerated, over the top, not true, in fact were total lies. Second, I cannot conceive that where a guy shows up, even, you know, two or three weeks ago at the Democratic convention and fabricates major stories that are just totally untrue, that we would ever consider such a person to be commander-in-chief.
RUSH: Well, especially since he's made that the centerpiece of his campaign. Which part of the story is it that you think grates most on you and your group? Is it his postwar activities or --

O'NEILL: It is, to be fair. The portion of it that's more captured press attention is the first half of the book Unfit for Command. To all of us, though, when he came back and he met with the North Vietnamese, I mean, he met with them in Paris on almost the same day that our boat, the 94 boat, that he had commanded and that I was then commanding, was rocketed. He came back and said that we were "like the army of Ghengis Khan," that we were "committing war crimes on a day-to-day basis," that our officers were like Lieutenant Calley. Rush, we had people that sat and died. I mean, several of them very close to my boat. I had one guy die literally on my helmet because they went up into a canal without opening fire just to broadcast at very slow speeds. We did everything we could do to reduce civilian casualties, and so you can imagine what a -- I mean, the day he testified is the day as deeply emotional to the people in our unit, many other Vietnam veterans, as the day the Challenger went down or when Kennedy died, because it just dropped directly at the heart of all of us, our service, and the people we lost there.

RUSH: And he didn't see any of this. He even says that these are stories others told him, that he assumes and assigns to everybody else. Something else about this: why didn't Senator Kerry, if he heard about this and saw some of this while he was there, and admits to engaging in some of it himself, why didn't he report it then? Why didn't he go to a commanding officer and say, "Hey, atrocities are taking place. This is not right." Why did he wait till he gets back to start making political hay out of this, if it was so bad and so rotten when he saw it or heard about it? Why didn't he stop it then or try to?

O'NEILL: And as the book details, he was exactly the opposite. He was considered too aggressive, if anything. He never protested, never reported anyone. On that Dick Cavett Show I said, "Look, if some of this stuff occurred, tell people. For God's sake tell people and let's go prosecute whoever was involved." That was all those years ago. They never showed with anything. Of course, many of the people he was relying on were documented fakes. I mean, they were never in Vietnam. The classic is the guy who was the cochairman, the founder of his organization, Al Hubbard, who supposedly was a pilot in Vietnam wounded by shrapnel who had blown up villages, who turned out to never have gone to Vietnam; he was a sergeant in the Air Force on disability from playing on the basketball team and hurting his back. But the book Sold and Valor recounts case after case of total fakes.


RUSH: Senator Kerry says he's released all of his records. It's on his website. Is that true?

O'NEILL: Totally false. A good example of a record not released is his January 20th, 1969 report where he lies about this junk incident in which a small family is -- what is obviously a tragedy -- is shot and he reports it instead as a huge squad of Vietcong and reports the mother and baby as prisoners captured in action. There are many other examples. He has a ledger, a record, a diary that he maintained on Vietnam. He gives friendly people a peek at it but won't produce it. His medical records he will not produce. They, of course, would, you know, show that he had minor or non-existent injuries, and spent no time off. His first Purple Heart, there is no hostile fire report, and there is no casualty report as required for any Purple Heart. Instead, there's nothing to support it at all.

RUSH: What do you say about -- or what were your thoughts on Senator Dole's comments yesterday about, "He hasn't bled. He didn't spend any time in the hospital"?

O'NEILL: I was really proud of Senator Dole. It has to be hard to come forward. Look, we're all coming forward because this is a deeply personal thing. We just have to speak. We don't have a choice.

RUSH: How are you afraid this will manifest itself in a Kerry presidency? What kind of things would you be frightened of because of these, what you claim are lies, distortions, untruths of his service?

O'NEILL: The problem you really have, Rush, is this man as commander-in-chief is a disaster. In the military, trust has to run from the lowest guy all the way up the chain to the commander-in-chief. They have to believe that if something happens to him, he's going to come back in and get them. They have to believe that he's going to support their service. They have to believe in what he is saying. What we have here is a guy who is exactly the opposite. I mean, who came back to the United States and betrayed literally the guys he was in the field with at exactly the same time, who lied over and over and even characterized them as war criminals for political benefit, and then who has told massive lies about his own experience there. I'm going to tell you, I don't think the kids that are out there, I think they're coming home if this guy is the commander-in-chief, and I have one of them, it's my nephew, and an awful lot of children of my friends.

RUSH: We've got to take a break here. We'll come back here, and I want to ask you about the whole strategy of the Kerry campaign, get your reaction to it, of trying to take a war that nobody liked, pluck a hero from it, make it valorous in that sense, and then try to turn the current Iraq situation into Vietnam all over again. It's hard to follow this, and I think maybe I can get your insight as to -- because you've gotten to know him in your own ways and you know people who have known him personally.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We're honored to have John O'Neill with us here today for the hour as we talk about where they are now in the swift boat vet campaign and their effort here to educate and inform the American people as to their view of Senator John Kerry. Let me ask you about this question specifically, and this has to be at the root of one of the things that bothered you given the second half of the book. Here you have a war which the Democratic Party back then despised. They called it ignoble. It was immoral. It was unjust and almost criminal, and John Kerry comes around after the war and promotes that for apparent political gain. Now all of a sudden the Democratic Party, desperate during the war on terror to be able to say they have a candidate who was a war hero, pluck John Kerry out of a war they hated and despised and now try to turn that war into something valorous and him into something valorous -- which you dispute in the book -- and at the same time they do that, they then try to take the war in Iraq and the war on terror and try to make it sound as though it's no different than Vietnam. We have presidents "lying" to get us involved. We've got conspiratorial reasons. It seems to me it plays right into your hands.

O'NEILL: I think I speak for every one of us. We may have different feelings in our group about the war in Iraq, but we feel very, very strongly that the people that voted for that war, including Kerry, should support those kids over there and not just with mouth language but I'm talking seriously. With respect to what he did Vietnam, it's just unbelievable. He wrote a book, Rush, called The New Soldier. He wrote it in 1972. It begins with a caricature of the Iwo Jima Memorial and it goes downhill from there. It's basically a collection of many false war crimes confessions.

RUSH: Is this the one he doesn't want anybody to see?

O'NEILL: He won't let anybody see it. I've offered to reprint it. It costs, you know, over a thousand dollars to buy it on eBay. I promise you, Rush, any American voter whether they're Democrats or Republicans, whatever they are, if you stick that in their hands and say, "Look, you're going to have to tell the kids, the kids in the armed forces this is the new commander-in-chief." None of them would vote for him. So what he's attempted to do is suppress that book, The New Soldier.


RUSH: Now, what is it that makes you think he hasn't changed? Is it his Senate voting record?

O'NEILL: He's the same guy, completely the same guy, that everybody knew. You could start with the total lies at the Democratic convention about what he actually did in Vietnam. It's exactly the same thing. It's the lies he told in Vietnam to his commanders to get medals there. With respect to the ability to flip-flop, when he was in Vietnam he was regarded as sort of a harsh operator. People wouldn't operate with him because his fire control was so bad. He'd fire at anything, and then he comes back from Vietnam and instantly he's a war protester, supposedly, and we're all criminals. So we have a guy, at the heart of him there aren't the values and stuff that we all had. This is a guy literally where there's absolutely nothing there except ambition, no loyalty to comrades, no, allegiance to the truth.

RUSH: I was going to say --

O'NEILL: -- just basically ambiguous.

RUSH: -- it sounds like a totally calculating individual that you portray here. He's in Vietnam, behaves in a certain way to be perceived a certain way; comes home, finds out the public mood is different, changes the way he looks and says what he did, all to be received favorably at that point in time. No core there, it sounds like.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Making the complex understandable, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network, talking with John O'Neill, the author of Unfit for (Command). Welcome back, Mr. O'Neill. First off, real quick question: What's the availability of the book? I'm hearing back orders, people going into stores unable to get it, some people thinking bookstores are purposely not stocking it. What's the status?

O'NEILL: Everybody is trying to get the book out as fast as possible. The easiest place to buy it, Rush, is on Amazon.com where it's delivered, you know, pretty darn promptly. You know, we basically wrote this book so that people would read it and not for any other reason. We just begged people to try and get hold of this book. Also Barnes & Noble, can be ordered online from there, too.

RUSH: And you're up to 500,000 copies scanned; is that right?


O'NEILL: That's what they say, 550,000 copies that either have been printed or --

RUSH: You're going to outsell Bill Clinton before this is all over. You might outsell Hillary Clinton before this is all over.

O'NEILL: And if it does, that will be a great thing because people will pick up an awful lot of information from this, and also will generate a nice royalty check for an awfully nice charity.

RUSH: Which is?

O'NEILL: I'm not sure if I should say, but what we've offered is, I've offered my total royalty interest in this to the Navy and Marine Corps Relief, which is the organization that aids --

RUSH: Children?

O'NEILL: -- families of people that are killed, servicemen --

RUSH: Feel free to. I'm very involved in one of those of my own, the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Scholarship Foundation, does the same thing. That's tremendous.

O'NEILL: -- and that's exactly where the total royalty interests attributable to me has been offered, and we hope that they'll accept that. If we don't, the money will also be given to another charity.

RUSH: I don't think you'll have any problem having it accepted. I'm glad I asked. Now, I want to hear it from your words. I've heard the story what happened in the river with Jim Rassmann. In fact, somewhere in my stack today, the Kerry camp has changed this, or I don't think changed it, or somebody "misspoke," but somebody, it might have been Tad Devine or Podesta, somebody, claims that Kerry now dove in after Rassmann. I always thought he pulled Rassmann out. Let me start with what is John Kerry's version of this story, and then tell us what your eyewitnesses say really happened.


O'NEILL: Yes, sir. Kerry said in over $50 million of advertising and at the Democratic convention, this was the famous story of March 13th entitled "No Man Left Behind." Actually that was the name of his ad that he ran: "No Man Left Behind." According to his story, a mine went off near another boat. There were five swift boats. They all began to take off. The mine went off near Kerry's boat. This knocked Rassmann in the water. There was intense fire, you know, small arms fire after these boats --

RUSH: Enemy fire?

O'NEILL: Enemy fire. The five boats cleared the kill zone, and then Kerry looked back and realized Rassmann was no longer there, and then single-handedly Kerry had been wounded by the water mine, both in the hip and had a bleeding arm. Nonetheless, despite his wounds, he led his boat back in and under terrible fire he crawled up to the bow, and I guess he dove in now, but in the old days, he pulled him out supposedly with his wounded arm. What this story is, is a total fabrication built around a small truth, and it's a very demonstrable fabrication. I might explain it if that's okay.

RUSH: Sure, go right ahead.

O'NEILL: There are three basic elements to the story that are a complete lie. The first element of the story is Kerry's wound. The Kerry camp has now admitted that although Kerry reported to the Navy that his hip wound came from an underwater mine, that his wound actually came from throwing a grenade into some rice earlier that morning when there was no enemy fire and no enemy around. He simply was playing around. He threw a grenade into some rice and got a tiny amount of rice and shrapnel in his fanny.

RUSH: Pardon me. Is there a strategic reason, like blowing up food stocks, blowing up rice, or is it just a thing to pass time?

O'NEILL: I think it was just horsing around. Nobody would ever throw a grenade into rice to try and destroy it. It doesn't destroy it, Rush, as far as I can tell. But be that as it may --

RUSH: Thought that.

O'NEILL: -- he had a tiny, I'm talking tweezer and Band-Aid deal.

RUSH: Yeah.

O'NEILL: What he did was report to the Navy that it came from a water mine. Now, that seemed to be very unlikely having seen a few water mines of my own in Vietnam.

RUSH: Were there witnesses to this that could contradict what he said?

O'NEILL: Yes. That was his first problem. There were at least two: Jim Rassmann, who had written about it earlier, and Larry Thurlow, who heard the grenade go off and was aware of it. But the biggest and most killing witness to Kerry was himself, because his own journal was quoted in the Brinkley book Tour of Duty and outlined exactly this incident. Brinkley apparently wasn't aware that he had lied to the Navy about it.


RUSH: That's another thing. All these people are coming out and you're debating them on TV. You're debating Lanny Davis and James Carville, and they stacked the deck against you. They weren't there. They're having to take somebody's word for what happened, and they're broadcasting it all over the place as though it's gospel. Nobody assumes that any of their sources are making anything up. It's gospel. They weren't there but yet they're noted authorities. You have eyewitnesses who were there and saw this, and you are still subject here to being impugned and discredited and laughed at, and you're bearing up under it rather well. But I can't help but think people are noticing this because you're out there so much doing this and you're keep your cool. You're not blowing up, and because you've got the facts on your side. I know you're a lawyer and you know how to do this and you know that facts speak volumes.

O'NEILL: It's exactly right. For example, on that, Rush, I have the false report. I have all the false accounts he filed on his website and all the false ads and then I have Kerry himself in his own book admitting that this rice deal was in the absence of enemy fire. He just threw a grenade in. There was no water mine.

RUSH: Well, now, wait. There has to have been a water mine. Something blew Rassmann in the water. Something blew up. Was there enemy fire or not?

O'NEILL: Well, we believe there was no enemy fire, but I think it's very important here to take this a step at a time.

RUSH: Okay.

O'NEILL: Step number 1 is, he wounded himself that morning, and also with respect to this wounded and bleeding arm, the records show that the was contusion minor, small bruise treated with cold cloth. There was no wounded, bleeding arm. So the third Purple Heart that he picked up to leave Vietnam in this incident was a complete fraud.

RUSH: Do you think he was trying to get out of Vietnam?


O'NEILL: Without question, Rush.

RUSH: Did not want to be there.

O'NEILL: He wanted out with medals, but he wanted out as fast as he could.

RUSH: But you all wanted out, right? Everybody wanted to get out.

O'NEILL: Oh, no, Rush. We were all volunteers. We were. Of course it was a hard time --

RUSH: I know, but I mean, you volunteered, but I mean, this is hell on earth over there. This is not something you get up to looking forward to every day.

O'NEILL: It was hard, but we all knew we were doing our duty. It was the honor of the thing. It may sound silly, but there aren't any 401(k)s for kids in the military. They're proud to be there. They just don't bail out. They're all there because they feel like they're doing the nation's work. It's honorable, and someday they hope to tell their kids about it. That's what motivates them, motivated all of us.


RUSH: But you believe he wanted out.

O'NEILL: He wanted out with some medals. The second big problem he's got in No Man Left Behind, remember he's got all five boats fleeing--

RUSH: Right.

O'NEILL: The physical evidence shows that PCF-3, not his boat, a boat captained by a man named Dick Pees in Cleveland, Ohio, was blown out of the water. That's how the whole action began. It was blown out of the water, and the guys on the boat, several of them, were blown into the water. The people left were unconscious or trapped in the boat, and so PCF-3 could go nowhere. The theory that all five boats escaped, they couldn't escape, Rush. PCF-3 couldn't go anywhere. What happened is all the boats, with one exception, went to the aid of PCF-3. That is, they closed on PCF-3 picking up swimmers, began trying to bring the boat under control and save it because it was sinking with people trapped on it. The one guy who was not there was John Kerry, exactly as he said, he fled. His boat took off and fled, and that was true. When he said he fled, that was right. He did.


RUSH: But none of the others did.

O'NEILL: They all stayed. Rush, we all drank out of the same cup. We would never flee a boat in those circumstances. We all would rather sit and die together.

RUSH: What did he do, mistake the mine for enemy fire?

O'NEILL: No, he simply bailed out. He's never explained why he bailed out. He tried to claim in some accounts, one account he claimed it was, or one of his crewmen, that it was just a turn. It was the longest turn, Rush, ever made by a PCF.

RUSH: I think guys like this, they drive me nuts.

O'NEILL: The next story was he was really going down somewhere to put troops in far away, but you see, Rush, the problem is we had guys right in the water there that were unconscious. They'd be dead by the time anybody got back to them and that's why all the other guys stayed. Now, that's undeniable. One and two are established as fact. You can look at the Washington Post diagram of yesterday, and I don't think Kerry denies that he may try and explain it. What Kerry has tried to do is let the tail on the dog be the dog. He's trying to argue while there was fire beyond the original mine. That, of course, is the smallest question of all, because it meant that the wound was fabricated on the, you know, this hip shrapnel wound. He admits that he fled and everybody else stayed. Now he's really trying to claim that when he came back to where everybody else was, there was still fire. I've got to tell you, I think we have overwhelming evidence we are right. Here's the evidence. We have ten guys on those boats including all the officers who say that there was no fire. We have the width of this little river as 75 yards. Those boats were there for an hour and a half saving the three boat and saving the people on it. There is not a bullet hole on any of those boats from that day. There's not a man wounded that day from anything but the original mine.

RUSH: Except John Kerry.

O'NEILL: Except John Kerry's hip wound from the rice explosion --

RUSH: Yes.

O'NEILL: -- and then the elbow that he claims banged up against the bulkhead, that was a minor bruise. Unlike our evidence on all this, the way he's been able to cloud that issue is at least one or more of his crewmen and Rassmann say there was fire. With respect to Mr. Rassmann, I think it's important to realize that he was in the water struggling for his life after he fell off the Kerry boat and that he did see the Kerry stern disappearing and maybe that's why he thought everybody left.

RUSH: Now, was he blown off? Do you know whether he was blown off? If the mine did not hit Kerry's boat, if it hit the 3 boat --

O'NEILL: Right.

RUSH: -- then how did Rassmann fall off?

O'NEILL: That's a wonderful question. First of all, all of our guys say there was no second mine, as reported by Kerry. At least none of them heard it. There's no evidence of any damage to the Kerry boat from any second mine. Kerry produced a damage report, but it reflects injuries the day before to his boat, not that day. We know that from page 304 of his book Tour. So there's no indication of any damage to the boat, and one of his crewmen now says there was no mine, it must have been a grenade. But a grenades wouldn't move a boat or tip a boat or push someone into the (water). I mean, Rush, we had I don't know how many grenades, you know, hit our boat or rockets, that didn't move the boat. These are deals that went through the boat. It would never cause someone to bump up against the edge or fall off. But, in any event, that's what they say. I don't think it's particularly material to the story because the problem is first, he fabricated the wounds and that wound and used it to leave Vietnam, even the tiny little scratch on his fanny, and second he fled when they all stayed. With respect to whether there was fire afterwards, I strongly believe that our guys are telling the truth, and truthfully any combat veteran I think will agree with us, but he's trying to use the third issue to cloud one and two.

RUSH: Okay, this happened. He's young. He wants out of there. You've stipulated that.

O'NEILL: Right.

RUSH: Three Purple Hearts and you go. How, in your estimation, does this damage his credibility or qualifications to be president of the United States in 2004? I mean, essentially he's going to have more to do as president than just be commander-in-chief.

Is this a character problem that you have with him? Is it a veracity or honesty problem you have with him overall?


O'NEILL: It's a terrible problem, Rush. It isn't just lying to the Navy all those years ago. The problem is he was lying to the whole country, you know, three weeks ago about this incident. The Cambodia deal he described as the turning point in his whole life.
RUSH: Right.

O'NEILL: This incident here he described as the military highlight. I mean, he had a hundred million dollars --

RUSH: So the highlight and the searing point in his life seemed to have vagaries?

O'NEILL: They're made up. I mean, what they always are is a tiny amount of truth and a huge amount of lie built up, and they have a common theme. The theme is always everybody's a villain or a coward like all those guys that really went to the three boats' aid and then there's one big hero. It's always John Kerry. The other guys are always weaklings or cowards or they're ordering him to do things that are wrong.

RUSH: Yeah. John O'Neill is our guest and we've got a couple more segments to go.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Mr. O'Neill, I just got this from the San Francisco Chronicle website. It's an AP story, and it was posted just three minutes ago, and I just want to read the first paragraph to you --

O'NEILL: Yes, sir.

RUSH: -- and get your reaction to it. "President Bush denounced TV ads by outside groups attacking both John Kerry and himself on Monday and called for a halt to all such political efforts. He said, 'I think they're bad for the system.'" Now, I know you've said that the president could personally ask you to cease and desist and you wouldn't. What's your reaction to this?


O'NEILL: Well, you know, President Bush, all these guys are entitled to whatever opinion they want. To us this is not a matter of politics. This is deeply personal. We have 60 guys in our group that were wounded in Vietnam, and not wounds like Kerry, but real wounds. We have 254 people that were there for at least a year except for the ones who were badly injured. This guy has lied about our unit. He's lied about his service in our unit, and the truth is, we could care less what anybody has to say about it. We're going to go forward and get the facts to the American people to our last dollar and our last bit of energy, and all our guys feel that way.


RUSH: How are you dealing with the questions of whether or not you and Mr. Perry and so forth have had direct contact with the Bush campaign?

O'NEILL: Well, we haven't. The long and short of it is we really haven't. You know, it's interesting, because, for example, this MoveOn group is headed by Kerry's old campaign manager, and all these groups are pretty closely related, looks like to me, to the political figures. The one group of all of them that has an independent right to speak is ours. We were set up with our own money, although we collect money from whoever will give it to us legally. Who we are, just turn to our website, SwiftVets.com. We list the names of all 254 people. We outline exactly what we're going to do, what we stand for. We outline what our appearances are going to be. We filed our financial reports early. Actually, we've got huge amounts of individual contributions. On one day, Rush, we got $320,000 in contributions that average $59 apiece.

RUSH: And you're still accepting them at that website address?

O'NEILL: Absolutely. We'll accept them big or small. If George Soros wants to give us some money, we'll take it from him.

RUSH: (Laughing.) Yeah, you got a long way to go to get to his money. He's into $15 or $20 million already, to various Democrat 527s. Time is running short here. Let me ask you, are there any more ads coming? Are you in this for the duration of the campaign, or is there an end here for what you have to say and when?

O'NEILL: Not at all, sir. We're in to the very end. We have additional ads coming to the extent that we can raise money to see it. We have our guys going around at press conferences, and our guys are there. We're particularly there now since some of the attacks on us. We all served in Vietnam; we're not about to be intimidated by a bunch of people attacking us.

RUSH: I was going to ask about this, and that's something that struck me about Senator Kerry. Here he is a big war hero with all these medals and he's acting very afraid of you.

O'NEILL: Well, amazing for a war hero, he's afraid to even come out publicly and answer directly himself these rather obvious factual questions.

RUSH: Yeah. Mr. O'Neill --

O'NEILL: He's no war hero.

RUSH: Well, you are certainly one, and in the eyes of many in this country you're doing the Lord's work today, and for them I'll say, "God bless you," and because you're incurring a lot of personal assaults, personal attacks, as are your men, and as you just said you're doing it because you believe it, and you're willing to undergo it and take it. So we appreciate the time that you've given us today. We appreciate what you're doing and support your effort, and wish you the best in the coming months, and the best to you and your wife, too, and your health.
_________________
.
one of..... We The People

[kate]

http://kmclive.com
Kevin McCullough
Radio Talk Show
JOHN ONEILL August 24

~5:24pm~ EST
UPDATE "SWIFTVET ONEILL ON KMC SHOW": You may have missed it live earlier this afternoon - and if you did don't worry. Today's hottest news headlines regarding Kerry being forced to now admit (via his campaign) that his first purple heart was more or less self-inflicted (and thereby nullifying his get out of Vietnam early card - WAS responded to by John ONeill author of "UNFIT FOR COMMAND".

If you would like to hear the entire interview - it will be streaming 24/7 with the rest of the show via our normal 24/7 stream - CLICK HERE TO LISTEN.
http://boss.streamos.com/real-live/swn/5724/16_swn-16_kmc_0204_040210.smi (broken link)


For just the three meaty parts of the ONeill interview only - check out these MP3's of my interview with ONeill today...Part One, Two, and Three!
http://web.archive.org/web/20051027071313/http://media.salemwebnetwork.com/WEBLOG/kmc/John%20ONeill%20Part%201.wma
http://web.archive.org/web/20051027070137/http://media.salemwebnetwork.com/WEBLOG/kmc/John%20ONeill%20Part%202.wma
http://web.archive.org/web/20051027070621/http://media.salemwebnetwork.com/WEBLOG/kmc/John%20ONeill%20Part%203.wma

note: internet archive links updated


~1:41pm~ EST
LOOKING FOR ONEILL?: He will be with us at 2:30pm EST to respond to the blockbuster revelations that Kerry has quietly been trying to twist Swift Vet arms behind the scenes as well as The Kerry Campaign's new admission that Kerry's first purple heart wound was possibly self inflicted... CLICK HERE TO LISTEN
http://boss.streamos.com/real-live/swn/5724/16_swn-16_kmc_0204_040210.smi (broken link)
_________________
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one of..... We The People

[ord33]

Steve Gardner & Larry Thurlow Aug. 26, 2004

MSNBC - Deborah Norville Show
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5841593/

[sround]

http://s2r-tech.com/swifty/cw-panel8-29.mp3

Chris Wallace on FoxNews Sunday 8/29/04

Brit Hume
Mara Liasson
Bill Kristol
Juan Williams

Size: 833K
Format: MP3
Time: 7:06 min
Tech note: Low volume first 10 sec but normal thereafter

Admin note: Sround and all...keep this stuff coming...it ROCKS! Thanks!

[RivanG]

Veterans for Truth Rally
In Washington, D.C., Vietnam Veterans hold a Veterans for Truth Rally.
9/12/2004: WASHINGTON, DC: 2 hr. 50 min.

http://www.c-span.org/Search/basic.asp?ResultStart=1&ResultCount=10&BasicQueryText=vietnam+rally

[kate]

Steve Gardner Interview
The Michael Savage show, 8/6/2004
http://www2.swiftvets.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=16371

linking here, since this thread has fallen back a few pages
_________________
.
one of..... We The People

[kate]

http://www.davidlimbaugh.com/oneill01.htm

John ONeill
interview with David Limbaugh
August 21, 2004
_________________
.
one of..... We The People

[Navy_Navy_Navy]

Dean Esmay Interviews Van Odell:
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1096905911.shtml
_________________
~ Echo Juliet ~
Altering course to starboard - On Fire, Keep Clear
Navy woman, Navy wife, Navy mother

[Navy_Navy_Navy]

Dean Esmay interviews George Elliott:
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1097675269.shtml
_________________
~ Echo Juliet ~
Altering course to starboard - On Fire, Keep Clear
Navy woman, Navy wife, Navy mother

[sevry]

Nightline,
14 OCT 2004,
2nd segment only,
interview with John O'Neill

VIDEO (pro-Kerry site, possibly pre-edited (?))

Unfit for Command
Tour of Duty
John F Kerry (Boston Globe)

[drjohn]

This post is fabulous- thanks much.

[kate]

http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.18461/article_detail.asp

The American Enterprise
"Live" with TAE John O'Neill
April/May 2005 Issue

One of the most dramatic stories of Election 2004 was the coalescence of a large group of Vietnam veterans dedicated to the idea that John Kerry was not fit to become America's Commander in Chief. Many of those who joined Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had served with Kerry in Vietnam. And his behavior there--and, even more, upon his return--convinced them that Kerry could not be trusted to lead our nation in wartime.

To their great surprise, the testimony of the Swift Boat veterans was simply ignored by a hostile media establishment. The veterans were tenacious, however, and eventually captured the attention of the alternate media, then finally the nation as a whole. That's when the media elites attacked them with icy ferocity.

In the end, the Swift Boat vets raised more than $26 million and took their message directly to the public with a grassroots advertising and personal testimony campaign. Their first ads appeared in early August when Kerry was leading the Presidential race. They were widely credited with reversing that lead, which Kerry never won back.

John O'Neill first became aware of John Kerry's accusations that American soldiers in Vietnam acted in a "fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan" back in 1971. He felt compelled to speak out, and debated Kerry on "The Dick Cavett Show."

O'Neill then disappeared into private life, only appearing again in 2004 to debunk John Kerry's revisions of his Vietnam record during his pursuit of the White House. O'Neill became a spokesman for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

John O'Neill was interviewed for TAE by contributing writer David Isaac.


TAE: How and when did the idea for the Swift Boat veterans group come into being?

O'NEILL: The one who conceived of this was Admiral Roy Hoffmann. He began contacting many Swift Boat people in January and February last year. At that time, I was in the hospital. I had given my wife a kidney for a transplant.

I became a part of it in early to mid March. I was motivated by several things, the first and most important being a genuine fear of what would happen to our country, our national security, and our armed forces if John Kerry became Commander in Chief.

The reason we had our press conference on May 4 was that we thought if we could come forward quickly, we might be able to prevent John Kerry from becoming the Democratic nominee and allow the Democratic Party to pick someone else, in which case we could all go home.


TAE: At the Swift Boat veterans' May 4 press conference you had an open letter calling Kerry unfit to be Commander in Chief. It was signed by virtually all of John Kerry's commanders in Vietnam. Yet the story fell flat. The media ignored it. How did your group react to the media blackout?

O'NEILL: We were shocked. We couldn't believe it. I haven't been involved in politics or media relations, and I thought the job of the media was primarily to report the facts. It was obvious to me that many hundreds of his former comrades coming forward to say that he lied about his record in Vietnam and that he was unfit to be President would be important information for Americans. I only then became aware of the bias of the media.


TAE: How do you explain the media's response?

O'NEILL: The establishment media was very pro-Kerry. They were opposed to any story that was critical of Kerry, and I believe that they were captured by their own bias. We met with one reporter around that time. We told a story to him relating to Kerry's service. He acknowledged it was true and terribly important. And he told us he would not print it because it would help George Bush. That's when we began to realize we had a real problem on our hands.


TAE: Is there anything other than pro-Kerry bias to account for the establishment media's attitude to the story?

O'NEILL: Perhaps a second factor is that there are very few veterans in the established media. It makes it very difficult for them to understand the story or to care about it. That's very different from the situation 40 or 50 years ago when most people had served in some fashion in the armed forces or had uncles or brothers who had.


TAE: Did your group consider giving up?

O'NEILL: We couldn't give up because in the end our objective was to get our facts out. We had to be able to look at ourselves the day after the election and know we had done everything we could. If we were simply shouting in the desert, we would still have to shout.

Our analysis after the press conference was that the three major networks, the New York Times, and the Washington Post would under no circumstances carry a story like ours, no matter how well documented. The strategy we devised first involved use of a fifteenth-century method of communication; that is, writing a book, which may sound strange in the telecommunications age. But that book, Unfit for Command, sold over 850,000 copies. I've often mused how funny it is that the New York Times had to list it as No. 1 on its bestseller list. The second thing we did was run, with the small amount of money we had, our ad, which featured 15 of us.


TAE: Did your group come up with the content of the ads?

O'NEILL: Yes, the content had to come from us. There's not an advertising firm in the world that's ever been on a Swift Boat. And none of them were there on the day of March 14 when Kerry fled on the Bay Hop.

The same thing is true of the second ad. None of us will ever forget the day Kerry testi-fied before Congress. It was like the Kennedy assassination. And so we just couldn't live in the United States if we didn't make a statement about his testimony in 1971.


TAE: Before the first ad came out, who picked up the story?

O'NEILL: The only people willing to publicizing the story very early were Sean Hannity, the Wall Street Journal, Investor's Business Daily, several Web sources, and finally C-SPAN (which aired the press conference). Other people who contributed to the story later in a significant way were the Drudge Report and Rush Limbaugh. Another very important person was Laura Ingraham, who went through the allegations point by point and permitted rebuttal, and there was none. That made it apparent that there was a large-scale media cover up in progress.


TAE: Between the press conference and when you released your first ad, May 5 to August 5, what was the group doing?

O'NEILL: The biggest single thing we were doing was composing, checking, and putting out the book. More than 60 people reviewed it, the people who were physically involved in the incidents. We did filming for the first and second ads during that period of time. We raised money from a variety of sources. We established our Web site. It was crude and immediately hijacked by the Kerry people. It was hacked and destroyed repeatedly. We were eventually able to get a Web site that functioned, that could take communications, where the ads could be downloaded and the like.


TAE: Were you surprised when Senator Kerry focused so much on his Vietnam record at the Democratic Convention in late July? How do you account for this when he clearly knew you were out there?

O'NEILL: I think he thought that he had good control over the mainline media, that they were sympathetic, that they would kill the story. And I think he was very confident that was the case with the New York Times and the three major networks and CNN, and that he could intimidate the portions of the media not already friendly to him. And so he thought the story would never come out. That had been his experience over and over again in Massachusetts.


TAE: Everything changed in early August, after your first ad.

O'NEILL: All of a sudden, Kerry and the media were faced with an ad that was actually showing. There was a time when they controlled the entire world of communications. That day is over. The Kerry campaign, fortunately for us, threatened the stations carrying the ad. They had two Washington law firms write legal letters demanding that the ads not be run.

There were 20 stations. We provided a factual package to each of them containing 15 affidavits supporting each of the items. After receiving that, 19 of the 20 stations immediately ran the ad. The twentieth station couldn't do it until the following Monday because they couldn't process the legal stuff quick enough. And they did bring up subsequent ads and they invited us to put additional ads on.


TAE: Did the attempts of Kerry's people to stop your message only help publicize it more?

O'NEILL: They helped us tremendously. The threats against the station managers led to extensive publicity, particularly on the "Hannity & Colmes" show and then on other FOX News shows. Then it spread to CNN and to MSNBC. More than 1,400,000 people downloaded that first ad, and it swept through the Internet. It also allowed thousands and thousands of people to start donating money to us at our Web site.

Three weeks after it was put up, half of all the people in the United States had heard about that ad and about us and yet there had never been a story about us on ABC, NBC, or CBS or in the New York Times. At that point, people began laughing, I believe, at the mainline media. It became obvious they were suppressing the story.

The critical factor was that it was the truth. I think anyone of good faith would believe Kerry's post-Vietnam activities were clearly a campaign issue. So once the facts about those came out, the story was almost impossible to suppress. The media was like the dutch boy, keeping its fingers in the dike to stop the story from flowing out. It just got to a point where it got beyond them. There weren't enough fingers.


TAE: Leading journalist David Broder reported that Kerry told him his Vietnam background would give him double benefit--he would get the votes of veterans because he served, and of anti-war activists because he had opposed the war. If you hadn't come along, do you think he would have succeeded?

O'NEILL: If word hadn't gotten out, if they'd allowed him to get by portraying himself as a war hero with no genuine revelation from the veteran community that this was the same guy from 1971 that they all remember, perhaps he could have gotten by.


TAE: On August 20, your second ad was released featuring a 27-year-old Kerry testifying in 1971 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about American war crimes. Later that month, you came out with ads featuring Kerry's gunner and Kerry throwing away his medals. Can you assess the impact of the various ads? Did any one of them clearly have the biggest effect?

O'NEILL: I thought that the first and second ads each had profound impacts, but in different ways. I thought that the first one, which dealt directly with Kerry's service in Vietnam, was like a pinprick in a balloon. Kerry had blown himself up and presented himself as something that he wasn't. So simply seeing the people who had been with him telling the plain truth had an impact.

The second ad was one that went to the heart of the American soul. To have accused our guys in Vietnam of committing war crimes on a day-to-day basis, repetitive and planned, I think was something that all Americans knew was not the truth. I have always believed that if the average American knew what he did, it would be impossible for John Kerry ever to hold high elected office.


TAE: The media establishment finally took notice when Senator Kerry attacked you publicly on August 19. Then they seemed to see their role as proving your charges false.

O'NEILL: Yes, that's exactly what occurred. The New York Times functioned as a newsletter for the Kerry campaign. The Times purported to show that I was a Republican. I would have been happy to be a Republican if I really was. The article was ridiculous. It had me married to the wrong person. It was really a sad article to see from a great newspaper. It should win the Jayson Blair award. There's never been a piece in the New York Times examining the factual basis of the Swift Boat vets' charges.


TAE: How did the Kerry campaign react when your story gained traction?

O'NEILL: In terms of attacks by the Kerry campaign, I resented deeply the picketing at my own house during my daughter's wedding.

I also resented the attacks on Larry Thurlow, who was the greatest hero we ever had in Vietnam. Only in the New York Times could Kerry be a hero and Thurlow, who saved everyone's life, who stayed and rescued the people in the boat, end up a goat.

They also leaked to the New York Daily News the suicide attempt of one of the peripheral signers of our letter, and a story appeared in the New York Times related to a suicide attempt 15 years before.

The very first ad we filed began with a man named Al French, a very highly decorated Vietnam veteran, who served as a prosecutor in Clackamas County, Oregon. Immediately, 23 different complaints were filed with the state bar of Oregon against Mr. French. In addition, he was fired from his job in Oregon as an assistant prosecutor supposedly on the basis of a ten-year-old complaint that had never been processed by his boss before that time.

Bullets were fired over the phone. My wife was monitoring our phone, and she picks up: "Mr. O'Neill we know where you are." They'd start shooting a gun. "How many babies did you kill?" And then begin firing a gun. "We're going to come and hunt you down." The roaches showed up all right. It was a very hard process for all of us.


TAE: The New York Times didn't get around to reviewing your book until October although it had been at the top of the Times bestseller list since August?

O'NEILL: They began the review by saying if Kerry loses the election it will be because of this book. You would expect that declaration would be followed by an in-depth review of the book that would indicate whether it was true or not true. But the review is very short. No fact is refuted other than the outcome of my debate with John Kerry in 1971. I said I thought I'd beat him. I quoted from the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the San Antonio Express & News, all of which concluded that he lost. The Times review claimed that debate was the launching point for Kerry's entire career. The fact is, before the debate John Kerry was a major national figure. After the debate, his career declined. He was defeated for Congress and he disappeared from public view. Only in the New York Times would that debate be the launching point for Kerry's career. When you have a guy who's very famous in 1971 and then no one hears about him again until 1984, how could this be a launch?


TAE: What was your worst experience with the media?

O'NEILL: I was shouted down the worst by James Carville. The entire "Crossfire" TV show consisted of James Carville screaming. He demonstrated a wonderful set of lungs but shed very little light on the issues.


TAE: On the "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" you were matched with Thomas Oliphant of the Boston Globe who lectured you. He said that your allegations didn't meet the basic criteria for a real story.

O'NEILL: It was interesting. He said in order to carry a story you had to have conclusive evidence. Within a few days of that story, the Boston Globe, his newspaper, was pushing the Dan Rather story, based on phony documents, that President Bush skirted his National Guard duty. Oliphant was involved with the story. He should be ashamed of himself, as I think the entire journalistic establishment should be.


TAE: What were you thinking during that interview?

O'NEILL: About being lectured on journalistic ethics by a journalist from a newspaper now famous for a lack of ethics? It was truly a remarkable experience, particularly from someone who was trying to suppress a story that he knew was the truth. Oliphant, after all, was a friend of Kerry's. As a matter of fact, the Kerry campaign was asked to send a debate representative, and I gather Oliphant was their representative. How could a supposedly independent journalist appear as a debater for the Kerry campaign? How could James Carville be an independent commentator if he was retained by the Kerry campaign? I realized they were simply doing openly what the New York Times was doing secretly.


TAE: There was a discussion at the New York Public Library on October 2 between the top anchors of the three broadcast networks at which Peter Jennings said of the Swift Boat ads, "We were not quick enough to say they were demonstrably false."

O'NEILL: Yes, I appeared on "Nightline" hosted by Ted Koppel. He went to Vietnam to prove that our account of the Silver Star incident involving Kerry was false. He interviewed five or six former Vietcong, who indicated that when Kerry beached his boat in the Silver Star incident, there was not one Vietcong, but as many as 20.

Everyone on Kerry's crew said there was a single Vietcong. Everyone on our crew, our guys, said there was a single Vietcong. In Tour of Duty, Kerry himself says, "I thought to myself, 'Thank God there was only one. If there were five or ten we would have all died.'"

Koppel presented all this as a great exposŽ of us. How on earth could someone believe four Vietcong accompanied by a government handler instead of us, Kerry's own crew, and every other independent witness?

I'm comfortable that some day people will study the journalism of the three networks in the same way that they studied the Pulitzer prize the New York Times got in 1932 for describing Stalin's plan in Russia as a wonderful idea and the reports of starvation as exaggerated.


TAE: What did you say to Koppel?

O'NEILL: I went through exactly what I told you and he had no answer. Koppel kept asking me to put down the biography of Kerry, to not quote Kerry anymore. Instead, Koppel repeatedly indicated that he thought that his Vietcong sources should be the ones to rely on. So it had a quality that was just hard to believe.


TAE: There are parallels between your own experience in 1971 and today. How has the media changed in terms of being "balanced" since you debated John Kerry on "The Dick Cavett Show"?

O'NEILL: I'm Rip Van Winkle when it comes to the media. I happily disappeared from public life for 32 years. The big difference is that, in 1971, while the media would spin facts on occasion and spin them very favorably to Kerry and his group, they wouldn't actually suppress the news.

What's happened now is the mainline media, by which I mean the three major networks, and the New York Times, suppress news stories. It's one thing to provide opinion, even in the news section. It's another to suppress facts that are adverse to your views. That is really a brave new world that did not exist in the 1970s.


TAE: Does your experience suggest the major media have lost their gatekeeper role?

O'NEILL: Yes, without question. Major networks tried to blacklist us and to hide the story from the public. In doing so they seemed to follow the directions of the Kerry campaign. As long as the campaign ignored us, they ignored us. When the Kerry campaign went on the attack, the big media attacked us.

But the message got out anyway. In my opinion they were unsuccessful basically because they didn't have very much to work with. They hadn't anything to sink their teeth into. We were very careful in the ads and in the book. That's why the attacks on us flailed around.


TAE: Did alternative forms of media make the difference?

O'NEILL: They really did. It would have been impossible to get our story out if it had been left to the networks and to the New York Times. Nothing came out on any of those until the story was so widespread that they became a laughingstock by ignoring it.


TAE: Has your group played a pioneering role in demonstrating old media's loss of control?

O'NEILL: I'm not enough of an observer to know. I wish we could say we planned this. It was more something that happened to us and we initially expected that the media would definitely cover the story.


TAE: Will this lead to media reform?

O'NEILL: I think reform is occurring right now. You've seen a tremendous drop in the ratings for the networks. There's a tremendous drop going on in readership for newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. Why are people leaving and seeking their news elsewhere? Because they start by simply wanting to get a good, factual account of what occurred. Then they're happy to listen to opinion pieces, but they're not willing to accept people who simply suppress the underlying facts. That's why people have gone to the Internet and to other sources for their news.


TAE: Was the 2004 election a defeat for the traditional media?

O'NEILL: Yes, I think that whatever shreds of credibility the major media had before the election are gone. They operated so clearly as extensions of the Kerry campaign that it's evident everywhere from Leon, Iowa to Oxford, Mississippi and all places in between that these folks simply start off with an opinion and then either gather or manufacture facts to support the opinion.


TAE: You didn't receive criticism from the media alone. Even President Bush criticized your group. Were you disappointed by his reaction?


O'NEILL: I would have felt more comfortable if he would have simply recognized this was an issue between us and Kerry that was not really related to him. This is about criticism of our unit and fellow veterans. I didn't think his comment that 527 ads should cease was unreasonable, although I disagree with it.


TAE: How much do you owe to John McCain's campaign finance reform? Would you have had equal impact without 527s?

O'NEILL: I think we would have come forward and we would have been able to solicit contributions in the way we have. We have 274 Swift Boat people. We're not a shade of any political party. We share a deep experience going back 35 years. And the reasons we determined to set the record straight are not political reasons. They relate to our friends who died there, our service, and our fear of this guy being Commander
in Chief.

I think that what is unfortunate about the 527 reform is that there is apparently no distinction between Moveon.org, really just a part of a political party, and genuine third-party efforts like ours.


TAE: Neither party likes what happened in this election where they lost control of the debate to independent 527s. What do you think will be the effect of the Swift Boat veterans on campaign reform?

O'NEILL: I would think that we would be the worst example for someone who is trying to shut down independent political campaigning efforts. I would think logically it would be impossible to defend a situation in which John Kerry could spend millions, or tens of millions, of dollars presenting his record in Vietnam in a way that was very demeaning to the people he served with, and we who were actually there would not have the right to respond.

I would think that would be a terrible thing to try and defend legally, morally, or ethically and I don't think that Americans would permit that to happen.


TAE: Were you taken aback when Senator John McCain condemned your first ad?

O'NEILL: Yes. I believe that he did that without fully understanding the circumstances. All of us say things we regret, and I hope he regrets that. I really hope he apologizes for it. I think that John McCain, candidly, confused senatorial courtesy with the suppression of free speech.

We were very grateful when his roommate at the Hanoi Hilton, Colonel Bud Day, came forward to strongly endorse our efforts. Colonel Day was the most decorated United States soldier since World War II and the winner of the Medal of Honor. It was good when he and many other POWs came forward to disagree with McCain.


TAE: What general lessons do you think can be taken from the Swift Boat vets' experience?

O'NEILL: One thing is that you cannot simply leave the conduct of national elections to politicians and political parties. It's simply a process that's too important. And they each have their own reasons for not wanting to cope with difficult issues or facts. I believe that the cardinal design of the First Amendment was free political speech. I don't think there would be a better example of it than our group coming forward. It's obvious that the materials we dealt with, the record of Kerry in Vietnam, his false war crimes charges, were very, very important in the selection of a President.


I think a second thing, as naive as this sounds, is that it's possible for a small number of people to influence things. And I think it indicates that the truth itself has a certain power that may at times overpower money and control by the media and the like.


TAE: In retrospect would you have done anything differently?

O'NEILL: Of course, if we had known from the inception that the heavyweight media would simply ignore our story--that the three networks and the New York Times were our adversaries--we wouldn't have done the press conference. Instead, we would have gone immediately to the publication of the book, to radio, to the ads.


TAE: Shortly before the election, you thought it was a 50-50 deal. You couldn't predict who would win. Were you surprised by how well Bush did?

O'NEILL: Yes, I was surprised. It's obvious the Democrats were cleaning out every place that they could find voters, but they didn't realize that they incited a tremendous reaction from middle America against them. They, therefore, produced a huge vote on the other side. I think a great deal of it was a reaction to Kerry; I think people were afraid of Kerry as President of the United States.


TAE: What contribution did your group make to Kerry's defeat?

O'NEILL: Other political prognosticators could say that better than me. I think that people got a chance to learn how he had actually dealt with a terrorist problem. And the only time in his life that he really confronted it was with the North Vietnamese--who shot people in the back of the head, executed 4 million people. And he thought that we were the criminals, and couldn't seem to tell the difference between us and the North Vietnamese. He thought Ho Chi Minh was George Washington. And of course he met with them and basically supported them. That would not at all be the type of leader you would want to confront the current group of terrorists, al-Qaeda.


TAE: Listening to the pundits explain Bush's victory the day after the election, I didn't hear a single one mention the Swift Boat vets.

O'NEILL: We're happy to fade back into our own jobs and our own places and none of us did it to try to get credit. So if the commentators conclude that we had a small role or no role that's fine with us.


TAE: The story of the Swift Boat vets is a powerful one. Many of you hadn't seen each other in 32 years. You came back together out of a sense of duty to stop a man you knew to be unfit for the Presidency.

O'NEILL: Have you ever heard the poem "Ulysses" by Alfred Lord Tennyson? Ulysses is at the end of his life and gets his old crew together and they sail around for one last great adventure--not too different from Admiral Hoffmann getting all of us together for one last shot that we thought was very much in the national interest of the United States.

The election aside, the attention focused on Vietnam has allowed the people who served there to confront this myth and lie about the Vietnam War and I think it's made a permanent change in the American psyche in terms of the treatment of people who served there. I think that the people on the left are now afraid to repeat the old myths that we were all war criminals. They've lost that battle.


TAE: You believe what you've done has changed the way the public views the Vietnam War?

O'NEILL: I do. I think that the change was coming to some degree without us, but I think that the public now realizes that the Vietnam War was a lost battle in a war that was won, the Cold War. Vietnam lives in darkness because we lost, but it's one lonely outpost of what used to be a vast threat to human freedom. And I think they recognize that our service there, while in a losing battle, was noble service.


TAE: Does this explain some of the anger directed toward your group by the Left? In attacking Kerry's war stance, you undermined part of their mythology?

O'NEILL: I think that is true. They attempted to claim that all Kerry had done was oppose the Vietnam War. That ignores the actual facts of his conduct itself, that is, meeting with the North Vietnamese, and criminalizing the people who disagreed with him. Those are myths so fanciful that no one can defend them. Another problem those on the left have is that history has not been kind to them. Kerry said that you can't stop the march of communism. We did. It is evident to anyone that the North Vietnamese imposed, as a result of our leaving, a cruel and barbaric tyranny that has left Vietnam a dark and depressed place compared to all of its neighbors. On the other hand, it's also clear that communism is now an ideology of the past that is fading from the Earth.


TAE: Is there an irony that John Kerry, the man who did more than any other to tarnish the image of the U.S. soldier in Vietnam, may inadvertently have helped a truer picture of that war spread across the nation in 2004 ?

O'NEILL: It haunts all of us that the first Vietnam veteran nominated for President would be John Kerry--the very last person most veterans would pick for high office. But it is ironic that his run for the White House may have finally initiated some less fictionalized thinking about the war.


TAE: Have you noticed a change among your fellow veterans since this started? Has it changed the way they feel about themselves?

O'NEILL: I think they're prouder of their service than they were. I've had many survivors of veterans, wives or children, tell me they felt liberated by what we did. They have endured the loss of a husband, the loss of a father, and had this blemish placed on those they lost by the radical elements of the Left in the late '60s and early '70s. They feel like it's been removed. They feel very liberated.


TAE: Would you describe the theme of this whole debate as moving from stolen honor to honor restored?

O'NEILL: Exactly so. Military people don't serve for pay. The kids who served with us had almost no money. What they had was their lives, their good names, their honor. The ones who died in Vietnam, who ranged in age from about 18 to 23, gave up their lives. They really gave them up, in the words of the Bible, for their neighbor. They had nothing directly to gain. They did it because the country asked. They did it to try and save Vietnam.

On a personal basis, it's had a tremendous impact on me. When I came back, I really forgot about everything related to war after the Kerry debate. I didn't go to any reunions. I was trying to put the whole thing behind me basically, because of the sadness for my friends who were killed.

What I did in the process was to separate myself from a lot of people who were really and truly the best people I ever met. And so the spontaneous coming together of the Swift Boat group has been a great thing for me. Because I've gotten back together with men I'll be close to the rest of my life.


Published in Democracy Breaks Out in the Middle East April/May 2005
http://www.taemag.com/issues/current_issue.asp
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one of..... We The People

[kate]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5840657/

Adm. William Schachte: 'No enemy fire'
One of John Kerry's superior officers disputes the circumstances Kerry claims led to the awarding of his first Purple Heart
Updated: 5:57 p.m. ET Aug. 27, 2004

NBC's Lisa Myers conducted the following interview with Rear Adm. William L. Schachte (USN Ret.) in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 24, 2004. Portions have been edited for clarity.

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.

Myers: And how long did you serve with Senator Kerry?

Schachte: Until he left our area; I believe it was the 4th of December [1968] or so.

Myers: So for a period of roughly how long?

Schachte: Well, a couple of weeks. Several weeks. But he was out on patrol and I was with him one night in particular – in the skimmer [Note: Schachte claims the date of that night was 12/02/68, the same date listed in military records for the incident that earned Kerry his first Purple Heart; “skimmer” is a type of small water craft used by U.S. forces in Vietnam].Which was the subject of that first matter concerning his Purple Heart…

I had been a patrolling officer and when I became the operations officer and the number two in command, it was subsequent to the bombing halt announced by President Johnson. We got orders to turn up the heat, try to be more aggressive, do things differently. And I conceived an operation – it became known as ‘skimmer ops.’ Very simple operation – we had a 15-foot Boston whaler. We would send that boat into ‘hot’ areas… The operation was very simple. The boat was to go into these areas and, by the way, I must mention that these areas were all non-population areas, not near any villages or anything else. We knew if anybody or anyone were around, they were enemy. We would go in, draw fire and get out immediately. Let others – swift boats standing off or maybe air support come in and take care of the enemy forces… ["swift boat" was the common name for Patrol Craft Fast vessels (PCFs) used by the U.S. Navy in Vietnam]

Myers: So you were basically trying to smoke out the enemy?

Schachte: Yes. Bait 'em, if you will. We had these boats. We had an M-60 machine gun forward, an M-16 mounted with a starlight scope. On a hazy night, a badly overcast night, we had a M-14 mounted with an infra-red. M-79 grenade launcher – those were single-launch launchers in those days. Flares…an FM radio. And we, in addition to our combat gear – helmets, flak-jackets and what-not – we had .38-caliber pistols. I usually carried one. A lot of times different folks didn't want to carry them…

The boats were manned by two officers and one enlisted person. Officers because officers were briefed daily. We had daily intelligence briefings seven days a week, with the latest intelligence from the area. Or in the patrolling boat – officers would come back and debrief their area. So, the officers had a good feel for everything that was going in our area of operation and our sectors.

The enlisted person operated the motor. Now, this was my idea. And I went on each one of these – in command of each one that we did up to and including the night with Lieutenant Junior Grade Kerry.

I did that because it was my idea and people volunteered for this. And I didn't think it was right having one of these operations and being on a swift boat or back at Operations Center or something like that.

Myers: Because you thought it was a dangerous operation?

Schachte: Yes, and I had to be a part of it. It was my idea. The night in question, we-- as always, the swift boat would tow the skimmer out to the designated area. And we would board the skimmer. This night our call sign was ‘Batman.’ I got into the boat. My weapon was forward – the M-60 machine gun. John got in the boat. I don't remember who the enlisted person was. We then proceeded to the designated area. The swift boat would stay off, sometimes out of sight, sometimes not. But far enough away that they could ride shotgun on the mission.

Providing, also, long-ranged communications. All we had was this FM radio. We would then go into an area and as we did this night, shut the motor down and just drift. And we would drift along the shoreline or river bank or whatever it happened to be – looking for movement, or listening for sounds of movement. This night, we were in an area – I recall we were so close to the beach you could actually hear the water lapping on the shoreline. It was between two and three in the morning – I don't remember. I detected what I thought was some movement. So, I took one of the hand-held flares and popped it instantly. It went up and when it burst – I don't know if you've heard that described, but it really lights up the area. I thought I saw the same area of movement. So, I opened up on it with my M-60.

Those guns were double loaded with tracers – Tango India, target identification. And John, right after I opened up, opened up with his M-16 and I could see he was firing in the direction of my tracer fire, which is why we had the double-loaded tracer. My gun jammed after the first burst and as I was trying to clear my weapon – John's gun apparently jammed too because he wouldn't fire anymore – I heard the old familiar, ‘thump’ – ‘POW!’. And I looked, and John had fired the M-79 grenade launcher.

We were receiving NO fire from the beach. There were no muzzle flashes. The water wasn't boiling around the boat as it were – and the only noise was the noise we were making. So, I told the boat operator – the motor operator – to, you know, ‘let's leave the area.’ And we did, went back to port, eventually – went back to the swift boat and went back to port. And that morning, I went in and debriefed my commanding officer – our division commander, then Lieutenant Commander [Grant] ‘Skip’ Hibbard.

And I told him what happened. And I told him I was NOT going to be filing an after-action report, which is required if you have enemy action, because we had no enemy action. And I also after giving him all the details and I said, ‘Oh, by the way – ’ and I don't remember my exact words – ‘John nicked himself with the M-79.’ Those M-79s, by the way, have a kill radius of about five meters. A little over five yards. But, there is a shrapnel area beyond that. And that's what happened. And I was upset because that could have gone in somebody's eye and so on and so forth.

The division commander said, ‘Fine, understand – no after-action report required.’ Then, I found out that John had come in. And then I went back into a meeting and he had this small piece of shrapnel in his hand and he was requesting a Purple Heart. I was opposed to that. The division commander was opposed to that.

And John left our division four or five days later. I departed country maybe three weeks later. Skip left a few days after I left. So, we were all gone. And I forgot about it. Until some years later, someone told me – and I don't recall who – to my surprise, John had been awarded a Purple Heart for that incident.

Fine, I felt I did my duty that night and that morning and it didn't bother me. And that's the way things were until about 20 years or so later. I was then an Admiral and I was in uniform – didn't have my hat on; I'd left that someplace in an office I was visiting. I was in the basement of the Senate Russell Office Building. And you have this subway system in the Capitol. I was waiting for a subway with a friend.

And he pointed – ‘Look, that's Senator Kerry over there.’ And I said, ‘I know him.’ And he said, ‘You do?’ And I hadn't seen or talked with John since Vietnam. And I guess I embarrassed my friend because I said, ‘Hey, John!’ Just like that. Well, he turned around, looked at me – it's about 20 paces away – and he kind of strolled over to me. And that call sign that night, if I haven't mentioned it, was ‘Batman.’ I think I have. But, John walked over to me and got kind of close and he said, ‘Batman.’ And I was really impressed that he had that degree of recall. And, of course, we exchanged pleasantries. And we were going to do lunch. And, of course, we never did. And that was the last time I've seen him in person or been with him. And that went on. I retired – so on and so forth. And this March, I got a phone call from one of my swift boat colleagues, ‘have you seen Tour of Duty?’ [the book,Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, by Douglas Brinkley (William Morrow, 2004)]

And I said, ‘No, I certainly haven't.’ …And he said, ‘Well, let me at least fax you these pages about an incident that we all you know you got personal information on and so on and so forth.’ So, I said, ‘Fine.’ And he did. And I looked at that fax and read his account – and I was astonished. I'm not in the boat. The sampan issue and people and he's firing the hand-held grenade and so on and so forth. [note: the account of the incident attributed to Kerry in Brinkley’s book describes the mission encountering people in sampan vessels; Schachte recalls seeing no people or vessels]

One other point: John was new in-country. He'd never been in a firefight. We never would – anybody with any combat experience will tell you – you would never assign somebody like that to an ambush mission like this, endangering, you know, other people if you didn't have some degree of experience.

We always had two officers in the boat.

No after-action report – no fire received and so and so forth. Well, I thank my friend for sending me that information. But, I told him, ‘Look, I'm not going to get involved in this.’ You know, and I've heard from them and different people that they had a number of eyewitness reports on different things. And I just didn't want to expose my family to all of that. And I kind of maintained that posture – I'm not a member of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth…

Myers: …are you saying that John Kerry accidentally injured himself?

Schachte: Yes. Clear-- of course, it was an accident.

Myers: That there was no enemy fire?

Schachte: There was no enemy fire – no after- action report, no muzzle flashes – nothing. No return fire from the beach at all.

Myers: So, in your view, he did not deserve the Purple Heart?

Schachte: That's what I told my commanding officer at the time.

Myers: And your commanding officer felt what?

Schachte: He agreed with me, after I related the story.

Myers: So, if you didn't support a Purple Heart and your commanding officer did not put in Kerry for a Purple Heart, how did he get it?

Schachte: You'll have to ask him. I don't know. And after– like I say, I had done my duty. It was over. I didn't care. I mean, that was not my issue. I was doing other things with my life.

Myers: Here's how John Kerry has described what happened that night. Quote: ‘My M-16 jammed and as I bent down in the boat to grab another gun, a stinging piece of heat socked into my arm.’ Is that accurate?

Schachte: It's accurate that his gun jammed, but it's not accurate (LAUGHS) that he was reaching something. He had already fired the M-79.

Myers: And that's what injured him?

Schachte: Yes.

Myers: It was an accidentally, self-inflicted wound?

Schachte: Yes, right. Which could have been very dangerous to any of the other two of us in that boat.

Myers: If you both were firing weapons, how can you be absolutely certain that there was no enemy fire that hit John Kerry that night?

Schachte: Because when both guns jammed after the first burst, there was this moment of eerie silence until I heard the M-79 go off and the subsequent – almost immediate explosion from that weapon. And if you were there, (LAUGHS) you would know if you're being shot at, believe me.

Myers: …So what happens when you all return from the mission?

Schachte: We went back. I reported to the division commander. I debriefed him on what had happened that evening, earlier that morning. And that I was not going to file an after-action report because there was no enemy action. We received no fire from the beach and that John had gotten nicked from a round at – I don't remember my exact words. But, John had gotten nicked from an M-79 that he fired too close to the boat.

Myers: And there was no enemy fire involved?

Schachte: None.

Myers: Period?

Schachte: Yes.

Myers: You're absolutely certain?

Schachte: Yes.

Myers: 36 years later?

Schachte: Hey, listen, when somebody's shooting at you [LAUGHS], you know it. There was no – and some of the reasons you remember these things is because the starkness of what happens while that's going on…

Myers: You seem to be saying that John Kerry lied then and is lying today. That's a very serious charge. What proof do you have?

Schachte: The only thing that I can tell you – several things – number one, no after-action report, which would have been required. I was in command of those missions and I was in the boat that night. We always had two officers in the boat that night-- in the boat when we did those operations, and an enlisted man on the motor. I saw no muzzle flashes or anything else. Now, that's what I saw. And it's not for me to judge what other people are going to think about that. That's up to other people.

Myers: But, you are, in a sense, saying Senator Kerry is lying and did not deserve his first Purple [Heart].

Schachte: I'm saying that he did not deserve the first Purple Heart from what I saw. You can characterize it anyway you want. But, I'm not going to say that.

Myers: Do you believe that John Kerry served honorably in Vietnam?

Schachte: Listen, everybody in that combat environment, as I said earlier, were all volunteers. I was only with him for this very small piece of that truncated tour that he had. I can only speak to what I saw that night and what-not. You have to ask others that spent more time with him. I couldn't give a judgment on something like that.

Myers: But, based on what you saw, do you believe John Kerry served honorably?

Schachte: From that night, from that incident, I would say that John Kerry sought a Purple Heart that was turned down that he later got. How he got it -- I don't have a clue….

Myers: Do you believe that John Kerry showed courage?

Schachte: Listen, anybody on any of those boats at any time – I was there, we were there for Tet [1968 Tet Offensive by North Vietnam and Vietcong forces], and further times – you don't-- you don't show up on the boat if-- unless you've got a little bit of that in you.

Myers: Courage?

Schachte: Yes.

Myers: So, you're not saying that John Kerry was not courageous?

Schachte: No.

Myers: Or that he did not serve honorably?

Schachte: I can't judge that. All I can tell you about is that very brief period that I was with him on.

Myers: You say…that John Kerry was so new to country, there's no way you could have sent him out on a mission by himself?

Schachte: Yeah, not alone – in charge – no, uh-uh [negative].

Myers: Can you remember the name of the enlisted man that was with him?

Schachte: No. I really can't.

Myers: But, you're absolutely certain that John Kerry would not have been -- never have been sent off in–

Schachte: Listen, my boss would not have permitted that and neither would the chain of command. You just don't DO that on a mission on an ambush operation like this that's, um, dangerous, that dangerous. It's not fair to the person to put him in that situation. And it's not a situation of absolute necessity. We were just trying to turn the heat up. And that's why we sought volunteers. And that's why I went as a volunteer myself on these missions.

Myers: And John Kerry volunteered for that mission?

Schachte: Yep.

Myers: …What proof do you have that you were actually in that boat that night?

Schachte: Well, my report back to the division commander, the fact that we had officers in those boats, the fact that I was in the boat for those that we did up to and including that evening. And what I saw.

Myers: But, there's no documentation.

Schachte: No, listen, we're in a wartime environment. We didn't write up doctrines and stuff. We made the necessary reports – if you had a Casualty Report, After-Action Report, Operational Status of the Boats [Report], whether they were combat ready or not. I was responsible for all that as the operations officer. But, those are the kinds of things that we kept record of, records of.

Myers: And there would not have been any damage report on that...

Schachte: Correct, there was none-- yeah.

Myers: The thing a lot of people are going to be asking Admiral is, it's been 35 years--

Schachte: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

Myers: Why speak out now in the heat of a presidential campaign?

Schachte: Well, the timing is something that's driven by the publication of Tour of Duty. As far as the timing is concerned, that was the precipitating thing that got those of us who were eyewitnesses, who served with John Kerry in Vietnam – made us aware of-- of what he was saying. I was not interviewed by anybody for that book. Nor do I know anybody of my colleagues that were interviewed.

I'm non-partisan. Listen, I have voted Democrat, Republican. I voted for President Clinton the first time he ran. And I know what you're talking about. That has nothing to do-- this is not a partisan issue. This is an issue of people stepping forward to tell their facts as they saw them.

Myers: John Kerry and two enlisted men insist they were on the boat that night and you were not. Why should we believe you?

Schachte: …there are two officers on each boat, each time we did one of these missions. I reported to the division command. I think he [then-Lt. Cmdr. Grant Hibbard, Coastal Division 14] has been public with a sworn affidavit [released by the organization Swift Boat Veterans for Truth] as to my coming in to him and telling him what happened…

Myers: You think the two enlisted men are just making it up?

Schachte: I don’t-- I can't tell you anything about their motives. The only thing I can tell you is what I know, who I talked to about it – after the incident and-- and that's all I can say…

Myers: Admiral, how can you be certain that John Kerry did not deserve that first Purple Heart?

Schachte: Well, other than the fact that I was in the boat with him when he fired this M-79 round too close to the boat and got nicked by it, I can't give you much more than that…

Myers: Can you think of anyone else who would recall your presence in the skimmer that day?

Schachte: Well, there are several people that may know the answer to that, and some of which have-- one in particular has requested not to be involved. And I certainly honored that. Maybe someone who was in-- the place where we-- we stayed – after the incident. I think I said something to a couple of the guys, and they may have been able to remember the remark.

Myers: You said you went on, as I recall, that you went on nine different missions.

Schachte: Thereabouts. I'm not sure the number.

Myers: In this skimmer?

Schachte: Yeah, yeah.

Myers: Do you recall roughly where John Kerry's mission was in the sequence?

Schachte: It was the last one I went on. It was the last one I went on.

Myers: All right. And he went on only one.

Schachte: Yes. And then he departed about four days later to go South…

Myers: Why would John Kerry say that you weren't in the boat if you were?

Schachte: You'll have to ask John.

Myers: Can you think of a motive?

Schachte: Uh, I'll let you speculate. I'm not going to.

Myers: Is it possible in your view that John Kerry simply forgot that you were there?

Schachte: It could've been. I know he had vivid recollection of our call sign that night. It was repeated to me over 20 years later. But of course, that's possible.

Myers: …Everyone is going to wonder why now? Why come forward in the closing weeks of a presidential campaign. What is your motive?

Schachte: My only motive, as is the motive as I understand it of those brave eyewitness – witnesses that have come forward with sworn affidavits and what not – is to tell the truth. The timing was not in my control. The publication of his book and then the way he made this such an issue out of this whole campaign, his Vietnam service, and then some recent media discussions of all of those areas of his service that have been the matter of debate, my name has surfaced. And I just felt that it wasn't fair for me to continue to not – what I finally determined to be – to not do my duty, and just step forward, and say what I knew of that night, and not watch my colleagues continue to get beat up about he wasn't there, and a lot of other things that I'm not even going to mention. In the print and the TV media.

Myers: …So you're not calling John Kerry a liar?

Schachte: All I'm telling you is what I know happened that night and who I told about it and what- not… I'm not into name-calling. I just want to tell you what I knew that happened that night.

Myers: In your mind, John Kerry showed courage just going out on the mission.

Schachte: Sure.

Myers: You mentioned that you don't have a political motive. What have you done politically since you've been out of-- retired from the Navy?…

Schachte: Yeah, well, I guess the first thing I did when I retired – I was working for the Mayor of Charleston who was running for Governor. He's a Democrat. And I was his statewide get-out-the-vote coordinator for that election. Unfortunately, we lost in the primary or in the primary runoff. I have contributed to Democratic Senators, one in particular from my own state. And have voted Democrat or Republican, depending on the person and the issues. I don't consider myself a partisan person. And I really haven't had any active involvement in politics other than that time when I was helping the person running for Governor in South Carolina in 1994.

Myers: What about President Bush?

Schachte: …First of all, let me tell you, I went to a number of rallies for Senator McCain, my wife and I. In fact, at the request of a long-time personal friend, I helped sponsor a luncheon for Senator McCain and made a financial contribution that went along with sponsorship. I did not go to the luncheon. And we were -- I was discussing these matters with my wife. And finally decided that I-- I was going to fully support George Bush. And before the election I got a call from a fellow general officer asking me if I was supporting Bush. And I said, "Yes, I was." And that I had contributed financially.

And he said they were going to put together a letter entitled ‘Veterans for Bush.’ And I said, ‘I'll be glad to sign that letter, but only if I can edit it.’ And of course, they agreed to that. And – that was really the extent of my active involvement with President Bush in the primary campaign.

Myers: You said you have contributed to him since you retired from the Navy?

Schachte: Yes, I have.

Myers: How much total?

Schachte: Total, I don't know. I gave him $1,000 when he ran the first time. And $1,000 so far this year.

Myers: Have you had any relationship or any contact with his campaign?

Schachte: Oh, absolutely not. I don't know that I know anybody in his campaign. And that, by the way, that's one thing that is really -- it's difficult to get beyond those accusations that we're somehow puppets for this campaign. I mean that really strikes at the heart of your own personal honor. I mean I can't speak for others. And I've tried to keep that -- or I shouldn't have said anything now. But -- yeah, I know where you're going with that. But that answer's absolutely not.

Myers: So you're not doing this to help President Bush?

Schachte: For Lord's sake, no. Would I invite what's going to happen? (LAUGHS) I mean, I-- no. Absolutely not.

Myers: …you've been around this town. I mean, why risk tarnishing your own reputation by wading into this morass?

Schachte: It is a matter of personal honor. I'm sorry. There are times in life when you have to do what you know is right regardless of the personal consequences.

Myers: You told me before that one of the reasons you wanted to-- decided to speak out…is [because of] some of the things that were being said about you by the Kerry people on television…

Schachte: Well, that was the thing that pushed me over the side. But I'd rather not get involved in those specifics. I mean that in a sense is history. And I realize that I had to do my duty. I had to step up and be heard. Only on the only thing that I can talk about – which was this experience.

Myers: So you're not saying that John Kerry was, quote, ‘unfit for command?’

Schachte: Listen, who is fit for command in the context of Commander-in-Chief is up to the American people to decide…

Myers: You said you are not a member of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Schachte: I admire them, but I'm not a member.

Myers: Okay. But you do support their cause.

Schachte: I support men that are willing to stand up and put up with what they've been putting up with just to tell the truth – of what they know to be the truth. And this is America. I mean that's what we do here.

Myers: Do you worry that your own reputation could be tarnished by getting involved in this?

Schachte: Oh, of course. Absolutely. And I knew that consequence was looking me dead in the face. But I also knew that it's not a higher calling. But there are times in life when you have to do what you know is right regardless of the personal consequences. And it's-- it's not easy. And the reason I stayed out of this from the beginning is because I didn't want to get wrapped up into whatever kind of frenzy was going to follow. But I also knew that there were people who knew from what I told them of what happened that night. And I thought that would take care of it…

Myers: Some people will say, ‘Look, you contributed money to the President's campaign.’

Schachte: Yeah.

Myers: Here it is the closing weeks of a very tight election. That this is all about politics.

Schachte: Well, see that's-- that's the probably the worst thing you could say to me. That I'm some kind of a political operative. That I would throw my reputation to the wolves to stand up for something that – as the inference is – is not true and expose my family to everything… I wouldn't do that. And I don't think anybody would do that.


[i]pulling an older one into the archives
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one of..... We The People

[kate]

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12920
Colonel George "Bud" Day
A Hero Speaks

By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 29, 2005

August 26, 1967, Air Force Major (later Colonel) George "Bud" Day was hit in his F-100 just north of the DMZ. During ejection he smashed one knee and broke his right arm in three places. The North Vietnamese were waiting for his parachute. Taken prisoner, he was given a novocaine shot and put in a primitive and painful cast on his arm. Day was bound at the ankles and carried to a small underground bunker. After dark, he managed to untie the ropes and crawled out of the bunker and began moving South. This began one of the remarkable sagas of the Vietnam war. For almost two weeks, Day traveled by night and hid during the day to conserve his strength and avoid capture. He ate frogs and berries to keep going. Hallucinating and barely able to move his legs, he came to a knoll and looked down at a U.S. Army unit less than a mile away. As he started to move toward it, a North Vietnamese soldier came up behind him and shouted at him to stop. Day made a run for it and heard rifle shots, then went down, hit in the hand and thigh.

This time there was no escape. He was trussed up and taken on a forced march north, tied to trees some nights by his damaged arm and interrogated. When asked who his fellow flyers were, he gave names such as Charles Lindbergh and Billy Mitchell. Arriving at the Hanoi Hilton, Day became the cornerstone of the U.S. prisoners' resistance. As with the other POWs, Day was tortured constantly, suspended by his arms and whipped. His broken arm healed improperly. He was denied treatment for the hand in which he had been shot; every day he pressed his fingers against the wall of his cell and pushed to keep the muscles from contracting into a claw.

Day took the under remitting torture and kept offering maximum resistance. John McCain has credited Day with saving his life in the prison and has called him the bravest man he ever met. This is a sentiment shared by many of the other POWs who have made Bud Day a legendary figure in the years since they came out of captivity.

Bud Day is the most highly decorated military officer since Gen Douglas MacArthur. He holds some seventy decorations and awards, including every significant combat award. Along with his cellmate James Stockdale, he received the Medal of Honor from President Gerald Ford in 1976.

We are honored to have this American hero join Frontpage Interview today.


FP: Mr. Day, welcome to Frontpage, it is a great honor for me to speak with you.


Day: Good day. I appreciate a chance to speak with you.


FP: Why don't we begin with your youth. How did you get into the military?


Day: I was a 16 year old junior in high school when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. I was ready to join the military right then, but could not until after my birthday in February 1942. My parents refused to give their consent for me to enlist in the Marine Corps until I finally wore them down. I dropped out of high school only one month before graduation and joined the Corps. I got a direct commission between WW II and Korea, and was called up into the Air Force in 1950, went to jet pilot training, became a jet fighter pilot and volunteered for Vietnam as a fighter pilot in the F-100 aircraft.


FP: What drove you in your desire to become a Marine and a fighter pilot? Many people would want to avoid putting their lives in danger. What is it you think that drove your passion? What influenced you?


Day: I admired Charles Lindberg very much from the time that I was a very small boy. My admiration for airmen increased enormously with WW II, and Jimmy Doolittle's bombing of Japan. The Flying Tigers were most admirable men, so I was drawn to flying.

What caused me to join the Marine Corps in 1942 was the attack on Pearl Harbor. I was 17, and within a few days of graduating from high school in Dec 1942, when the U.S. announced that they were going to draft 18 year olds. I was too naive to understand that such a thing could not occur in a matter of days, so I badgered my parents into signing my papers. I could not consider the idea of being forced to serve my country. I was going to do it right, and volunteer. I did.

When I left the military in 1945, I had 4 years of GI bill, so I got a B.S. and a law degree in 47 calendar months. During college I got a direct appointment as a 2d Lt from enlisted status and volunteered for Korea. I went to flying school as I preferred to serve as a pilot and became an early jet fighter pilot. It is the most exciting job in the world. You make more life and death decisions in an hour and a half flight than some people make in ten years. Most satisfying.

I liked the military. You get more authority as a corporal in the USMC in a couple of years, than many get in a life time. You learn to follow, then learn to lead. Leading men in combat is the ultimate of satisfying jobs.


FP: Let’s move on to your Vietnam experience. What were the circumstances under which you were captured? You also almost escaped right afterwards, can you relate that story to us?


Day: I was shot down striking a missile site in North Vietnam by ground fire on August 26, 1967. I had to eject, was severely injured in the bail-out, and was immediately captured.

My right arm was broken in three places, my knee was injured, and I was temporarily blinded in one eye. I convinced my captors that I could not move because of my injuries, and was able to escape after a few days of abuse, including a threatened execution, hanging by the feet for an entire day, and some physical beatings.

I then navigated about 45 miles through the jungle to within a mile of the USMC base at Con Tien in South Vietnam. I walked into an ambush. They called to me to surrender. I took off running. They shot me in the leg and hand, and recaptured me.


FP: This is simply an incredible story. Why did they threaten execution if they did not go through with it? Was this part of the psychological torture?

Tell us about the inner emotional journey one goes through, or that you went through, upon being captured.

Also, when you say you “navigated” through 45 miles of jungle, what do you mean? How did you do this?


Day: The mock execution was intimidation. They wanted to see if just threatening me would get an answer. Some people would answer. I think it was a common ploy.

My assumption was that if they had authority to kill me on the spot, they would have already done it. So I had to call their bluff.

Getting captured, and as I was, recaptured -- is a dismal thing. I was within a few minutes of freedom when this Viet Cong soldier popped out of a hole and yelled at me. When I figured out that he was a North VN, I decided that I had not come this far to surrender, so I took off running. Someone of them shot me in the leg and hand, and after I got into the jungle, they found me and I was recaptured. A horrible let down. I knew how close I was, and how much I wanted to be free. It was clear that if I did not die from infection, that I would wind up in the Hanoi jail. I have never felt more let down.

Navigating means that you have to know where you are going and the approximate heading across the ground to get there. For example: a heading of 180 is due South. I knew that from where I was to the Marine Corps base at Con Tien, SVN, that I was going to have to stay on a rough course of about 200 degrees. You can look at the sun in the AM, and know where South is then you adjust. You continue to do this as you walk. In the jungle. You cannot see the sun so you have to then follow the trails going South and sort it out when you see the sun again.

My navigation was quite perfect considering all of the detours that I had to make. As a pilot, you are navigating every minute of a flight so I had literally thousands of hours of navigating and with my Marine Corps experience it wasn't the first time I had ever been on the ground or a jungle.


FP: I apologize for asking this, but what were some of the ways the North Vietnamese tortured you and other prisoners?


Day: Physical beating with their hands and fists, with short sticks, roped arms behind the back and cinched up to pull the arms out of the socket, leg irons, fan belt beatings, kneeling torture, 16 hour per day propaganda from anti-war types in U.S., Russian classical music between propaganda blasts, untreated fractures, no protein, weight loss of about 35-40%, no mail or packages from home for three years, frequent threats of execution and non-release from jail.

Unless we made propaganda for the Communists, propaganda made by Senators Fulbright, Kennedy, and Greuning, who were volunteering anti-war statements that we were being tortured for. Visits by Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, Dave Dellinger and other people whom I considered to be traitors.


FP: How did you endure the tortures physically and psychologically? What resources did you have to access inside of yourself to survive this horror?


Day: I didn't endure the torture very well. When they hung me, they wiped out both of my hands, and I lost quite a bit of the use of my arms. They also re-broke my right wrist, and I was quite dysfunctional most of my POW experience, as I was trying to do self rehab, by scraping my fingers on the wall to straighten out my fingers which had curled up into a ball. My right wrist remained broken until John McCain splinted it in about December 1967-Jan 68.

Mentally, I grew to hate them. The torture was so stupid, and only for intimidation after a while. I did a lot of praying, and I continued to tell myself that I was going to live, that I was going to keep my honor, and that I would never surrender. It is great to have God, a family, and the U.S. as a country. When you have that, you can hang on in a lot of adverse circumstances, and know that you will make it. G. Gordon Liddy calls it "will". I had it.


FP: There is one story about you that you sang the American anthem in the face of great danger during your imprisonment. What happened?


Day: After the Son Tay raid by U.S. forces in 1970, the Commies moved us into large rooms containing about 45 prisoners. We were overjoyed to have roommates, as many had been in solitary for 48-52 months. After a few days together, we decided that we were going to have a church service. This would consist of a couple of hymns by 4-5 people who could sing, a short sermon by Col. Robinson Risner, a recitation of some bible verses by a couple of our members, concluding with another hymn. We explained to the Commies what we had in mind on the day before. They advised that this would not happen, and if we persisted, there would be dire consequences -- meaning torture.

We started the church service, and the guards went a bit berserk, ordered us to stop, pointed guns into the room, and issued more orders to stop. We did not stop. They then entered with weapons and ordered everyone involved in the singing or speaking, out of the room, and as they were marched out, I stood up on the cement bed and started singing the Star Spangled Banner. The next room then joined in, and soon every room in the camp was singing. We then sang God Bless America, every song that anyone could remember the words to, and continued to sing for about an hour.

The Commie leadership went berserk, put some people back in leg irons, and solitary and sent me and several "black criminals" out to a crummy camp called Skid Row, where we stayed for several months in small cells. More solitary.

Just before we got exiled to Skid Row, the senior commie came up on the radio and stated that it was always the policy of the Commies to let people enjoy religious expression. The reason for that was that they knew that there was going to be a church service again on the next Sunday and there was. We had a church service every Sunday from that time until we were released in the spring of 1973 -- some two years. They never interfered with church service again.


FP: What do you think caused your victory?


Day: Singing the Star Spangled Banner. That was the right reaction to their removing our church participants out of the room. There had to be a protest against this, but it had to be non-violent. I was sure that all of the other rooms in the camp would pick up on it, and they did. We sang for hours and hours. I was sure in my gut that we would not get shot for this and I was right, but we had to slam the message home that if they were going to deny us church services, that they were going to have to start the torture all over.

They did not fully crank it up, but went back to a few people in irons, a couple of pretty hard beatings with the fan belt, some solitary for a few of us, but it was clear that we had won the battle and had the moral highground.


FP: What do you think your guards were most afraid of?


Day: Overall, the North Vietnamese were terrified that we were going to revolt and have an uprising. They were extremely paranoid as all Communists are, and existed only with high support from the Iron Curtain countries, and China. They always claimed the moral high ground, claiming that little old North Vietnam was just defending itself against the American oppressor, even though they invaded South Vietnam.

Thus, they had to let us out of solitary into big rooms, but they had no idea how to treat us after they had been keeping order by beating us, roping us, and torturing us. They had no idea how disciplined we were, and that we (I) knew that a revolt would cost us a bunch of lives, and that we (I) was not stupid enough to permit a revolt for no reason.

Their initial take on the "church service" was that it was the start of a revolt. After we had done it a few times, they got the picture that it was not threatening to them and while they hated church, they left us alone.


FP: Let’s go back for a second. When you first sang the Star Spangled Banner in the face of possible torture, what did it mean to you?


Day: It was another facet of combat. Things happen. Someone has to act. It happened. I had to do it. No one else was moving or acting, something had to be done. I did it. It was the first time that an American voice had been heard over the walls of the camp. Obviously they lost much face. A big mistake. A small, but important victory for us.


FP: It appears the North Vietnamese were at some stages very confused about what to do with you. Can you talk about that?


Day: Yes, the North Vietnamese were simply at a loss as to how to manage us after torture had been terminated as a national policy. For years, we were tortured frequently and methodically because Ho Chi Minh was alive, and he wanted us to suffer. We were white men. We needed to suffer. This brought about an escape, where one of the escapers got murdered. They responded to the escape by torturing all of the senior leaders, including me.

Ho died.

Some Americans got released and told all the world about how we had been brutalized and tortured. The North Vietnamese had a lot of respect for world opinion as they could not keep the war going in the South, without support from the Communist countries. Thus, following Ho's death, the new government eased off on the brutal torture, and improved our conditions immensely, just by stopping the physical brutality.

Most prisoners were 30-50 pounds underweight. The food improved slightly, and we received an additional blanket, some socks, and were able to resist the cold temperatures much better.

But because Communists were so paranoid, they could not get used to the idea that if they put us together in big rooms that they would have to correspondingly treat us differently.


FP: If you met Jane Fonda one-on-one today, what would this meeting entail?


Day: Jane Fonda is the 20th Century's most famous traitor. I have offered to debate her, but she lacks the courage. She had an opportunity to debate me when I was at a White House Correspondent's event, and she and her husband were in the next room. One of the correspondents suggested a debate, since we were so close. She refused, even though she called me a liar when I told CBS, NBC, ABC and the networks that I had been brutalized and tortured at a press conference that was held a few hours after the "LAST" POW came out of Hanoi.

She claimed that anyone who claimed torture was a liar. I had many marks on my back from beatings with the fan belt, kneeling scars on my knees, ankle scars from the irons, and crippled arms and hands. I showed some of them to the press. Her claim was no torture.

My take on this kook is that the father who rejected her, and the husbands who "dumped" her, had it just right. They knew what an empty bag that she was -- just a little piece of trash.

There wouldn't be much for us to talk about except about her treasonous acts against American G.I.s and she doesn't want to talk about that. The picture of her grinning and hamming it up on a North V anti-aircraft weapon really explains her better than anything else. Who wants to get famous as the greatest traitor of the 20th century? She will do anything for publicity. Her latest: an anti-war bus running on cooking oil. It figures.


FP: The thought of what you experienced and your bravery, juxtaposed with Jane Fonda and, of course, with the Tom Haydens and Jerry Rubins etc., is quite a picture. What do you think of the anti-war types back then? How about the anti-war characters today? Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan etc? What is their psychology? And how is it that people like Hayden and Fonda know perfectly well that their behaviour and activism facilitated a bloodbath in Southeast Asia and yet they have learned absolutely nothing and today support an American withdrawal from Iraq, knowing full well that yet another bloodbath will follow? What is in their hearts and minds?


Day: Fonda, Hayden, Rubin. I initially thought that they were just a bunch of dopers high on marijuana, and entranced with the idea that they were helping the cause of peace and keeping themselves out of combat.

As the war went along into the late 60s and early 70s, I began to understand that they were revolutionaries who thought they were going to overthrow the government. I couldn't really grasp how people who lived so well under capitalism could possibly believe that Communism was a good thing, because there was not a single thing in communist history that showed it to be a good system. Everything about it was, and is, evil.

So as I began to weigh their motivation, I began to understand that they were communists who wanted the North Vietnamese to win, for capitalism to be overthrown by communists, and for them to seize power.

Stupid and incompetent as they were, these nut cases thought that they could take power in the U.S.A. It demonstrates how disconnected from reality their brains were and are.

This is no joke, however. There is still a deep streak of this same nutty anti-war mentality in the Democratic Party today. Former Governor Paul Dean, John Kerry, John Podesta, much of that body of Kerry supporters are part and parcel of the old hippie anti-war crazies and they still do not understand that the U.S. does not want to surrender to someone.

There is a lot of the radical Left in the Democratic Party’s approach to national politics. Michael Moore's outrageous movie is their daily bread. To understand Michael Moore is to look at him. Scruffy whiskers, dirty ball cap, crummy appearance, obese. To sort him out, just take one look at him and you can instantly draw the obvious conclusion.

The leftie crowd have some common traits. They love the easy life in the U.S., easy money, none of them ever had a demanding job; they have little respect for the working class; they hate conservatives, patriots, capitalists, and the military.

The anti-war types want us to lose in Iraq. Once again, as they did in Vietnam, they want the enemy to win.


FP; What advice do you have for Bush and his administration in our terror war today?


Day: We have to do what Ronald Reagan said and did: "Stay the course."

Read the remarks of former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. He says that we will know when Iraq can defend itself. When that time comes, we can start a draw down, and we must start a draw down. But not a day before the Iraqis can fight for themselves.

We have to challenge the Saudis to get with us and support us and the Iraqis. We need to do all we can to get major Muslim imams and religious leaders to condemn the terrorist and senseless murder of fellow Arabs and Muslims -- and to do so with high volume, and high frequency.

The Bush strategy and tactics have worked wonders. After 9/11, the monstrous Taliban were overthrown and expelled from Afghanistan. The Afghanis have voted in a government for the first time in anyone's memory. It isn't perfect, but the Afghan women believe that they have died and gone to heaven. They have some freedom finally. Young girls can go to school and have some dignity.

Saddam is in jail. Elections in Iraq have been held, despite the terror. More elections are coming. Iraqis are free for the first time in history, and choosing a government. Syria has departed Lebanon. Khadafi is out of the terror business. Could all of this really have happened without the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq?

The bottom line is that people will choose freedom and capitalism whenever they are given the free choice.

We have to stay the course.


FP: Bud Day, it was a great honor to speak with you. You are a true American hero. Thank you for joining us today.


Day: Thank you Jamie.
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