SwiftVets.com

[kate]

Fast Forward to Kerry's 1996 reelection campaign, (challenger Gov. William F. Weld)
These articles follow below. Kerry's war record was an issue in that election, as it was in the most recent one.


A BAN ON NEGATIVE ADS, SEN. KERRY? WHY WAIT?
Boston Globe
December 12, 1995

Kerry has war stories, and Weld feels the pain
Boston Herald
January 22, 1996

BADGES OF COURAGE FIGURED IN ADMIRAL'S LIFE FALSE BATTLE CLAIMS CALLED A VIOLATION OF HONOR
Boston Globe
May 18, 1996

THE MAKING OF THE CANDIDATES
JOHN FORBES KERRY OFTEN TAGGED AS A POLITICAL OPPORTUNIST --
Boston Globe
October 6, 1996

THE WAR HERO
Boston Globe
October 22, 1996

BEHIND THE HOOTCH
Boston Globe
October 27, 1996

KERRY DEFENDS WAR RECORD
Worcester Telegram & Gazette (MA)
October 28, 1996
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one of..... We The People

[kate]

A BAN ON NEGATIVE ADS, SEN. KERRY? WHY WAIT?
Boston Globe
December 12, 1995
Author: Jeff Jacoby, Globe Staff

John Kerry will never agree to the $5 million spending cap Bill Weld proposes for their US Senate race. Big deal. Weld's not about to accede to Kerry's demand that all negative advertising be banned from the campaign. Ho- hum. Except for a clutch of Common Cause-type goo-goos and media thumb-suckers, who really gives a wet slap whether Weld and Kerry pour a combined $10 million into their race, or $12 million, or $15 million? Politics is expensive. You want to win a statewide election, you burn a lot of dollars -- what else is new? As long as these guys aren't spending taxpayers' money, I don't care how high their campaign budgets go.

Nor, with one caveat, do I care how negative their advertising gets. In fact, to be shamelessly candid about it, I rather enjoy negative ads. The best ones are clever and entertaining. They're more attention-grabbing than talking-head commercials, or those tiresome spots in which the candidate listens intently to some senior citizens, then strides purposefully down a corridor. And unlike football, boxing or auto racing, nobody bleeds, breaks a bone, gets knocked unconscious or crashes into a wall. Well, not literally.

The caveat is that even biting political ads must be truthful -- or at least defensible. A little exaggeration is forgivable, but candidates who lie about their opponents should be exposed and condemned. As in other contact sports, there ought to be penalties for players who cross the line from pugnacious competition to personal fouls.

But hey, that's only my view. If the junior senator from Massachusetts and his campaign swamis consider negative advertising to be -- as Kerry put it last week -- "kind of like pornography," they should refuse to indulge in it. Unilaterally. Just as Kerry long ago resolved not to accept PAC contributions, he can announce that regardless of what any other candidate may do, he will not stoop to defamatory campaigning. I assume, of course, that Kerry's call to forswear "pornographic" politics is the sincere exhortation of a leader, not merely the sly campaign tactic of an embattled incumbent.

But perhaps I assume too much.

In his last reelection contest, six years ago, Kerry was challenged by Republican businessman James Rappaport. I'm looking at a full-page newspaper ad published by Kerry's campaign eight days before the 1990 election. In gigantic, 70-point type, 23 words leap off the page:

"JAMES RAPPAPORT: SLIMEBALL. SLEAZE. STUPID. A JOKE. CHEAP SHOT. EMBARRASSING. TRASH. INSULTING. RUBBISH. SMEARS. KNUCKLEHEAD SMIFF. HALF- TRUTHS. GUTLESS. UGLY. HYPOCRISY. DISTORTION. SLANDER."

Is this what Kerry has in mind when he likens negative ads to pornography? When he urges Gov. Weld to steer clear of a "hatchet-job, blood-in-the-yard, negative campaign," is he referring to campaigns like the one he mounted to blacken Rappaport's name? If so -- if Kerry now repents for what he did six years ago to Rappaport -- maybe he should say so. Maybe he should even extend a belated apology.

One of the crosses Kerry bears is a reputation for being two-faced. The business with the medals illustrates why. When it served his purposes to be seen throwing away his combat medals in an antiwar demonstration, he pretended to do so ("John Kerry of Waltham . . . said before he threw his medals over the fence: 'I'm not doing this for any violent reasons, but . . . to try to make this country wake up once and for all' " -- Boston Globe, April 24, 1971). When he later wanted to soften his antiwar record, he admitted tossing not his own medals, but another man's ("Kerry, after showing a reporter his medals and ribbons on display in his Back Bay apartment, said he had disagreed with other protest leaders on throwing away medals" -- Globe, Oct. 15, 1984).

It might help rehabilitate Kerry's image as a politician of no fixed principles if he Just Said No to negative campaigning -- and stuck to it. Taking such a pledge would give him the moral high ground. His rectitude would win praise from the media. The aforementioned goo-goos and thumb-suckers would press Weld to follow suit. It's not for me to tell Sen. Kerry how to run his campaigns, but if he really abhors negative politics, this is a no-lose proposition.

Of course, Kerry needs to clarify just what he means by negative campaigning. So far he has said only that "you know it when you see it." Most people know it and see it in ads done by Bob Shrum, the Democrats' king of slash-and-burn. (It was Shrum who tore Mitt Romney to shreds for Ted Kennedy in 1994.) If savage attack ads are verboten, why has Kerry just hired Shrum? And shouldn't attacks made in statements to the press be just as impermissible as those made in TV spots? When Kerry spokesman Dan Payne says that Weld is "mean to people in need . . . just like Gingrich" -- isn't that negative campaigning?

I repeat: Negative ads don't offend me if they're not libelously false. But they do offend John Kerry, or so he keeps insisting. Part of being a US senator is leading by example. Let's see Kerry put his campaign where his mouth is.


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one of..... We The People

[kate]

Kerry has war stories, and Weld feels the pain
Boston Herald
January 22, 1996
Author: Joe Sciacca

In March 1969, a young Navy lieutenant, his arm bleeding after a mine exploded under his patrol boat, pulled another serviceman from the Bay Hap River in a hail of Viet Cong gunfire.

That same month, back in the States, a second-year Harvard Law student was fighting a different battle. His appeal to avoid military induction had just been rejected by the draft board.

John Kerry was the naval officer. Bill Weld was the Harvard student.

Kerry won the Silver Star and the Bronze Star. Weld won his battle as well, avoiding service in Vietnam by claiming a bad back in a persistant series of appeals.

The contrast is powerful, so powerful that the squash-playing, Adirondack-hiking Weld, who beat the draft despite being certified "1A" four times and passing at least two Army physicals, won't get near it. Whenever the topic comes up, the governor and his aides commend Kerry for his combat heroics, then change the subject swiftly.

Kerry, whose subsequent antiwar protests put him right up there with Jane Fonda on the American Legion's hit parade, certainly doesn't mind when his combat duty comes up.

"I didn't duck fast enough," he tells a talk-show caller who asks about his war injuries, taking a page from JFK's "They sank my boat" explanation for his PT-109 fame.

"Listen, I was one of the very, very lucky people," Kerry says. "I was wounded in my leg and my arm, my head and my arm, with shrapnel mostly, with a concussion. But I was among the walking. There were too many who were not as lucky. I do not consider myself a hero."

This year, with an electorate dominated by older and blue-collar voters and a pro-military sentiment still reverberating from the CNN-televised Gulf War, war stories are once again political dynamite, especially when used against campaign rivals who don't have any.

Bob Dole (two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star) is using it on the presidential campaign trail, discussing the World War II injury that ravaged his right arm and detailing it in his TV ads. His major GOP rivals can't match that macho military record and, well, let's just say that Bill Clinton's threat to punch William Safire in the nose isn't exactly going to earn him a "V" for valor.

Nobody knows anything about where Colin Powell stands on the issues but they know one thing: He was a war hero, and that makes him a major political force.

Look for Kerry to use his medal-winning heroics in TV ads if, or rather when, the going gets tough in his Senate race with Weld.

The material in official Navy reports on the action he saw in Vietnam is enough to make a political ad consultant weep with joy.

Take One: There were two choices when gunfire erupted along the Ca Mau Peninsula: Run or fight.

The young commander in U.S. Navy Patrol Craft Fast 94 - John Kerry - made his choice clear. He ordered his units to turn to the beach and charge the Viet Cong positions.

As the patrol boat roared towards the shore through a shower of bullets, a B-40 rocket exploded close aboard. But the U.S. troops continued to advance, beaching their craft in the middle of the action.

Suddenly, according to official accounts, "An enemy soldier sprang up from his position not 10 feet from Patrol Craft Fast 94 and fled. Without hesitation, Lt. Kerry leaped ashore, pursued the man behind a hootch and killed him, capturing a B-40 rocket launcher with a round in the chamber."

Cut to Bill Weld. "I can tell you the story of the physical. The guy said, `Anything wrong with you?' I said, `Well, I don't have a great back here.'

"He said, `Lean over and tell me when you can feel it.' I leaned over about this far and said, `Well, I can feel that, but I can lean over further if you want me to.' The guy said, `I wouldn't take you on a bet.' "

Somehow, this doesn't make it, not even if you set it to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic."

"How a war record sells in a campaign depends on the candidates," former JFK aide Dan H. Fenn Jr. was saying yesterday. "If I'm 6 foot 3 inches and played football and my opponent is 5 foot 2 inches and wrote sonnets and my district is pretty macho, I've got the edge.

"My opponent's best reply is, `I think that's terrific. That's admirable. But my life took me in a different direction. Sonnets are pretty good, too.' "

OK, let's see. "There once was a lad named Bill, whose draft notice made him feel ill . . ." Nah, it's
Nah, it's probably best just to change the subject


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one of..... We The People

[kate]

BADGES OF COURAGE FIGURED IN ADMIRAL'S LIFE FALSE BATTLE CLAIMS CALLED A VIOLATION OF HONOR
Boston Globe
May 18, 1996
Author: Bob Hohler, Globe Staff

WASHINGTON -- Six rows of ribbons adorned his uniform. Hero's ribbons.

But after 40 years of distinguished military service, Adm. Jeremy M. Boorda, the chief of naval operations and former commander in chief of allied forces in Southern Europe, endured a glaring truth: Not once had he faced hostile fire
<snip>

Several prominent veterans expressed little surprise.

"The military is a rigorous culture that places a high premium on battlefield accomplishment," said Sen. John F. Kerry, who received numerous decorations, including a Bronze Star with a "V" pin, as a Navy lieutenant in Vietnam.

"In a sense, there's nothing that says more about your career than when you fought, where you fought and how you fought," Kerry said.

"If you wind up being less than what you're pretending to be, there is a major confrontation with value and self-esteem and your sense of how others view you."




(For respect to Adm Boorda, not posting the entire article...just posting Kerry's comments - who could be talking about himself)

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one of..... We The People

[kate]

THE MAKING OF THE CANDIDATES

JOHN FORBES KERRY OFTEN TAGGED AS A POLITICAL OPPORTUNIST -- ALOOF, INSINCERE -- HE IS ALSO A MAN OF COURAGE AND CHARISMA, HIS INNER LIFE INTENSE, EMOTIONAL AND FILLED WITH THE RAW EXPERIENCE THAT SHOWS IN THE SEVERE LINES OF HIS FACE, THE OFTEN-HAUNTED LOOK IN HIS EYES.
Boston Globe
October 6, 1996
Author: Charles Sennott, Globe Staff


Vietnam. The Mekong Delta. February 1969.

US Navy boats glide through rays of sunlight glinting off cobalt waters. Lush green palms and mangroves sway on river banks, and just under them dozens of Viet Cong snipers are dug in deep. John Forbes Kerry, then a 25-year-old skipper of the six-man crew on Patrol Craft Fast 93, is about to be ambushed.

The rattling of machine-gun fire jumps in loud bursts. Volleys of B-40 rockets splash just a few yards away. Then Kerry orders the boat turned directly toward shore, and the front gunner opens fire. The .50-caliber pounding forces an enemy retreat. Reaching land, Kerry jumps from the boat, charges into the jungle, pursues a Viet Cong soldier behind a hootch and shoots him. The enemy dies clutching a B-40 rocket launcher with a round in the chamber.

This action -- cited as heroic achievement by his commanders and considered reckless by some of his crew -- earned Kerry the Silver Star. In many ways, it was Kerry's defining moment, a gutsy impulse that turned a junior officer into a hero, launching him on a trajectory of fame. An experience of war reduced to its essence -- kill or be killed -- that would transform an aggressive soldier into a more reflective veteran against the war and, finally, into a young candidate who wanted to bring that experience to Washington.

And Kerry just happens to have captured it all on film.

"I'll show you where they shot from. See? That's the hole covered up with reeds," says Kerry, showing the films on a recent evening, his hand tightening on the remote control as he clicks the images down to slow motion.

"This is just something that I improvised. . . . The point was not to just take an ambush, but to go directly at them," adds Kerry, pointing to where he brought the boat ashore, and explaining how he returned later with a Super 8 millimeter hand-held movie camera to record highlights of the mission. "That's me right there. One of my crew was filming all this."

The films have the grainy quality of home movies. In their blend of the posed and the unexpected, they reveal something indelible about the man who shot them -- the tall, thin, handsome Naval officer seen striding through the reeds in flak jacket and helmet, holding aloft the captured B-40 rocket. The young man so unconscious of risk in the heat of battle, yet so focused on his future ambitions that he would reenact the moment for film. It is as if he had cast himself in the sequel to the experience of his hero, John F. Kennedy, on the PT-109.

"John was thinking Camelot when he shot that film, absolutely," says Thomas Vallely, a fellow veteran and one of Kerry's closest political advisers and friends.

"He was thinking, `These are my moments fighting for a good cause,' " adds Vallely, now director of Harvard's Indochina-Burma Program. "But then he had to throw that away, Camelot and the whole thing, when he came out against the war. That is what makes John an interesting guy; it's what makes him real."

Kerry dismisses the film record of his war as "just something I did, no great meaning to it." But through hours of watching the films in the den of his newly renovated Beacon Hill mansion, it becomes apparent that these are memories and footage he returns to often. Kerry jumps repeatedly from the couch to adjust the Sony large screen TV in his home entertainment center, making sure the picture is clear, the color correct. He fast forwards, rewinds and freeze frames the footage. His running commentary -- vivid, sometimes touching, sometimes self-serving -- never misses a beat. At one point, his eyes well with tears when he talks about a close friend killed by a Viet Cong rocket in the spring of 1969 on the same rivers he had left only two w eeks before.

The evening captures the Kerry conundrum: a man often tagged as a political opportunist -- aloof, insincere -- was also a young man of courage and high ambition, his inner life intense, emotional and filled with the raw experience that still shows in the severe lines of his face, the often-haunted look in his eyes.

In a five-hour interview, Kerry unloaded the intimacy of his war experience. He recounted the week in Washington in the spring of 1971, when he delivered perhaps the most memorable testimony against the war before Congress and became the hottest political prospect Washington had seen in a long time. Such precocious fame fueled a brazen, early ambition that to this day, Kerry admits, somewhat mars his image.

"There were a lot of early assumptions," he says, "and I compounded it with some stupid sort of brash, youthful, exuberant, un-thought-out things. . . . So I got some baggage. I spent a lot of time trying to put the baggage away."

Kerry, 52, also addressed questions that linger about his war years: Did he throw his own medals -- or someone else's -- over the fence at the Capitol during a famous anti-war demonstration? And was he, as some in his crew feared, an officer in search of glory who put his men in needless peril?

For at bottom, to understand who Kerry is is to return to the war and the fight against it, and to ask where all that passion is now. "I think it is still there," the senator says, citing "children and economic fairness" as his chief concerns today. "But you know, it is a different time. People don't allow for that sort of thing. That sort of thing -- I mean passion -- is somehow more suspicious today."

Childhood on the move

Growing up in the 1950s, America was all about neighborhoods, small farm towns, safe suburban tracts and ethnic pockets of cities. They defined you.

"I never had that experience of being from somewhere, you know, a neighborhood. When I was a kid, one of the big things I wanted was a Washington Star wagon for a newspaper route. I wasn't there long enough to have one," remembers Kerry.

He was a war baby born Dec. 11, 1943, in Colorado, where his father, an Army pilot, overcame a bout with tuberculosis. He was the first son to a father, Richard Kerry, who hailed from an upper-class Boston family of Irish and Scottish ancestry. His mother was a Forbes, a family which made its name and wealth developing trade routes to bring tea from China. Today, the Forbeses own most of the Elizabeth Islands off Cape Cod, where Kerry still goes to sail and ride horses. His mother, Rosemary Forbes Kerry, also is a Winthrop, descended from the Massachusetts Bay Colony's first governor, John Winthrop.

After the war, Richard Kerry became a diplomat, first in Washington, then Oslo, Paris and Berlin. John attended a string of Swiss boarding schools. The second of four children, he grew up largely away from his parents, creating "a sense of dislocation," as he puts it. He skied the Alps and vacationed at a family estate in Brittany.

Says Peggy Kerry, John's older sister: "There is a European kind of formality to us and to John that I would say has carried over. Like the French difference between `tu' and `vous,' John still sees the world that way, and sees the difference between his public life and his personal life that way."

At 13, Kerry was sent to St. Paul's, the prestigious Episcopalian preparatory school near Concord, N.H. Though his mother is Episcopalian and his father Catholic, the children were raised in the Catholic church and Kerry says he often felt like an outsider at the school.

He was an avid hockey and soccer player. He also founded a political society, and it was obvious he was smitten by the Kennedy mystique. After a visit to Boston in the spring of 1960, Kerry was heading for North Station to return to St. Paul's when he saw a crowd gathering. It was a Kennedy rally.

"I was very taken. It just captured you, the whole excitement, and the possibility of change. The next day I gave a speech about why he should be president."

Kerry was mocked by some at St. Paul's as a Kennedy wannabe. He'd sign his papers and wear his Oxford cotton shirts embossed with his initials, "JFK," as if the political affinity were preordained. Behind his back, classmates rolled their eyes and, as one said, joked that the initials stood for "Just For Kerry."

He even briefly dated Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy's half-sister, and was at the Bouvier mansion in Newport, R.I., one summer day when his idol, Jack Kennedy, happened by and invited him out for a sail.

Kerry began his freshman year at Yale in 1962. He was playing in the final moments of a Harvard-Yale soccer game on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, when the news broke that the president had been shot. "I went into meltdown," Kerry recalls. "There was this feeling of numbness. I couldn't move."

Friends say he was more profoundly affected than most other students. He spent Saturday praying at a chapel on campus.

Kerry's busy Yale years reflect the social class to which he was born and the talents he brought with him. A serious but not outstanding student, he was a member of the secret society Skull and Bones, a star athlete on the soccer, hockey and lacrosse teams, and president of the Yale Political Union. But despite his achievements, Kerry generally was not well-liked.

"He was not easy to get to know, and some of that is still there," says Yale roommate David Thorne, twin brother to Kerry's first wife, Julia, and still one of the senator's closest friends. "Some of it was that he was shy, and some of it was that achievement became more important than personal relationships. . . . Since the day I met him, he's had his eye on politics. . . . He was consumed by a desire to achieve, and that would put people off. But I think he matured out of that."

In Kerry's senior year, US involvement in Vietnam was escalating. Kerry's father was skeptical of the war.

"I thought it a serious policy mistake," says Richard Kerry, now living in Groton, Mass. "His (John's) attitude was gung ho: had to show the flag. He was quite immature in that direction. As a senior, he matured considerably."

Vietnam loomed over the Class of '66. At his graduation, Kerry delivered a Class Day speech about Vietnam, a policy critique urging the US to restrain its involvement. Still, he enlisted in the Navy and in the summer of 1966 headed off to Officer Candidates School in Newport, R.I.

"I had a sense of duty and obligation. I could have gone to law school, like he (Gov. William Weld) did and many of my friends did. I chose not to," Kerry says. "I think those of us who were lucky enough to go to a place like Harvard or Yale owed something to our country. A sharing of the risks, if you will."

Aggressive style

Kerry began his tour of duty in a safe haven, aboard a frigate stationed in California, and then the Gulf of Tonkin. But he wanted action, and he got it.

He volunteered for service in Operation Sea Lords, skippering one of the so-called "swift boats," charged with navigating the Mekong Delta in search of the small craft that supplied the Viet Cong with weapons. Kerry's time "in country" with Sea Lords was less than four months.

Veterans who served with him portray Kerry as one of the more unorthodox and assertive young commanders in the operation -- both gallant and reckless. As he screened films of his Sea Lords experience, Kerry was asked if he ever felt he had put his own men in needless danger.

"I thought I was fighting the war and doing the best thing I could to win."

Did his crew ever complain?

"No. They liked winning. And they didn't want to . . . just sit there. At least they never complained to me."

Thomas Bellodeau, from a working class family in North Chelmsford, Mass., was a front gunner and radar man on Kerry's boat. He remembers the senator, whose radio name was "Rock Jaw," and the furious action that earned him Silver and Bronze stars and one of three Purple Hearts. The Bronze Star was awarded for the events of March 13, 1969, according to the Navy citation. With a graze wound in his right arm, Kerry turned back into enemy fire to rescue a soldier fallen overboard.

But the battle Bellodeau remembers best was the one on Feb. 28 that earned Kerry the Silver Star. Especially vivid is his memory of the alarm he felt when Kerry turned their boat directly into enemy fire. It was an unusal strategy in a war in which cautious commanders tended to avoid direct assaults if air power or artillery could do the job. But it worked. The Viet Cong retreated, leaving behind a cache of weapons.

Bellodeau remembers thinking to himself: " `I'm never doing that again. We're going to have to talk to this guy (Kerry).' A lot of the new guys came in gung ho, and we had already seen one skipper shot. But just when I was thinking about all that, there was more fire from the banks and he ordered the boat turned back into shore once again."

Though some questioned his tactics, Kerry had the respect of the boat, says Bellodeau, now a union electrician. "It always seemed to be the right decision. We're all alive, put it that way."

Drew Whitlow, from a poor family in Oklahoma, was the back gunner on Kerry's swift boat. "He volunteered us for everything. He'd always step forward and say, `We'll do it. Load up men.' And we'd say, `Oh my God, here we go again,' " he remembers. "We called him the John Wayne of Vietnam."

Whitlow went on to a naval career, retiring after 26 years in 1991. He was surprised when he saw Kerry in the news in 1971, speaking out against a war he had so eagerly fought. "I thought it was kind of a betrayal. He did a 180 on me. But then he went into politics, and it all kind of made sense. . . . He was a guy with a plan, you know, and that's okay. I guess."

Painful memories

That Kerry took the trouble to film his war experience strikes many veterans, including some of his closest friends, as extraordinary -- even strange.

Kerry says he shot his war footage on a Super 8 camera he bought at the PX in Cam Ranh Bay. Asked how he filmed in the heat of battle, he demonstrated, gripping an imaginary ship's helm and thrusting his camera hand out to the side. "I'd steer, or direct, or fire my gun, and hold onto it when I could," Kerry says. "Sometimes the other guys would pick it up."

Watching the film and listening to Kerry's narration is to take a strange journey inside the war. There is Kerry in cutoff shorts, working on his suntan next to a Viet Cong prisoner bound and blindfolded. There are the splashes of incoming rocket fire. There is a mortar blowing a thatch hut into oblivion. Through the silent footage, there is a sense of a young man turning against the war as he filmed it.

"This was America's effort to win the war right here," he says as the film showed soldiers dousing gasoline on huts in a small village before setting them on fire. "There was always a kind of sick, sweet smell of burning wood."

Giving the films an air of the absurd was a color graphic that jumped out at the start of each VHS tape, flashing the slogan of the company that copied them from the original 8 millimeter films: "Memories Made Easy."

Speaking of friends he lost in the war, Kerry remembered the day he found out Richard Pershing, a Yale classmate, was killed.

"I was on the deck of a ship on watch. An officer called me aside and said, `Do you know Dick Pershing?' And I knew," he says, words trailing off. He left and began doing dishes in the kitchen, brushing tears from his eyes.

"My sacrifice was losing so many friends," he says. "That and the softness and the sense of innocence of life. The war took that away from all of us."

Turbulent times

When Kerry came home in April 1969, everything had changed. Anti-war demonstrations raged across the country -- even at Harvard and Yale. Veterans were coming out against it. When his family got together, there were long discussions about what John had seen and survived; the Kerrys were unanimous on the need to end the war. So was Julia Thorne, who that same year would become his wife.

After a brief stint working for an admiral in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Kerry decided to leave the service. On Jan. 1, 1970, he was given an early release and honorable discharge, leaving as a full lieutenant. He had already begun laying groundwork to run for Congress from what was then Massachusetts' 3d District, from Fitchburg to Newton.

But it proved a political misadventure. A "Citizens Caucus," a district vote of party activists, was held to see if there was a Democrat strong enough to oust Rep. Philip J. Philbin, a conservative Democrat and hawk on Vietnam who had held the seat since Kerry was born. Kerry, the first Vietnam veteran to run for Congress with a dovish platform on the war, was convinced he could pull it off. However, when Rev. Robert F. Drinan won the caucus, Kerry worked hard for Drinan's victory.

His emergence as a public figure continued. In February 1971, a historic gathering of a group of Vietnam veterans was held in a Detroit motel. They recounted "war crimes" -- from the killing of civilians to illegal incursions into Laos. They called for congressional hearings, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War was formed. More articulate and polished than most other members, Kerry was generally respected, but his obvious political ambitions also left some skeptical of his motives. He spearheaded the call for a demonstration at the Capitol and began raising money.

On April 19, veterans assembled in Washington. For days, the Nixon White House attempted to block them from using the Capitol grounds, and 100 were arrested.

Kerry was a leader among this angry band, but also not quite part of the group. Most were more outwardly rebellious, with longer hair and much more willingness to confront the powers that be. While they stayed in tents, Kerry spent most nights at a Georgetown townhouse owned by the family of George Butler, an old college friend and fellow veteran. There, Kerry was able to work the phones and lay his plan.

The scene back at the encampment was a confusing mix of angry veterans and angry young people pretending to be veterans. There were also, as Kerry would later learn, spies working for the White House under the direction of presidential adviser Charles Colson, who two years later would be implicated in the Watergate affair. (Some 25 years later, as a born-again Christian, Colson would write a letter to Kerry asking "forgiveness over any ways in which I hurt you in the past.")

On April 21, with pressure mounting for Congress to take notice of the protesters, Kerry was invited to speak the following morning before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

He entered the packed hearing room to sustained applause, wearing his green fatigues, his hair just long enough to make a statement, but clean and neatly groomed.

The speech, based on writings that Kerry had crafted for months, was filled with rhetorical jewels, delivered flawlessly. The most memorable line: "How do you ask a man to be the last soldier to die for a mistake?" His eloquence and evident sincerity would stun the committee -- and the national press. He was anointed a political comer, with Sen. Claiborne Pell, the Rhode Island Democrat, expressing his hope that Kerry would "someday be a colleague of ours in this body."

Critics have always claimed that Adam Walinsky, a speechwriter for the late Robert F. Kennedy and political mentor to Kerry, wrote the speech, that its polish and pacing had the mark of a pro. Kerry now concedes that Walinsky helped, but insists that the most memorable lines and the bulk of the text were his own.

The following day, the veterans gathered in front of a makeshift fence blocking them from the front of the Capitol. As a dramatic conclusion to the five-day protest, they were going to "return" their medals, tossing them over the fence. Kerry was tortured by this decision, both because he was proud of his medals and because he knew that discarding them was the kind of act that could damage a political career.

"He was ambivalent about it. It was very hard for him," said David Thorne, who stood by his side through the protest. "John never took his eye off the ball, and that was the political career. He worried about how it would look."

The protest quickly erupted in passion. Veterans hurled their medals high on the steps of the Capitol. Many cried. Someone put up a sign on the fence that read, "Trash." Soon, they began throwing not just Bronze and Silver stars and Purple Hearts, but citations, discharge papers, caps, jackets and canteens.

Kerry remembers: "I wasn't comfortable just hurling these things because they were all that was left of some people. It was a hugely emotional event. When it was over, I went and sat down and cried for over a half-hour."

Newspaper accounts described Kerry throwing his own medals, and in a speech immediately afterward to the veterans, Kerry said: "This administration forced us to return our medals. . . . These leaders denied us the integrity those symbols supposedly gave our lives."

But as it later turned out, the medals Kerry threw were not his own. Since that fact was revealed by the Wall Street Journal in 1984, it has dogged Kerry. It appears as a throwaway line in nearly every profile of the senator, usually used to paint him as a phony. In his recent interview with the Globe, Kerry added a new twist.

He says that the two sets of medals he threw had been handed to him by a wounded veteran in a New York VA hospital and by a World War II veteran from Lincoln, Mass., whom he'd met at a fund-raiser. Kerry says he can't remember their names. While he did not throw his own medals (they remain tucked away in a desk at his home in Boston), Kerry says he did throw the ribbons on his uniform that symbolized the medals he had earned. Asked why he didn't bring his own medals to throw since it was planned weeks in advance, Kerry said it was because he "didn't have time to go home (to New York) and get them."

"It is frustrating.," Kerry says of the criticism he's received. " People said things, you know, about the medals. And I mean, I led that march, I stood up at the goddamn thing, and I took my ribbons off my chest and I threw them over the fence. I was the last person there, the leader of the event. I waited till everyone had done their duty, then fulfilled mine."

Duty done, but doubts persist. Perhaps the larger question, politically, is why, even as Kerry has assembled an imposing resume of achievements from war hero to 14 years in public office with strong stands on matters ranging from foreign policy to the local economy, do these nagging perceptions of him as insincere persist?

It's not just the medals. For years, Washington gossip columnists have whispered about Kerry's once-bulging jaw -- that he had plastic surgery to make it look more telegenic. Kerry insists it was a necessary operation to correct a "malocclusion," or bad bite, that he'd had since childhood. He offers a letter from the doctor who did the procedure to prove it. And he grows visibly angry about lingering whispers that Walinsky ghost wrote the 1971 speech he gave to Congress. After 25 years in the public eye, he is tired of the skeptical gaze.

So why does it follow him?

"Because people have to have a way to tear down, or to find flaws, or to find a negative, or to eat you up," Kerry says.

His friend George Butler had another explanation: "Jealousy. A lot of people just hate John because he has had a charmed life. They figure there's just no way he is that good."

Utilizing notoriety

Kerry was in the middle of much that was going on at the turn of the decade, leading peace rallies with the likes of John Lennon and Peter, Paul and Mary. He was of the time and, like most of his generation, partook in all that it was about, including smoking marijuana. He says he tried it several times between 1970 and 1971, but, "essentially, the smoke bothered me. I didn't cotton to it."

The overnight fame that came to Kerry in 1971 after his speech was extraordinary. "60 Minutes" did a profile. He went on the Dick Cavett show. Newspaper columnists were hinting he was the next Kennedy. A bill to lower the age for senator to 27 was dubbed the "Kerry amendment."

In 1972, Kerry took the national momentum to the local stage. After some embarrassing "district shopping," he decided to run for a congressional seat in Lowell, claiming his parents' Groton home as his residence. The conservative Lowell Sun was merciless, challenging Kerry's patriotism. The Kennedy guns came out on his behalf. Even George McGovern. But Kerry still lost.

"I admired him before, but the first time I felt I really got to like John was the night he lost," says Vallely, who was his campaign coordinator that year. "He stood up and said, `If I had to do it over again, I'd still be standing there with the veterans.' When I heard that, I said, `This is a real guy.' "

From 1973 to 1976, Kerry attended Boston College Law School and began working in the Middlesex District Attorney's office, the first step in his political maturation. By then, he and his wife had two daughters.

He worked hard at the DA's office, building a more traditional political resume that would ultimately lead to a successful run for lieutenant governor in 1982. He was divorced from Julia that same year, and says he has remained close to his daughters, now in college at Yale and Brown.

Two years later, he left the State House and prevailed in the brutal contest to succeed Paul Tsongas in the Senate, after Tsongas resigned due to illness. He was one of few freshmen ever to win a spot on the Foreign Relations Committee, and a prophetic Sen. Pell was there to greet him.

He has remarried to Teresa Heinz, the very rich, philanthropic widow of Sen. John Heinz III, the Pennsylvania Republican. To this day, friends and family say, Vietnam haunts Kerry with nightmares that regularly stir him from his sleep, screaming.

In one recurring dream he is consumed by snakes in the Mekong Delta. In another, according to Heinz, he shouts: "Get down! I got the women and the children! Get down, get down!" In the throes of such a dream, Kerry often leaps out of bed and crashes into bedroom furniture, Heinz told a gathering of the senator's supporters in New York recently.

But in his waking hours, Kerry today seems comfortable -- living both in Heinz's grand Georgetown townhouse in Washington and in the $3 million Louisburg Square mansion in Boston which the couple had converted from an old convent. He also seems comfortable in the role of senator, and with the power and trappings that come with it. Some friends wonder if somewhere along the line he became too comfortable.

"Some of the passion may have faded, but the fighter in him hasn't," Vallely says. "John is real good when it comes time to lock and load. When this election gets to that point, look out. All the intensity of the war comes back, and that is the place that he needs to find within himself right now. John is best when he is danger.

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one of..... We The People

[kate]

THE WAR HERO
Boston Globe
October 22, 1996
Author: David Warsh, Globe Staff

John Kerry's shaky-voiced taunt to Bill Weld last week -- "You didn't go to that war" (they were discussing cash assistance to recovering drug addicts, some of them Vietnam vets) -- reminded me of the first time I heard Kerry speak, many years ago, in 1971.

He had come to my college to give a talk. He had won some medals as a Navy lieutenant. He had turned against the war. He was said to harbor political ambitions. I thought it was funny that, for a guy who was supposed to know a lot about Vietnam, he mispronounced the name of a Buddhist sect, the Hoa Hao (pronounced "wah how") as "wah wah.

I don't think so anymore, not after reading the portion devoted to Kerry's war in the superb profile of the candidate earlier this month by The Boston Globe's Charles M. Sennott.

I learned that Kerry had spent less than four months in Vietnam, assigned there on temporary duty from a frigate patrolling in the Tonkin Gulf.

Kerry was assigned to a boat whose skipper had been killed in action. He commanded it effectively, in more aggressive ways. One day he charged ashore and killed a wounded man who had been part of an ambush (for which he was awarded a Silver Star, a rather uncommon reward for bravery). Another time he pulled a sailor from the water (he earned a Bronze Star, of which more were given). He was himself three times lightly wounded. After four months he flew home to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he spent his last eight months in uniform as an aide to an admiral.

Sennott also described Kerry's habit of filming himself, sometimes under fire, one hand on the helm or a weapon, the other clutching a super 8 movie camera at the end of a fully extended arm. The habit seemed strange, even to his friends, Sennott wrote. But he noted that Kerry had demonstrated real talent as the skipper of his boat and retained the loyalty of his crew, though some thought him occasionally reckless. "We called him the John Wayne of Vietnam," said back gunner Drew Whitlow.he quality of these awards.

For another, after I escaped to become a reporter for the military newspaper Pacific Stars and Stripes, I'd traveled widely throughout Vietnam. I knew something of the mores of the American military in the field in 1968, 1969 and 1970.

The war in 1969 was a far more tentative place than the war in 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive. Richard Nixon was in the White House, "Vietnamization" was in the air and aggressive heroes of 1969 were beginning to earn contempt instead of medals. It was the year of Hamburger Hill, of the murderous excesses of Operation Dixie Express in the Mekong delta. Gung-ho behavior was suspect by most GIs, though the occasional "fragging" of zealous officers by reluctant troops was still a year away.

One developed a lot of tolerance in those days. Draft resisters, protesters, conscientious objectors coexisted relatively easily with long-range reconnaissance patrollers, fighter pilots, careerist battalion commanders and plain old infantrymen. Nobody's right to stay home was questioned as a rule. And the last thing you did was cross-examine one who had been there.

The one thing that seemed hard to abide was a grandstander. A Silver Star for finishing off an unlucky young man? A passionate rejection of a war that had been equally passionately prosecuted a few months before? During the self-dramatizing moments in the early 1970s when he first became a celebrity, Kerry lost the sympathy and support of the majority of Vietnam veterans.

But hasn't Kerry lived the grandstanding down? The answer is yes and no. No, because his wife says he still has nightmares about Vietnam. "Get down!" Kerry shouts, she says. "I got the women and children, get down, get down!" He flies out of bed and hits himself, she says, or crashes into a wall.

Yes, because once he finally got elected to office, he put Vietnam bragging behind him and became the man he wanted to be. From an ungainly kid, anxious to make his mark on the world, Kerry evolved into a useful citizen, capable and hard working. He's been a good senator, serving honorably and well. But perhaps 12 years is enough.


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one of..... We The People

[kate]

BEHIND THE HOOTCH
Boston Globe
October 27, 1996
Author: David Warsh, Globe Staff


What happened behind the hootch?

It happened 27 years ago and 12,000 miles away. Does it matter now

In the heat of the Massachusetts Senate campaign, a new account has raised questions about what happened on a river bank in the Ca Mau peninsula on Feb. 28, 1969.

That was the day that Sen. John Kerry won the Silver Star, the nation's third-highest award for bravery, for, among other things, killing an enemy soldier. The events of that day, and their lengthy aftermath, are what this column is about.

But the story here doesn't have anything to do with Kerry's reelection battle with GOP challenger William F. Weld. Nor does it have much to do with business and economics, except insofar as many present-day attitudes toward the possibilities and limits of government were formed in the crucible of the Vietnam War.

It concerns instead a personal transformation that took place in that crucible -- or perhaps a couple of transformations.

The tale of Kerry's heroism has been told in a general way many times: how a young Navy lieutenant, whose idol was John F. Kennedy -- whose very initials were JFK -- distinguished himself in Vietnam as commander of a Swift boat, was twice decorated for bravery under fire, three times wounded. Kennedy, of course, won fame as a PT boat hero in the Pacific during World War II.

In a conversation with me Monday, however, the rear gunner of John Kerry's boat in Vietnam offered an account that differed on a couple of key points from one given recently by his skipper.

Tom Bellodeau phoned from Michigan at the behest of the Kerry campaign as I prepared to write a column last week about the senator's experience as a young man in Vietnam. Bellodeau long has been a familiar figure in the senator's campaigns. He is a native of North Chelmsford, well-known and well-liked in the local veteran community, though he lives in Michigan now.

He convinced me of the general authenticity of various accounts of Kerry's service, and of his success as a skipper. But his remarks left far from clear the circumstances in which the enemy soldier had died.

At a certain point in a meandering conversation, our attention turned to the events of Feb. 28, 1969.

We have the broad outlines of that day from the citation that accompanied the award of Kerry's Silver Star. It began with three Swift boats -- big, lightly armored aluminum patrol boats capable of going nearly 30 m.p.h. steaming up a river deep in the Ca Mau peninsula, near the southernmost tip of Vietnam. Each was carrying 30 South Vietnamese militiamen who were to be landed at a certain point. A team of US explosives experts was along as well. Kerry, driving Swift boat 94, was in tactical command of the operation.

On its way to its destination, the little flotilla came under small arms fire from a bank of the Bay Hap River. Kerry's boats charged the river bank, blasting away with heavy 50 mm machine guns, then put the Vietnamese troops ashore to sweep the area.

Kerry stationed one boat nearby and took his own boat and another upstream to investigate an area from which fire had come. When they got close, somebody fired a rocket at the Americans and Kerry swiftly and unexpectedly beached his boat on the river bank.

According to the citation, ". . . an enemy soldier sprang up from his position not 10 feet from [Swift boat] 94 and fled. Without hesitation Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry leaped ashore, pursued the man behind a hootch and killed him, capturing a B-40 rocket launcher with a round in the chamber."

Twice more the expedition came under fire before returning safely to base, according to the citation. Ten Viet Cong were killed during the day and one was wounded; many weapons were captured; no Americans were hurt.

Last Monday, as he described the long-ago events to me, Tom Bellodeau said with no inflection in particular, "You know, I shot that guy. He jumped up, he looked right at me, I looked at him. You could tell he was trying to decide whether to shoot or not. I expected the guy [on Kerry's boat] with the twin 50s to blast him but he couldn't depress the guns far enough. We were up on the bank." Bellodeau said he fired at the man, wounding him.

But didn't Kerry shoot him? "When I hit him he went down and got up again. When Kerry hit him, he stayed down," said Bellodeau.

I mentioned Tuesday in my column that Kerry apparently had shot a wounded man, but otherwise thought no more about it.

Then Tuesday morning I discovered that a somewhat different sequence of events had been described by Kerry in a recent interview with writer James Carroll. Carroll's article, "A Friendship That Ended the War," published in the Oct. 21 New Yorker, is a thoughtful, probing exploration of the differing experiences and motives of Sen. John McCain and Sen. Kerry -- the former an ex-POW and war hero, the latter an antiwar activist and war hero, whose partnership healed divisions of opinion over missing POWs.

Carroll wrote, "Recently, I asked Kerry about the man he killed. We had been talking for an hour or more, and for the first time he hesitated. Then he said, `It was either going to be him or it was going to be us. It was that simple. I don't know why it wasn't us -- I mean, to this day. He had a rocket pointed right at our boat. He stood up out of a hole, and none of us saw him until he was standing in front of us, aiming a rocket right at us, and, for whatever reason, he didn't pull the trigger -- he turned and ran. He was shocked to see our boat right in front of him. If he'd pulled the trigger, we'd all be dead . . .' " The ellipses signified a long pause, Carroll told me last week.

" `I just won't talk about all of it. I don't and can't. The things that really turned me I've never told anybody. Nobody would understand.' Kerry stopped. He was silent. `These things are very personal. It was our youth.' "

Kerry's Silver Star citation mentions no second American sailor on the river bank. Tom Bellodeau says he was awarded a Bronze Star for his actions that day, but I have been unable to find a copy of the citation.

One point on which all three accounts agree -- the Silver Star citation, Bellodeau's account and Kerry's -- is that it was "behind a hootch," an insubstantial dwelling, where Kerry killed the Vietnamese soldier.

Otherwise, there are subtle differences that give rise to important ambiguities. In Kerry's account to Carroll, there is no second sailor confronting the Vietnamese. No wound is mentioned. There is only a moment of terror, followed by hot pursuit. And then death, behind the hootch.

So Bellodeau's account raises questions: Did Kerry shoot a wounded soldier? Did he know the soldier was wounded? If so, how badly was he hurt?

I asked Kerry's campaign headquarters repeatedly this week for an interview with Kerry and to speak to Tom Bellodeau again. I asked also to see the home movies of Vietnam that Kerry had made. As previously reported in The Boston Globe, Kerry had the habit of filming himself in combat. He returned to the site of the Feb. 28 incident the next day in order to re-enact the events. He had shown the films to Globe reporter Charles M. Sennott during a five-hour interview.

But over a period of three days neither Kerry nor Tom Bellodeau returned my phone calls. Nor was an intermediary representing Kerry able to produce a copy of Tom Bellodeau's Bronze Star citation. Instead, John Kerry attended a fund-raiser hosted by fellow war hero Tom Vallely and featuring Sen. Bob Kerrey, the Medal of Honor winner who lost a leg in Vietnam. At one point Kerry's office did offer the name of Kerry's commanding officer in Vietnam, so I called him. It was he who recommended the citation.

In 1969, George Elliott was a 31-year-old lieutenant commander, a career naval officer commanding Coastal Division 11. Today, Elliott, a retired Navy captain, lives in Lewes, Del., where he is president of the local historical society. He is both sharp and friendly.

While saying he had not agreed for many years with Kerry's politics, Elliott remembered him as an outstanding young officer to whom he gave a glowing fitness report.

Of the citation, Elliott said: "I don't remember whether I initiated it or whether it was one of the troops who was with him. The recommendation left over my signature. I was not an eyewitness, but I stand by it.

"The only question I had for him was why did he leave his boat. A commander doesn't leave his boat. I pressed him on that, more for his benefit than for anything else . . . It was another of those things, you either court-martial him or you give him a medal."

"I had no reason to question his motives or his actions."

What if the man Kerry killed was wounded at the time? Elliott was dismissive. "In combat, as much reaction as thoughtful action, lots of guys have been killed by a wounded man. I don't know what weapon he had, or if he had, but you don't have much time to think in those situations."

But were there no eyewitnesses? "That may be my recollection. There was a dead guy there and John had a weapon. That's the way it is sometimes.

"Where the rest of the men were, and what they saw, I can't remember. I took the stories down, what I considered to be corroboration . . . There is no question that someone ran and that a few seconds later there was a dead man behind the hootch."

What about Bellodeau's medal? "There may have been another guy. You try to spread the glory around. It's hard to describe what you try to do with decorations. It's part hype, part leadership. You don't want to cheapen it but you've got to recognize uncommon behavior. You've got to get them to go back out there.

"I had Purple Hearts in foot-cube boxes to give out," recalls Elliott. "You have aluminum boats, there's a lot of shrapnel flying around." But he says he recommended few other Silver Stars -- possibly as few as one other. "I had two Bronze Stars myself. People say to me, `Did you earn 'em?' I say, `I earned one of them. A Silver Star was hard to come by.' "

So what actually happened behind the hootch? Without corroborative accounts, all talk about what happened on Feb. 28 necessarily remains conjecture.

What's the best interpretation? That a breathless young lieutenant, his pulse pounding with the exhilaration of battle, ran some distance from the river bank in pursuit of a soldier, turned the corner behind the hootch and came face to face with an enemy ready to kill him -- and that he fired in self-defense.

What's the ugliest possibility? That behind the hootch Kerry administered a coup de grace to the Vietnamese soldier -- a practice not uncommon in those days, but a war crime nevertheless, and hardly the basis for a Silver Star. And that he went back the next day with a movie camera, perhaps to build his own case for what happened. Different people will draw different conclusions from the limited information that is available, depending on their experiences.

Whatever happened that day, it clearly played a part in turning John Kerry against the war -- against the experience of war in general. Ever since his famous testimony before Congress in 1971 as a founder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War -- "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" -- Kerry has been an eloquent foe of the organized, socially sanctioned killing that is war. There's something deeply moving about Kerry's last remarks on the subject to author Carroll.

Read those words again: "I just won't talk about all of it. I don't and I can't. The things that probably really turned me I've never told anybody. Nobody would understand." Whatever they conceal, Kerry's words are moving -- heartbreakingly, unspeakably, unforgettably moving. Perhaps what happened behind that hootch is enough to begin to account for John F. Kerry's transformation and for the personal testimony he has given ever since.

The other personal transformation at the heart of this column is more difficult to explain. It is that of Tommy Bellodeau. Did he mean to tell me a story that was slightly different from that of the senator? (Or, for that matter, different from the one the Globe's Sennott says Bellodeau gave him during a two-hour interview?) I don't know. He wasn't actively calling my attention to the discrepancy, of that I'm sure. He was simply telling his story of what had happened that day.

Does any of it matter now?

Painful as it is to revisit Vietnam battlefields with a skeptical eye -- especially in the late stages of a noisome election campaign -- the answer to the question of relevance seems to me to be unambiguously yes. But the reason is not so much because Kerry's war record has been at the center of Kerry campaigns since 1972.

Rather, the story of what happened behind the hootch matters because it calls attention to the enormity of the moral maze at the center of which Kerry has lived his life ever since he enlisted in the Navy straight out of college in 1966 -- the existential dilemma that William F. Weld so artfully and casually dodged, then and now.


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one of..... We The People

[kate]

KERRY DEFENDS WAR RECORD
Worcester Telegram & Gazette (MA)
October 28, 1996


BOSTON - Stung by a column questioning the circumstances of his greatest war triumph, Sen. John F. Kerry gathered his commanders and crew from Vietnam yesterday to rebuff what several called an assault on Kerry's integrity.

Kerry, visibly angered, recounted how he chased down a Viet Cong soldier in February 1969 and killed him as he was about to fire a rocket into Kerry's Swift boat. The action earned him the Silver Star, the country's third highest honor for bravery.
The critical column, however, quoted the boat's forward gunner as saying Kerry actually finished off the soldier after the gunner wounded him.

Yesterday, the gunner, Tom Belodeau of Dracut, stood beside Kerry and said he had been misquoted.

"This man was not lying on the ground. This man was more than capable of destroying that boat and everybody on it. Senator Kerry did not give him that opportunity," Belodeau said.

Belodeau did concede he may have wounded the Viet Cong soldier with a burst from his own gun, but he said Kerry did more than just finish him off. The columnist, economics writer David Warsh of The Boston Globe, noted that such a "coup de grace" would have been considered a war crime.

`ON BOTH FEET'

"The soldier that Senator John Kerry shot was standing on both feet with a loaded rocket launcher, about to fire it on the boat from which (Kerry) had just left, which still had four men aboard," Belodeau said.

In his own remarks, Kerry took on Warsh personally.

"This was a firefight, life or death, and it was that way every single day, and for some desk jockey who wants to come in, who hasn't seen a firefight in his life, to try to say that, it's just wrong. Period. Wrong," he said.

Kerry's military career has long been a source of pride. He was wounded and received a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts.

The Democrat also describes it as a defining period in his life, since he came home opposed to the war and began his public life as co-founder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

The most celebrated moment came on Feb. 28, 1969. A three-boat flotilla Kerry was commanding on a river in South Vietnam came under fire, and Kerry took his boat directly into it. By the end, a Viet Cong soldier was dead and Kerry was carrying an enemy rocket launcher with a rocket still loaded in the chamber.

`HE STAYED DOWN'

In the column, Warsh quotes Belodeau as saying in the course of their interview, "You know, I shot that guy. ... When I hit him, he went down and got up again. When Kerry hit him, he stayed down."

The column clearly struck a nerve with Kerry, who finds himself in the closing days of a pitched re-election battle with Gov. William F. Weld. Two polls released yesterday showed the race is still a statistical dead heat.

Weld received educational and medical deferments from serving in Vietnam, something Kerry has never directly challenged. But Kerry was clearly insulted over having a segment of his service questioned.

Kerry's staff arranged a news conference at the Courageous Sailing Center in the Charlestown Navy Yard. It also flew in several people who attested to Kerry's character and his version of events.

They were retired Admiral E.R. Zumwalt Jr., who commanded U.S. naval forces in Vietnam; retired Capt. George Elliott, Kerry's commander at the time of the shooting; retired Cmdr. Adrian Longsdale, who commanded shoreline operations at the time; and Belodeau, an electrician who is currently working in Michigan.

Also participating by phone from San Francisco was Michael Medeiros, who was the rear gunner on the Swift boat. Tom Vallely, a former Marine and Kerry's close friend, introduced each speaker.

Zumwalt, with two Navy ships and the USS Constitution anchored nearby, said he remembered only two such incidents from Vietnam, and one was Kerry's.

Zumwalt also said he wanted to recommend Kerry for an even higher medal, the Navy Cross, but approval would have taken too long. Instead, he personally approved a Silver Star and sped along the award to improve morale at a time his sailors were taking heavy casualties.

"To me it was such a terrible insult, such an absolutely outrageous misinterpretation of the facts, that I felt it was important to be here," Zumwalt said. "A wartime commander has a lifetime responsibility to look out for the guys under him."

Medeiros, who was chasing after Kerry and the fleeing soldier, said he did not see Kerry kill him but had no doubt that the senator had done so.

"The only one that was there was Senator Kerry," he said

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one of..... We The People

[kate]

Here's a lil bonus

The Boston Herald
October 14, 1979

Kerry discussing the movie "Apocalypse Now"