SwiftVets.com

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Swift boat veterans explain their beef with Kerry
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/nation/9509051.htm
By TOM INFIELDand RON HUTCHESON

Knight Ridder Newspapers


WASHINGTON — Leaders of the Swift boat veterans group criticizing presidential candidate John Kerry’s Vietnam War record said Thursday they were motivated in part by a book published earlier this year in which Kerry demonstrated a high opinion of himself — and a low opinion of them.

Kerry’s former commanding officer and two others above Kerry in the chain of command said the book, “Tour of Duty,” made it seem as if Kerry had been the only hero in a war that later, as a war protester, he labeled wrong-headed and immoral. The book, by historian Douglas Brinkley, was based largely on Kerry’s war diaries.

In interviews with Knight Ridder, the veterans denied any ties to Bush or the Republican party. They said their motives for attacking Kerry were deeply personal.

“We are nonpolitical,” said former Navy Adm. Roy Hoffmann, of Richmond, Va., who commanded the naval forces on the coast of Vietnam and its inland waterways.

Hoffmann said he found “gross exaggerations” and “distortions of fact” in the Brinkley book. Brinkley wrote that Kerry saw Hoffmann as approving cowboy tactics and holding a cavalier attitude toward civilian casualties.

Hoffmann contacted other veterans and before long, he said, he had “80 to 100 people solidly lined up” to produce a new book — “Unfit for Command” by John E. O’Neill and Jerome R. Corsi — that challenges Kerry.

Other veterans cited similar motives. “I had forgotten all of this, and then the book came out,” said retired Navy Capt. George M. Elliott, of Lewes, Del., who as Kerry’s immediate superior had praised his performance in reports. “Thirty years ago, every man in United States military uniform was a war criminal, and in 2004 a lone hero emerges and his name is John Kerry. That’s not right. That’s just not right.”

Retired Coast Guard Capt. Adrian Lonsdale, a Massachusetts resident who supported Kerry’s re-election to the Senate in 1996, also changed his mind after he read “Tour of Duty.”

“If he’d given us some credit in his book and been positive about it, he’d probably have us backing him now,” Lonsdale said.

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