SwiftVets.com

[vincentc]

The Aug 29 Raleigh News and Observer editorial page contains a pro-Kerry whitewash today (standard, lame DNC talking points)
Steve Ford, I believe, is a veteran himself of the Vietnam era, but is obviously a Kerry apologist.

There are a huge number of soldiers and veterans in North Carolina,
some of whom vote in other states. So I encourage particularly fellow North Carolinians to tell Mr. Ford what you feel about Kerry's behavior during and after the war. And his continuing malicious falsehoods in "Tour of Duty" and on the floor of the Senate.


Vince Caserta
Durham, NC

http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/story/1580293p-7775045c.html

By STEVE FORD, Staff Writer

It didn't take a genius to predict that the war would become a white-hot issue in this year's Skull and Bones Invitational Throwdown, otherwise known as the race for the White House. But the war in Vietnam? Quite a few geniuses, their minds concentrated by the mayhem in Iraq, didn't see that coming. It could even be said they missed the boat.
The uproar over John Kerry's Swift boat exploits -- an uproar stoked by critics who have tried to paint this Silver Star recipient as a lily-livered liar -- began practically the moment Kerry presented himself as Vietnam hero to claim the Democratic nomination.

A solid month after his July 29 "reporting for duty" speech in Boston -- and with President Bush set to take his own party's stage this week -- the firefight at last seem to be quieting down. Looks like time, then, for a preliminary stab at an after-action report:

On the particulars of the accusations lodged by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Kerry has come through in fairly good shape.

While some ex-comrades in the brown-water Navy continue to claim that his medals for valor were undeserved, their broadsides are countered by the accounts of other people who were on the scenes and by official write-ups. The critics' main point -- that Kerry failed to exhibit the courage under fire for which he was honored, but accepted or even engineered those honors anyway -- certainly has not been proved.

Yes, there remains the dispute over whether Kerry and the Swift boat he commanded had ventured clandestinely into Cambodia on Christmas of 1968, as he apparently was fond of asserting. Let's say he was mistaken about that. Did he confuse dates or locations? He could have been flatly wrong without deliberately lying. Some want to assume the worst; if so, at least let them keep a sense of proportion in weighing the sin.

Kerry's Purple Hearts for superficial wounds? Unless somebody can show that he contrived to have medals awarded for injuries that shouldn't have qualified, he's in the clear.

On one of them, his first of three, the jury still may be out. But again, let those who imagine Kerry working the system to claim an unwarranted Purple Heart recall the dangers he routinely faced. Could there have been a sense that, hey, a Purple Heart for a shrapnel scratch was simply one of the perks of the job for which he had volunteered? It wouldn't have been his finest moment, but neither would it detract from the bravery he went on to display.

The fiercest criticism to come Kerry's way of course has not focused on his conduct in the combat zone. It was his high-profile antiwar stance upon his return that still drives some Vietnam vets up the wall. Sure, we take their point. But it might help them calm down if they'd try to be better listeners, not so quick to take antiwar views personally.

When Kerry testified in 1971 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he famously spoke of war crimes committed "on a day-to-day basis" by American fighters, "with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

Gory examples were cited, in generic terms. Kerry did not claim to have witnessed such conduct. He instead referred to testimony at an antiwar "investigation" where returned vets (or in some cases, it has been alleged, those falsely claiming to be returned vets) told their stories.

Huge umbrage was taken by veterans who thought they were being slandered, and their resentment has flamed anew now that Kerry is showcasing his medals. Kerry himself has conceded that he went over the top with his characterizations of torture, rape, pillage and desecration of bodies carried out by U.S. troops and tolerated by higher-ups.

But in fact, just because Kerry vouched for accounts that such outrages had occurred didn't mean he was accusing every American in Vietnam of committing them. And it's hard to deny the possibility of an ugly little kernel of truth in what he said. In wartime, abuses happen.

We can view Kerry's disillusionment with the war and his evolving opposition to it as a natural response to the waste and destruction he saw. To what he regarded as the pointlessness of it, even while it was harming so many people so terribly. Based on my year over there as a photographer in the Army, I surely can understand that kind of reaction to the massive bombardments, the free-fire zones, the environmental havoc, the deaths and injuries that just never seemed to stop. To what end?

A free and democratic South Vietnam obviously would have been desirable. But preventing a communist takeover of the south turned out not to have been a vital U.S. security concern at all. Nor could it be achieved at any cost that made sense.

Those who did their duty at great personal risk in spite of that, John Kerry among them, have deserved their honors. And if the Vietnam experience we've recently revisited has given us a fuller appreciation of war's unholy costs, that has probably been for the better.

Editorial page editor Steve Ford can be reached at 829-4512 or

[MarcB]

Good post Vince,

The News and Distorter are at work as always.

If all you NC guys/gals are interested in getting together for local action please feel free to send me a PM.

MarcB
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"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last."

- Winston Churchill, on Neville Chamberlain

[vincentc]

If anyone wants to proofread/fact-check this before I send it in, be my guest.
I dont have a miliary background, so my terminology might be off.

Thank you Swift Vets. You are national heroes, once again.
-Vince
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In his Aug. 29 editorial “Assessing Kerry’s battle damage”, N&O columnist Steve Ford dismisses legitimate concerns about John Kerry’s war and anti-war records.

Concerning the Bronze Star incident, the Kerry campaign has had to quietly retract the version of events represented in his “No Man Left Behind” campaign video at the DNC convention and in his recent authorized biography, “Tour of Duty”. Instead of Kerry returning back to rescue a lone man (Jim Rassmann) overboard, official records and all witnesses now say that it was Kerry’s boat (PCF-94) that sped downriver while an immobile boat (PCF-3) filled with dazed, unconscious began to take on water. Meanwhile, the other three boats were following standard operating procedure, aiding PCF-3 and its crew, and providing cover fire to ward off a possible ambush.

If we go by the after-action report and that seems to be treated as gospel by Kerry defenders, PCF-94 was 5000 meters down river before it turned around. According to John O’Neill in his book “Unfit for Command”, when Kerry returned (in approximately 10 minutes, assuming top speed) to pick up Rassmann, the rescue effort was well underway and the men of PCF-3 were being picked up one by one. Is it plausible that there was withering hostile fire from both banks at this point? The bucket brigade to keep PCF-3 continued for another 90 minutes while they waited for a coast guard cutter to medivac away the wounded. Then PCF-94 (sans Kerry, who caught a ride on the cutter) towed PCF-3 down river. If Kerry’s story is to be believed (he picked up Rassmann during hostile fire), this would mean that stationary boats were under automatic weapons fire from both banks for 10 minutes in a river the width of a soccer field. Common sense tells one that these boats would be sitting ducks. The damage reports only report 3 bullets holes total in the hulls of all five boats! If there is another explanation of the timeline, I think we need to hear that from Kerry himself. He could start by signing a Standard Form 180 which would release all his military records.

Unless he does, the public has a reason to suspect that like his political mentor Ted Kennedy, he also “fled the scene” in 1969 involving a capsizing vessel.

As far as Christmas in Cambodia, he repeated his oft-told story on the floor of the Senate in 1986 in order to dramatize a political point that President Reagan’s support of the Contras in Nicaragua was an illegal war, just as he was supposedly ordered to undertake in 1968. Since the Cambodian incursion would have then been against U.S. policy, he was carelessly disparaging his fellow officers and his commanding officers for political benefit. Why did he choose the date of Christmas? Apparently to make his story more believable, since everyone supposedly knows where they were on Christmas. His campaign has changed the story several times despite it being “seared, seared” in his memory in 1986. Recently, the campaign said he went there “accidentally”, “in January”, and/or “running guns for the CIA”.

After the war, he simply betrayed the United States, and has never apologized. Kerry said publicly at an anti-war rally in 1971 “Ho Chi Minh is the George Washington of Vietnam”. His group Vietnam Veterans against the War flew North Vietnamese flags and dressed in communist garb. He mocked the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima on the cover of a book he authored named “The New Soldier”. Still an officer in the Naval Reserves, he met secretly with North Vietnamese officials in Paris in 1971 in order to negotiate a U.S. withdrawal which included the admission of American war crimes and payment of reparations to the North. The VVAW contained scores of fake veterans who had never been to Vietnam, including its co-leader Al Hubbard. Any veteran can quickly spot a wannabe by asking a few questions “Where’d you serve? What units did you serve in?” The fact is that he allowed non-veterans to spew made-up atrocities and then repeated them wholesale in front of a public Senate Committee while U.S. soldiers bled in the rice patties. When the POWs came home in 1973 and told what they had suffered in Hanoi's prison camps, Jane Fonda, the primary sponsor of VVAW, called them "hypocrites and liars."

Ford shrugs off Kerry's 1971 Senate testimony, saying “just because Kerry vouched for accounts that such outrages had occurred didn't mean he was accusing every American in Vietnam of committing them.” Wrong. He contradicts himself with Kerry’s own words that they were “not isolated incidents, but occurred on day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” This is a charge Kerry never backed up or retracted. The Winter Soldiers participants didn’t sign affidavits, or cooperate with military investigators, even after being promised immunity.
Kerry's own spokesman John Hurley (former VVAW member) recently made unsubstantiated war crimes charges in "Tour of Duty" about Hurley's own unit, the 69th Engineers, which author Douglas Brinkley agreed to remove for the next edition.

Should only Vietnam veterans care about events thirty years ago? Hardly. Just analogize what Kerry has said and done to any era of American history past or present? What if young Lt. John Kennedy had returned from the Pacific and joined a “peace” group that brandished Japanese flags? While our G.I.s were on the Bataan Death March. Imagine Pat Tillman publicly denouncing his fellow Army rangers, visiting Osama Bin Laden in secret, and then posing for propaganda photographs. Whatever Mr. Ford's rationalizations about the problems of the Vietnam war, Kerry's anti-war past cannot be explained away so easily.

[phrein]

Excellent write up vincentc, send it!!!
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[FredRum]

Nice, but do more proofreading before sending it off.

2nd pp - "filled with dazed, unconscious began" is missing the word "men"
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