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From Instapundit Glenn Reynolds.


http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/30540.htm

From Powerline group in the New York Post great column on Kerry

THE MYSTERIES OF JOHN KERRY'S WAR RECORD

By JOHN HINDERAKER, SCOTT JOHNSON & EDWARD MORRISSEY
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September 20, 2004 -- WHEN John Kerry "reported for duty" at the Democratic Na tional Convention and pres ented himself as qualified to lead by virtue of his service in Vietnam, he opened up for public scrutiny his actions in Vietnam and, later, as an antiwar activist. Kerry's critics, including the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, promptly responded with a critique of Kerry's record. The charges and counter-charges have left many confused, especially as some issues seem to turn on obscure, if not arcane, facts.

What follows is a primer on the main issues, the evidence and open questions.


Christmas in Cambodia





On March 27, 1986, Kerry took the floor of the U.S. Senate to deliver a dramatic indictment of Reagan administration foreign policy. As is his habit, he drew on his Vietnam experience: "I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and having the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there."


He continued: "I have that memory which is seared — seared — in me, that says to me, before we send another generation into harm's way we have a responsibility in the U.S. Senate to go the last step, to make the best effort possible to avoid that kind of conflict."


Kerry has told of this Cambodia trip many times, from a 1979 Boston Herald review of "Apocalypse Now" to a June 1, 2003, Washington Post profile. The Post's Laura Blumenfeld reported that Kerry pulled a mildewed hat out of his briefcase and described it as "my good luck hat, given to me by a CIA man as we went in for a special mission in Cambodia."


Yet parts of Kerry's story are incredible on their face — such as saying Richard Nixon was responsible for the illegal mission, when Lyndon Johnson was president in 1968.


And there is no record that Swift boats were ever used for secret missions in Cambodia. (Their size and noisy engines make them ill-suited for the job.) Kerry's authorized biography, "Tour of Duty" by Douglas Brinkley, makes no mention of any such mission during Kerry's service.


Not a single crewman who served with Kerry has supported his claim to have entered Cambodia, and three have expressly denied it. Kerry's commanding officers have denied he was ever sent there. And Kerry's own Vietnam journal (excerpted in the Boston Globe) shows that on Christmas 1968 he was docked at Sa Dec, 50 miles from Cambodia.


In mid-August, these facts promped the Kerry campaign to "correct" the story, saying the mission took place in January 1969 when Kerry "inadvertently or responsibly" crossed the border.


Yet "inadvertently" straying into Cambodia — were that even possible — belies the basic point of Kerry's original story: that he lost his faith in government because the president lied about having sent U.S. troops into Cambodia. It also contradicts his story about ferrying a CIA man.


And the "correction" plainly hasn't sunk in: The Democratic Party chairman, Terry McAuliffe, told us in an interview earlier this month that Kerry had made two missions to Cambodia to drop off CIA men.


Some questions that Kerry himself has yet to answer: When exactly did he enter Cambodia? Accidentally, or intentionally? If by accident, how did that lead him to lose faith in the government? If on a secret mission, what was its purpose? What is the name of the CIA man? Why is there no record of any Cambodia mission, even in Kerry's journals? And why do Kerry's crewmates and fellow officers unanimously deny that any such mission ever occurred?


First Combat . . . Maybe



Kerry won his first Purple Heart for a combat engagement on Dec. 2, 1968, while training on a skimmer, or Boston whaler. On his campaign Web site, Kerry claims that on that day, he "experiences his first intense combat; receives combat-related injury" — for which he would eventually receive a Purple Heart.


But in "Tour of Duty," Brinkley writes:


"They pulled away from the pier at Cat Lo with spirits high, feeling satisfied with the way things were going for them. They had no lust for battle, but they also were not afraid. Kerry wrote in his notebook, 'A cocky feeling of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel because we hadn't been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven't been shot at are allowed to be cocky.' "


According to Kerry's journal, the date on which he "hadn't been shot at yet" was Dec. 9. Which means he hadn't been in combat on Dec. 2.


This fits in with the Swift vets' contention that Kerry's initial request for a Purple Heart had been denied by the chain of command. In fact, he didn't get a Purple Heart commendation for his Dec. 2 injury until months later, after transferring to a different command — which took Kerry at his word on being under enemy fire in the earlier engagement.


Kerry's campaign has now admitted that his first Purple Heart wound may have been unintentionally self-inflicted, sustained when he exploded a hand grenade too close to shore. The Kerry camp has not responded substantively to questions on the discrepancies between his citation and his journal entries as published by his biographer.


False Memories Of Fighting Together



David Alston has accompanied Kerry on campaign appearances, giving powerful testimony about Kerry's leadership under fire (including perhaps the most effective speech on Kerry's behalf at the Democratic Convention).


Alston and Kerry have both spoken of two engagements in which they took fire together on PCF-94, one on Jan. 29, 1969, the other on Feb. 28, 1969, when Kerry won his Silver Star.


Problems with these stories arose this April, when Lt. Tedd Peck complained that Kerry had appropriated one of Peck's actions as his own. It turned out that Peck, not Kerry, commanded PCF-94 on Jan. 29.


Both Peck and Alston were seriously wounded in that battle. We know that no other officer was aboard PCF-94, because enlisted man Del Sandusky took command after Peck was disabled. So Kerry's claim to have commanded the boat in that engagement is clearly false.


Kerry spokesman Michael Meehan created a timeline that credited all of PCF-94's January engagements to Kerry. Only after Peck complained publicly did Kerry stop trying to take credit for engagements that occurred before he was assigned to PCF-94. The campaign Website now notes only that he took command of PCF-94 in "late January."


According to records formerly available on the site, Alston was Medevaced to an Army hospital in Binh Thuy after being injured in the Jan. 29 fight, and did not return quickly. Kerry took command of PCF-94, the next day, replacing the injured Lt. Peck. The boat also got at least one and probably two new gunners to replace Alston. Fred Short arrived as the new gunner on Feb. 13.


On Feb. 28, PCF-94 took part in the engagement that won Kerry a Silver Star, and a commendation for every member of his crew. Alston has repeatedly asserted, since at least May 2002, that he participated in that action. In an interview with ABC News on June 24, Alston said: "I know when John Kerry told Del to beach that damn boat, this was a brand-new ball game. We wasn't running. We took it to Charlie."


"We?" All of Kerry's crew received commendations for this action. Absent from the list is the name David Alston. But Short's name is listed, and he was photographed at the award ceremony along with Kerry and his five enlisted men (a full PCF crew). Not in the photo: David Alston.


In an interview with Byron York of National Review, Short said that Alston didn't return to PCF-94 until after March 4, 1969, well after the Feb. 28 engagement. The exact date of Alston's return remains a mystery because (like Kerry) Alston has refused to release his military records. What is clear is that both Alston and Kerry have lied since at least May 2002 about Alston's service under Kerry.


Why did Kerry claim to have been in command of PCF-94 on Jan. 29, 1969? Why did Kerry try to replace Fred Short with David Alston as gunner in the Feb. 28 engagement? Only Kerry and Alston can explain. But since the controversy arose, Alston has disappeared from the campaign trail.


One Medal, Three Citations



In that Feb. 28 engagement, Kerry beached his PCF to frontally assault a Viet Cong ambush. He then leapt off the boat and chased an armed VC from the beach, killing him and capturing his rocket launcher. On that much, everyone agrees. The mystery surrounds the three differing citations Kerry has for the Silver Star he earned that day.


Adm. Elmo Zumwalt personally awarded the medal to Kerry. The citation (No. 1) notes that "an enemy soldier sprang up from his position not ten feet from Patrol Craft Fast 94 and fled. Without hesitation, Lieutenant (junior grade) KERRY leaped ashore, pursued the man behind a hootch and killed him . . . " The citations says the operation resulted in 10 Viet Cong killed.


For most people, one citation per award is sufficient. However, Kerry has another (No. 2) for this incident, this one signed by Adm. John Hyland, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet.


This citation fails to mention the VC that Kerry killed, but has added praise: Kerry now acted "with utter disregard for his own safety and the enemy rockets" and has now faced a "numerically superior force."


Citation No. 3 was signed by John Lehman as secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, more than 10 years after the action. It's nearly identical to No. 2, except it adds, "By his brave actions, bold initiative, and unwavering devotion to duty, Lieutenant (jg) Kerry reflected great credit upon himself."


What really happened on the Dong Cung River that day? Kerry's own crew (most of whom support his candidacy) insisted that Kerry chased the injured VC behind the hootch, out of sight of the crew, before killing him. Kerry denies leaving his crew's sight — which would be a brave but foolish tactical mistake for the commander of a beached boat under fire. And both later citations fail to mention Kerry personally killing the VC.


Last week, The Post's Deborah Orin confirmed from Navy sources that the original teletype of the after-action report had been found in the Naval Archives. It confirms the statements of Kerry's crew: "OinC [Officer in Command] of PCF 94 chased VC inland behind hootch and shot him while he fled capturing one B-40 rocket launcher with round in chamber."


The report also makes clear that the three PCFs carried a contingent of 90 Vietnamese RFPF troops, which would have hardly made their patrol numerically inferior to the snipers that ambushed them. And the final calculation of KIA from that mission, according to the immediately-filed after-action report, was 4 KIA, not 10 or a score as the citations state.


Kerry performed well under fire. But his changing stories regarding the action have mysteriously found their way into the extraordinary series of citations that stretch out over a decade for this single action and award.


Lehman, moreover, insists that he never signed the third citation nor wrote the additional language. On Friday, the Navy inspector general concluded, following an investigation prompted by a Judicial Watch request, that the proper procedure had been followed in the processes initially used to approve Kerry's medals and the officers involved had proper authority to approve the awards. But Adm. R. A. Route's probe didn't address any qualitative review of Kerry's awards, and Lehman's disavowal of citation No. 3 has prompted a separate investigation.


Conclusion



Much more could be said about John Kerry and the Vietnam years, but this primer may suggest why Kerry has been keeping his distance from the press these last six weeks. Kerry can put some of these questions to rest — by signing the standard military form to allow his records to be made public. Until those records are released, many questions will remain unanswered.





http://www.nationalreview.com/owens/owens200409200858.asp

Via Instapundit



September 20, 2004, 8:58 a.m.
“Seared in My Memory”
Reclaiming stolen honor this election year.



John Kerry's decision to run for president on his record in Vietnam has ripped the scab off of the wounds that war inflicted on the American body politic. Some of Kerry's defenders have laid this charge at the feet of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, but the fact is that they were responding to what they perceived as an affront to their honor. This is why all the attempts to paint them as Republican stooges are so far off of the mark.

I believe my own motivation in publicizing Kerry's actions after the war is typical of most anti-Kerry veterans, including the Swifties. I would never have written my first NRO piece back in January had Kerry chosen to run on his Senate record. But to coin a phrase, his April 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is "seared in my memory" and I believe his attempt now to surround himself with people he had once described as war criminals represents the height of cynicism and hypocrisy.


BEFORE AND AFTER
Of course, the Kerry campaign and most of the press blew off the pieces I wrote for NRO in January and for National Review in February as an attempt to question his service in Vietnam. The volume of e-mails and phone calls I received from Vietnam veterans agreeing with me demonstrated that I was far from alone. But owing to a lack of media interest, the issue dropped off the scope, permitting Kerry and his apologists to avoid addressing it.

Enter the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. They were motivated not only by Kerry's actions after the war but by the hagiographic portrayal of his Vietnam service in Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty. Despite a desperate attempt to dismiss the Swifties as Republican goons, Kerry and his defenders in the media were forced to deal with the substance of the Swifties' charges. This they did with varying degrees of success, owing to the fact that men in battle often perceive the same event differently. It does seem clear that Kerry did not spend Christmas of 1968 in Cambodia as he claimed on numerous occasions. There are also legitimate questions about the circumstances surrounding his first Purple Heart and his rescue of Jim Rassmann.

But there would seem to be no argument about Kerry's actions after the war. He did leave the Navy early to pursue a political career; he did join the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW); he did claim during his 1971 Senate testimony that American soldiers committed atrocities in Vietnam on a regular basis; he did participate in numerous instances of "political theater" put on by the VVAW, including Dewey Canyon III; and he did meet with representatives of the North Vietnamese Communist government. These events may have brought him to political prominence in the United States, but at the cost of alienating a substantial number of Vietnam veterans who believed he besmirched their honor and whose resulting anger has simmered for three decades.


WEAK DEFENSE
The first attempt to defend Kerry on the substance of the charge that he had dishonored all of those who fought in Vietnam with his 1971 Senate testimony was a series of arguments claiming that he really didn't mean to include everyone in Vietnam when he made his claim of widespread atrocities. He was, so the argument went, merely relating stories told by others. But if so, he should have chosen his words more carefully. The commonsense meaning of the statement that "over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command" seems to be that these accounts represent only the tip of the iceberg and, more important, that such actions represented U.S. policy against the Vietnamese.

So indeed, the second attempt to defend Kerry is now in play. His defenders claim that he was telling the truth — that atrocities did take place in Vietnam. Of course, as anyone who has read my articles knows, there is no controversy about this point. But the trick here, most on display in Peter Beinart's "Apocalypse Redux" in the September 6 issue of The New Republic, is to suggest that those who criticize Kerry are somehow denying that atrocities occurred in Vietnam at all. Beinart argues that the second Swift Boat ad (recounting Kerry's Senate testimony) doesn't claim that Kerry's charges were false, but "merely suggests he was unpatriotic for leveling them." Beinart then goes on to cite a number of historians who, sure enough, assure us that atrocities did occur in Vietnam.

But this is missing the point — whether intentionally or not I cannot say. This is now my eighth piece on this topic since January for National Review, NRO, The Weekly Standard, and the Jerusalem Post. In every one of those pieces as well as many others I have written over the years about the Vietnam War, I have stated unequivocally that Americans committed atrocities in Vietnam. I have never tried to whitewash the record, as one of my correspondents claimed.

As is often the case, Jim Webb — a Marine hero of the Vietnam War (Navy Cross) and best-selling author whose novel Fields of Fire is the best book about Vietnam — got to the crux of the matter in a recent NPR commentary when he said that the "stories of atrocious conduct, repeated in lurid detail by Kerry before the Congress, represented not the typical experience of the American soldier, but its ugly extreme" (emphasis added).


THE WINTER SOLDIER DISCONTENT
Some of us who believe that the American soldier did not typically commit atrocities have called into question the credibility of many of the accounts upon which Kerry based his testimony — the "Winter Soldier Investigation" (WSI), an early 1971 event in Detroit organized by the VVAW and sponsored by Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory, and conspiracy theorist Mark Lane. I had read Lane's 1970 book, Conversations with Americans, and was struck by how implausible most of the atrocity claims were. I was not alone. Lane's book was panned by James Reston Jr. and Neil Sheehan, not exactly known as supporters of the Vietnam War. Sheehan in particular demonstrated that many of Lane's "eyewitnesses" either had never served in Vietnam or had not done so in the capacity they claimed.

The transcripts of the WSI struck me the same way. My own beliefs were reinforced several years later by the publication of Guenter Lewy's America in Vietnam, in which he related the difficulty that military investigators faced trying to get particulars. As I wrote in the February 23 issue of National Review, paraphrasing Lewy, when the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) attempted to interview those who allegedly had witnessed atrocities, most refused to cooperate, even after assurances that they would not be questioned about atrocities they might have committed personally. Those that did cooperate never provided details of actual crimes to investigators. The NIS also discovered that some of the most grisly testimony was given by fake witnesses who had appropriated the names of real Vietnam veterans.

The same thing happened with Army investigators. As Lewy wrote,

the refusal of [those who claimed to have witnessed atrocities] to give substantiating factual information in support of their atrocity allegations created a situation in which the accusers continued to reap generous publicity for their sensational charges while the Army in most cases could neither investigate nor refute them...As of April 1971, the CID (the Army's Criminal Investigative Division) had determined that [in one case] 7 of 16 allegations...which could be investigated were unfounded or unsubstantiated. Most of the allegations were so general as to defy investigation.

My skepticism about the WSI was further strengthened by the publication of Stolen Valor by B. G. Burkett and Genna Whitley. In the course of trying to raise money for a Texas Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Burkett discovered that reporters were only interested in homeless veterans and drug abuse and that the corporate leaders he approached had bought into the popular image of Vietnam veterans: They were not honorable men who took pride in their service, but whining welfare cases, bellyaching about what an immoral government did to them.

Fed up, Burkett did something that any reporter worth his or her salt could have done: He used the Freedom of Information Act to check the actual records of the "image makers" used by reporters to flesh out their stories on homelessness, Agent Orange, suicide, drug abuse, criminality, or alcoholism. What he found was astounding. More often than not, the showcase "veteran" who cried on camera — about his dead buddies, about committing or witnessing atrocities, or about some heroic action in combat that led him to the current dead end in his life — was an impostor.

Indeed, Burkett discovered that over the last decade, some 1,700 individuals, including some of the most prominent examples of the Vietnam-veteran-as-dysfunctional-loser, had fabricated their war stories. Many had never even been in the service. Others had been, but had never been in Vietnam.

Lewy's account recently has been called into question and Burkett has been criticized for simply accusing everyone who talks about atrocities as a phony or imposter. In the August 30 TNR Online, historian John Prados writes regarding the WSI atrocity accounts that "a handful of individual stories may have been called into question, but the main thrust of the [WSI] testimonies — that American atrocities were widespread in Vietnam — is today beyond dispute. Indeed the emergence of new evidence during the last 30 years has only solidified the winter soldiers' overall case." He then criticizes Lewy's account of the WSI:

Lewy's primary evidence consists of noting that VVAW members refused to give depositions. When the Naval Investigative Service tried to pull VVAW members into an inquiry, it found one Marine who either could not or would not give details of what he had seen and allegedly located several other veterans who said they had never gone to Detroit. (O'Neill had cited this same information in his televised debate with Kerry.) But even if true, these incidents were far too limited to establish anything in particular about the Winter Soldier Investigation; the fact that some of the winter soldiers declined to give depositions does not prove or disprove the legitimacy of the entire project. The VVAW leadership left it up to individual members to decide how to respond to requests for depositions. And veterans had good reasons to decline. For one thing, they argued that their purpose was to protest U.S. policy, not to draw attention to individual soldiers. What's more, with the VVAW under direct assault from the Nixon administration, it's understandable that the group's members were loath to cooperate with government investigators.

The debate turns, it seems to me, on Prados's assertion that it is today beyond dispute that "American atrocities were widespread in Vietnam." Again I stipulate that they did occur. Recent revelations include the Son Thang event described by Marine Corps veteran Gary D. Solis in his book Son Thang: An American War Crime and the more troubling "Tiger Force" story broken earlier this year by the Toledo Blade, which reported that members of an elite unit of the 327th Airborne Infantry in the Central Highlands in 1967 committed war crimes ranging from murder and assault to dereliction of duty.

Of course the best-known incident was the admission several years ago by Bob Kerrey, the highly respected former senator from Nebraska and Medal of Honor recipient, that the Navy SEAL team he led in Vietnam killed women and children during a nighttime mission some 32 years ago.

Kerrey's admission was prompted by a lengthy New York Times Magazine story by Gregory Vistica that went further than the charge that civilians died during this action. It contained the explosive claim that then-Lieutenant (j.g.) Kerrey had ordered the civilians to be rounded up and then shot point-blank to facilitate the SEAL team's escape. If this allegation is true, what happened that night in the Mekong Delta village of Thanh Phong was more than a terrible tragedy of war — it was a war crime.



KERRY, THE SOVIET PROPAGANDIST
These are all troubling events. But they do not prove that atrocities in Vietnam were more widespread than in previous wars. Additionally, there is no evidence that atrocities were a matter of policy, as suggested in this September 1970 VVAW flyer issued in conjunction with one of its stunts:


A
US Infantry
Company Just
Came through
Here!

If you had been Vietnamese —

We might have burned your house
We might have shot your dog
We might have shot you
We might have raped your wife and daughter
We might have turned you over to the government for torture
We might have taken souvenirs from your property
We might have shot things up a bit
We might have done all these things to you and your whole town


Let's put things in perspective. Some three million men served in Vietnam. Since the logistics tail of U.S. forces is fairly large, only about 25 percent, or 750,000, served in combat units. If we add up all of the atrocities, both proven and alleged, and multiply them by two as a hedge against under-reporting, the percentage of American combat soldiers who might have committed atrocities is still less than 1 percent of the total. I doubt that many armies in history could match that record.

I have tried on many occasions to get to the heart of why some Americans committed atrocities in Vietnam and others didn't. The fact is that anyone who has been in combat understands the thin line between permissible acts and atrocity. The first and potentially most powerful emotion in combat is fear arising from the instinct of self-preservation.

But in soldiers, fear is overcome by what the Greeks called thumos, spiritedness or righteous indignation. It is thumos, awakened by the death of his comrade Patroclus, that causes Achilles to quit sulking in his tent and wade into the Trojans, slaughtering them in great numbers. But unchecked, thumos can engender rage and frenzy. It is the role of leadership, which provides strategic context for killing and enforces discipline, to prevent this outcome. Such leadership was not in evidence at My Lai, or most of the other cases of atrocities.

In the May 3 issue of National Review, I suggested three reasons that explain the belief on the part of so many that atrocities in Vietnam were more frequent than in other wars and that they were a part of policy: 1) Soviet propaganda; 2) the belief on the part of the veterans who related atrocity stories that they were telling their listeners what they wanted to hear; and 3) liars and phonies.

In America in Vietnam, Lewy noted the establishment of a veritable war-crimes industry, supported by the USSR, as early as 1965. As Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former Romanian intelligence chief, has recounted, the Soviets set up permanent international organizations — including the International War Crimes Tribunal and the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam — "to aid or to conduct operations to help Americans dodge the draft or defect, to demoralize its army with anti-American propaganda, to conduct protests, demonstrations, and boycotts, and to sanction anyone connected with the war." Pacepa claims to have been responsible for fabricating stories about U.S. atrocities in Vietnam and "flacking" them to Western news organizations. Lewy writes that "the Communists made skillful use of their worldwide propaganda apparatus . . . and they found many Western intellectuals only too willing to accept every conceivable allegation of [American] wrongdoing at face value."

The VVAW, a small, radical group that never exceeded a membership of 7,000 (including John Kerry) from a pool of nearly three million Vietnam (and nine million Vietnam-era) veterans, essentially "Americanized" Soviet propaganda. When he testified before the Senate in 1971, Kerry was merely repeating charges that had been making the rounds since 1965.

To the anti-war Left, atrocities revealed the Nazi-like character of "Amerika." But, unlike their Nazi counterparts, U.S. soldiers could be redeemed: By confessing atrocities, the Vietnam veterans, once denigrated as "baby killers," were able to receive absolution from the Left, and were transmuted into innocent victims of a brutal war. American military sociologist Charles Moskos has suggested that atrocity stories out of Vietnam were the functional equivalent of heroic war stories from World War II: They provided a meaning to participation in Vietnam that resonated with those who opposed the war and were now judging the returning soldiers. Some atrocity claims were the product of outright fantasy, on the part of soldiers who returned from the war emotionally disturbed. The (anti-war) psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton wrote of a veteran who, after some time in group therapy, could "confess that he had been much less violent in Vietnam than he had implied. He had previously given the impression that he had killed many people there, whereas in actuality, despite extensive combat experience, he could not be certain he had killed anyone."

Third were the phonies: In response to the claim that some if not many of those who testified at the WSI event were exaggerating or even imposters, Prados writes that "every veteran who presented in Detroit had to show a copy of his military papers (the military form known as DD-214) to demonstrate that he had actually been present at the places and times he was speaking about."

Let me be clear. Not all atrocity stories can be pawned off as the work of phonies. But one of the most striking revelations of Stolen Valor is how easy it is to produce fraudulent records, including the DD-214. And anyone who served in Vietnam has no doubt at one time or another confronted a wannabe Vietnam vet. It has always amazed me how many people want to claim to have served in such an unpopular war.

I would add a fourth reason — the passing down of a story from soldier to soldier. According to FactCheck.org, Keith Nolan, author of ten published books on Vietnam, says he's heard many veterans describe atrocities just like those Kerry recounted from the Winter Soldier event. Since 1978, Nolan has interviewed roughly 1,000 veterans in depth for his books, and spoken to thousands of others. "I have heard the exact same stories dozens if not hundreds of times over," he said. "Wars produce atrocities. Frustrating guerrilla wars produce a particularly horrific number of atrocities. That some individual soldiers and certain units responded with excessive brutality in Vietnam shouldn't really surprise anyone."

Let me recount a personal anecdote that makes me question the idea that a story heard many times validates it. I didn't commit or witness atrocities during my tour as a Marine infantry platoon leader. As far as I know, neither did the other officers in my regiment and battalion. But I heard of an atrocity just after I joined the unit. A Marine who was scheduled to rotate soon recounted an incident that he claimed had occurred shortly after he had arrived in the unit about a year earlier.

According to the story, members of a sister company had killed some North Vietnamese soldiers after they had surrendered. Some months later, I heard another Marine who had joined my platoon after I took it over relate exactly the same story to some newly arrived men, only now it involved me and my platoon. I had a little chat with him and he cleared things up with the new men. But that episode has always made me wonder how many of the stories have been recycled and how many accounts of atrocities are based on what veterans heard as opposed to committed or witnessed. Of course, an account based on hearsay may be true. After all, the soldier who broke the My Lai story was not present during the massacre.

Unfortunately for the body politic, this issue is not going to go away. Too many veterans have long memories and they believe that Kerry sacrificed their honor on the altar of his political ambitions.

— Mackubin Thomas Owens is a professor of national-security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He led a Marine infantry platoon in Vietnam in 1968-69.

_________________
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