SwiftVets.com

[Jette]

As swift boat controversy swirls, DuPage Dems host Kerry crewmate Wasser

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

By The Leader-Chicago Bureau

LOMBARD -- James R. Wasser, second in command under Democrat Presidential candidate John Kerry on PCF-44 in Vietnam, will speak at the August 25 meeting of the Democrat Party of DuPage County at their campaign office at 1000 Rohlwing, Lombard.

Wasser was one of the 13 men who fought with Kerry in Vietnam who were on the podium at the Democrat National Convention to help introduce the nominee before he gave his speech accepting the his Party's nomination for President.


Among the 13 were the boatswain, gunnery mates, and petty officers who crewed the boat skippered by Kerry when he was a 25-year-old Navy lieutenant in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. Kerry calls them his Band of Brothers.


Wasser is now a union electrician who lives in Kankakee. He was a 2004 Democrat Convention delegate from Illinois.


Meanwhile, controversy about Kerry's tenure in Vietnam grows.

In his syndicated column today, conservative David Limbaugh calls the mainstream media "AWOL" on its coverage of contradicting accounts of Kerry's less than four months tour of Vietnam, particularly following the recent release of the book, Unfit for Command, co-authored by John O'Neill and Jerome Corsi.

Limbaugh writes:

John O'Neill doesn't timidly suggest that Kerry might have lied occasionally or exaggerated in Vietnam and afterward during his antiwar crusade. Rather he paints an unmistakable picture of Kerry as a ruthless, self-promoting egomaniac who systematically placed his own interests above his fellow soldiers and who was obsessively involved in building his resume at all costs during the entirety of his short tour in Vietnam.

O'Neill depicts Kerry -- with mountains of documented evidence -- as a pathological, unconscionable liar whose penchant for dishonesty in Vietnam was only exceeded by his brutal, unmitigated slander of his fellow soldiers when he rushed stateside to lobby against them, their superiors and the entire military establishment.


Limbaugh points to specific media bias:

They haven't been willing to engage in a debate with Mr. O'Neill. Instead, they have shouted him down. Just review the transcript of O'Neill's appearance on CNN's Crossfire, where James Carville and Lanny Davis ceaselessly berated O'Neill and literally wouldn't let him speak.

And Chris Matthews [MSNBC's Hardball], though he allowed O'Neill to speak between interruptions, couldn't seem to get past his perception that Kerry had to be a hero because the Navy, as an institution, bestowed multiple awards on him.

But if Chris had read the book, he would have understood that one of its premises is that Kerry often circumvented those who had actual knowledge of events and duped his superiors into giving him honors by falsifying reports and presumably recommending himself for these awards when his superiors refused to do so.

Thus far, Kerry has refused to release all his military and medical records that would help clarify disputes. The swift boat waters were further muddied recently over Kerry's "Christmas in Cambodia" story.


On the floor of the U.S. Senate on March 27, 1986, Kerry recalled:

I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared - seared - in me.

Kerry also told the Boston Globe:

I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real.

Now, Kerry crewmembers who will speak about it say they were never in Cambodia, and all living commanders of Kerry deny he was ever ordered to Cambodia.


Limbaugh concludes:

But what's even more damning to John Kerry's credibility is his unsubstantiated defamation of his fellow servicemen in his opportunistic Senate testimony and elsewhere upon his return from Vietnam. Kerry not only indicts his fellow soldiers as war criminals, but the entire command structure of the U.S. military as directing these types of activities.

Yet Kerry has never been able to produce specific names and dates of those who committed these actions, nor any real proof of systematic, much less top-down orchestrated atrocities. Kerry has never apologized for these slanders.


If just one tenth of what the Swiftees assert is true, we should shudder at the prospect of a Kerry presidency.