Yes Virginia, there is a big problem with John Kerry, as his Vietnam record shows
A fan of John F. Kennedy and his WWII exploits, young John F. Kerry had his own political ambitions. He volunteered for service in the Navy, during the War in Vietnam; this, after the Yale undergrad had written against the war effort. Soon, he was serving in the Pacific on the ocean-going ship, USS Gridley. However, in an unanticipated move Lt. Kerry was put in charge of a Swift Boat, a small patrol boat, in the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam. There, he and his crew participated in a few altercations with the Viet Cong, along with the crews of other Swift Boats.
Kerry returned to the US with an astounding number of medals for four months of combat service. But, his record of exploits and the reasons for his combat medals have been disputed by a great majority of officers in his chain of command. A majority of his own crew support his stories, but almost all the rest say he twisted combat reports, for awards.
There is also cause to suspect he was not given an honorable discharge, until President Carter arranged it for him, years later. Unlike George W. Bush, Kerry has not signed a "180 Form" which would allow his entire military record to be publicly investigated and has refused to address specific allegations. But it gets much worse.
Soon, Kerry became a principle organizer with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. With this organization, he testified to Congress that he and his fellow combatants were engaged in rampant war crimes; i.e., rape, cutting off people's extremities, electrocuting men's testicles, burning villages, etc. Since then, others have confessed their false testimony and one has declared Kerry told him to lie. (However, others have verified that Kerry himself set fire to a village and ordered the killing of its livestock.) Kerry has made no apologies.
Further, at the beginning of the time he protested the war, still a commissioned officer of the US Naval Reserves, Kerry met twice with Communist Vietnamese leaders. He even mentioned this in writing, not long thereafter. Though "Nam" was not a declared war, these were definitively illegal, perhaps treasonous acts.
The allegations and lies of Kerry and his cohorts helped to turn the minds of many of the American people against our war efforts -- against our leaving Vietnam with effective leverage on the Communists. Further, Kerry's war crime allegations proved to be useful to the Communists in demoralizing not only the US military still engaged in Vietnam; they were used in psychological operations against American prisoners of war. Some believe these anti-war psyops kept them in the POW prison longer.
After Kerry became a US Senator, he was entrusted to lead an investigation of our missing in Vietnam. However, reporting indicates this served to quash testimony and destroy evidence indicating the withholding of American POW's by the Communists.
Kerry and his cohorts pushed America to end hostilities in Vietnam without securing the release of American POW's. Over 1,000 Americans, POW or MIA, were never accounted for by the Vietnamese Communists (or the US Government).
After our withdrawal and the Communist conquest of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia also fell. Our lack of a leverage in the region has been cited as allowing the subsequent murders of over 2,000,000 Southeast Asians after the war, mostly but not only Cambodians. You see, the Nixon administration had committed to resume the bombing of strategic Communist Vietnamese positions, at the very least, if they invaded South Vietnam. However, he resigned and Presidents Ford and Carter did not follow through.
Why is it an issue now?
John Kerry wants to be entrusted as our Commander in Chief during our unprecedented war. He says he wants us to be much less aggressive and less independent than we have had to be. Again, his integrity has been questioned.
As the maxim goes, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
