The Kerry Wars (Where was John Kerry December 24, 1968?)

JOHN KERRY, fresh from a three-day vacation at his retreat in Ketchum, Idaho, addressed the annual convention of the International Association of Fire Fighters in Boston last week, and it was quite a speech--combative, fiery, personal. The firefighters' union was one of the first to endorse Kerry during the Democratic primaries last year, as the candidate barnstormed among the snowy drifts of New Hampshire and Iowa, and on Thursday Kerry spoke to them plainly but forcefully, as one would to old friends. "Over the last week or so," Kerry began, "a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has been attacking me. Of course, this group isn't interested in the truth--and they're not telling the truth. They didn't exist until I won the nomination for president."

"Of course," Kerry went on, "the president keeps telling people he would never question my service to our country. Instead, he watches as a Republican-funded attack group does just that. Well, if he wants to have a debate about our service in Vietnam, here is my answer." He paused. "Bring it on."

The firefighters roared. Once a rhetorical staple of Kerry's on the campaign trail, the phrase "Bring it on" had been remaindered of late, the Kerry campaign having come to the decision, according to Democratic strategists, that the utterance sounded silly. But Kerry was all seriousness when he addressed the firefighters. This was personal.

Which shouldn't be surprising. It's not every day a war thought finished over 30 years ago starts up again. And that is a fair description of what has taken place on the campaign trail over the last two weeks, as the Kerry campaign wrestled with charges from a group of anti-Kerry Vietnam veterans that he distorted--even lied about--his war record. The group with the portentous name has accused Kerry of winning medals under false pretenses, of killing defenseless Vietnamese, of lying about his location and activities during the four months he spent in Vietnam. The veterans make their case in a television ad, which they ran in three key swing states (West Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin) and also in a book, Unfit for Command, which was written by the group's leader, a veteran named John O'Neill, along with a political scientist named Jerome Corsi.

These are not trivial claims. The Swifties don't give Kerry the benefit of the doubt on any issue. They challenge the circumstances behind every medal he earned in Vietnam. Their accusations are of three broad types.

First, there are issues of fact that are difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. The controversy over how Kerry earned his Bronze Star and third Purple Heart, for example, in which the young lieutenant pulled special forces soldier Jim Rassmann from the Bay Hap river, revolves around whether or not there was enemy fire at the time. Kerry says there was; the anti-Kerry veterans--some of whom were present that day, in boats alongside Kerry's--say there wasn't. The documentary evidence available so far backs Kerry's story. For example, Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs reported last week that a newly uncovered medal citation for Larry Thurlow, one of the veterans who challenge Kerry's account of the Rassmann incident, supports Kerry. Thurlow claims to have lost the citation over 20 years ago, but has refused to release his service records. Something similar happened in the case of Kerry's Silver Star, as one anti-Kerry vet told conflicting stories to the Boston Globe over the course of a year. In the final analysis, however, such claims boil down to Kerry's word versus his opponents'.

The second sort of accusation is even harder to pin down, because it delves into questions of intent. Personal scruples also play a role here. These are charges that Kerry was not entirely honest in the after-action reports he wrote from the field; that as time passed his version of battles grew exaggerated and distorted; that details in Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty, an account of Kerry's war years, conflict with those in the Boston Globe biography, John F. Kerry. The story of how Kerry earned his first Purple Heart falls into this category, as do the events surrounding an attack on a sampan by Kerry's crew in the late winter of 1969. The charge here is not that Kerry "lied," or even that he has "distorted" the truth, but that he has told inconsistent stories over the years, occasionally omitting certain details.

It is the third sort of charge--that Kerry has sometimes painted a demonstrably false picture of events--that is the hardest to dismiss. John O'Neill's group insists Kerry was not in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968, as the senator has repeatedly asserted that he was. They maintain that no one--including members of Kerry's crew who otherwise support the senator--has yet corroborated Kerry's presence in Cambodia that Christmas Eve. And indeed, after the charge had been vetted by a ravenous host of Internet bloggers, and broadcast on numerous talk radio and cable news programs, the Kerry campaign, along with Douglas Brinkley, was forced to concede: On this point, the anti-Kerry Swifties may be right.

On October 14, 1979, John Kerry made his debut as a film critic for the Boston Herald. The film in question was Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's sprawling, lushly photographed Vietnam War drama. Kerry's review was harsh. "Francis Coppola brings us Apocalypse Now the same way the politicians and generals brought us the war in Vietnam," Kerry wrote, "by spending a lot of money, displaying a lot of technical razzle-dazzle, and by losing all sense of proportion and direction." Plus, "Coppola's Vietnam is devoid of reality and feeling."

Kerry served in Vietnam from November 1968 to March 1969, and he related Coppola's movie to his own experience. "On more than one occasion," he went on, "I, like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, took my patrol boat into Cambodia." Kerry continued: "In fact 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." It was that same absurdity which Coppola failed to capture in the film, Kerry said.

Kerry's criticism was biting, but his implied chronology was off. President Nixon didn't claim there were no American troops in Cambodia in December 1968. Indeed, he couldn't have. He wasn't president until January 20, 1969. Nevertheless, Kerry continued to recount his Christmas Eve adventure in the waters of Cambodia after he was elected to the Senate in 1984.

For example, on March 27, 1986, Kerry took to the floor of the Senate to protest President Reagan's funding of the anti-Communist contras in Nicaragua. Like many Kerry speeches, this one warned against American intervention abroad by resurrecting the specter of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam: "Mr. President, I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia," Kerry began. "I remember what it was like to be shot at by 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," he went on, "that says to me, before we send another generation into harm's way, we have a responsibility in the United States Senate to go the last step, to make the best effort possible in order to avoid that kind of conflict."

The memory of his Christmas in Cambodia, indelibly seared into his mind, was such that Kerry often told others about it. Reporters, for example. In an AP dispatch published on June 25, 1992, reporter John Diamond wrote that, by Christmas 1968, "part of Kerry's patrol extended across the border of South Vietnam into Cambodia."

"We were told, 'Just go up there and do your patrol,'" Kerry told Diamond. "Everybody was over there [in Cambodia]. Nobody thought twice about it." Five years later, in a September 4, 1997, Senate subcommittee hearing on Cambodian politics, Kerry began his remarks by saying, "I first was introduced to Cambodia when I spent Christmas Eve of 1968 in a river in Cambodia during the Vietnam conflict." Kerry was impressed with what he saw. "I found it to be a rather remarkable and very beautiful country which had an allure to me, and to many others," he told his fellow lawmakers, "which has been sustained through those years."

In June 2003, Kerry repeated his story to Boston Globe reporter Michael Kranish, who later included it in John F. Kerry, the biography he wrote with coauthors Brian Mooney and Nina Easton. Kerry told Kranish that his adventures on December 24, 1968, began "near Cambodia," when his Swift boat was ambushed by Viet Cong. But later, Kerry said, "he had gone several miles inside Cambodia, which theoretically was off limits." Kerry's incursion put him in a cynical mood. He told Kranish he had sent a "sarcastic message" to his superiors from the Navy's "most inland" unit.

For Kerry, incursions into Cambodia brought home the central absurdity behind the American war in Vietnam: It was a war in which you had trouble distinguishing friend from foe in a country that your government denied you ever set foot in. To understand John Kerry, Michael Kranish told Fox's Hannity & Colmes last month, you have to understand his war experience. "And in one short anecdote I'll tell you," Kranish continued, "that in Christmas of 1968, he was on a small boat with his men, basically in Cambodia at a time when Richard Nixon was telling the American public that we're not in Cambodia. And he basically became skeptical."

Yet Kerry's account of his Christmas adventure in Cambodia is not supported by hagiographer Douglas Brinkley in his book Tour of Duty. Here is how Brinkley tells it:

Douglas Brinkley's book and Unfit for Command agree that Kerry was stationed at Sa Dec in December 1968. However, Sa Dec is about 55 miles from the Cambodian border. The anti-Kerry veterans--among them Kerry's commander at the time, George Elliott, and Elliott's superior, Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann--say that areas close to Cambodia were not patrolled by Swift boats at all, but by smaller craft called PBRs. "If he'd attempted to go in, he would have been stopped," Hoffmann told me last week. What's more, O'Neill writes in Unfit for Command, "preventing border crossings was considered so important at the time that an LCU (a large, mechanized landing craft) and several PBRs were stationed to ensure that no one could cross the border."

The Cambodia story put the Kerry campaign on the defensive. Two weeks ago, Kerry spokesman Michael Meehan issued a statement. Here it is in its entirety:

Read the statement carefully, and it becomes clear that it is a tacit concession. Meehan places Kerry's boat not in Cambodia, but "in the watery borders between Vietnam and Cambodia." Meehan had to hedge, because none of John Kerry's crewmates on PCF-44 affirms that they entered Cambodia. For example, the Boston Globe reported that James Wasser, a Kerry crewmate, "did not think" PCF-44 ever went into Cambodia. "It is very hard to tell," Wasser said. Wasser is a Kerry supporter. Steven Gardner, who was the gunner on PCF-44, and who is not a Kerry supporter, is more succinct. "Never happened," he told the Globe. "We didn't go to Cambodia," Gardner told me last week. "We were no closer than 40 miles, 30 miles max."

And Rocky Hildreth, another Swift boat commander in Kerry's division, said last week he "never heard of anybody going into Cambodia" in December 1968.

Indeed, at this writing, not a single Swift boat commander or crewmate of Kerry's has stepped forward to confirm that John Kerry was in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968.

For that matter, Kerry himself has not always been so precise about his location. "Christmas Eve I was getting shot at somewhere near Cambodia," he told the Providence Journal-Bulletin on April 3, 1994. "Stupid Vietnamese were celebrating Christmas by shooting tracers, fifty-caliber, right up into the air," Kerry went on, "and the goddamned things were coming right over our head. That was a wild night." Then, swept up in his rhetorical reverie, Kerry brought the Cambodia story full circle:

THE ANTI-KERRY SWIFTIES were in Washington last week, attending planning sessions and break-out panels at the Key Bridge Marriott, across the Potomac river from Washington's Georgetown neighborhood. They are middle-aged men now, their hair gray or absent, their paunches established, their combat fatigues replaced with golf shirts and khakis. Most are from the Midwest. Politically, they range from conservative Democrat to conservative Republican to independent-minded Perotista. In fact, most dislike politics altogether. "This is not about politics," one of the veterans, a 61-year-old man from Montgomery, Texas, named Jack Chenoweth told me. "This is about telling the truth." Van Odell, who in 1969 was Jack Chenoweth's gunner, said the anti-Kerry vets were making progress. "I feel optimistic," Odell said. "I felt when we started this thing we'd be a one-day news story. But we're still here."

Chenoweth first joined Swift Boat Veterans for Truth last March, when he received a call from John O'Neill. Like most of the anti-Kerry Swifties, Chenoweth has held a low opinion of John Kerry since Vietnam, one that was only reinforced by Kerry's antiwar activities in the early '70s. When Kerry delivered Senate testimony in April 1971 as a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Chenoweth and others were repelled by statements like this one:

After O'Neill started tracking them down this year, the 250 or so veterans who have joined his effort began to reminisce and compare notes, some of them told me. And they compared their recollections with what they saw on Kerry's campaign website, as well as after-action reports O'Neill says he obtained from the Navy archives. Looking back from a distance of over 30 years, the veterans say they concluded that, when a firefight was over and Kerry wrote the requisite after-action report, the future presidential candidate bent what had happened to his own advantage. So they put together their own account of events: Unfit for Command.

The book has some conspicuous flaws. O'Neill and his coauthor attack Kerry for accusing veterans of committing war crimes in Vietnam, but then turn around and accuse him of committing the same. They raise the unanswerable question of whether Kerry "deserved" his medals. And, in its own way, the book accepts the same dubious premise that Kerry embraced at his nominating convention: that the American public should judge the 2004 presidential candidate centrally on his military service long ago.

And yet, on August 19, when Kerry addressed the International Association of Fire Fighters, he did not respond to any of the charges made by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. He did attack the group's integrity, however. "Here's what you really need to know about them," Kerry said, his voice rising. "They're funded by hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Republican contributor out of Texas. They're a front for the Bush campaign. And the fact that the president won't denounce what they're up to tells you everything you need to know--he wants them to do his dirty work." Then, late last week, a Kerry campaign spokesman, along with some liberal commentators, urged Regnery, publisher of Unfit for Command, to pull the book, accusing the company of "retailing a hoax."

So it seems the Kerry wars will continue for some time. A debate over Vietnam was supposed to work to the senator's advantage, of course. If you watch Kerry on the stump, or read his speeches, or saw him take the stage at the Democratic National Convention, you could be forgiven for thinking that Kerry wanted this election to be a referendum on his experience in the Vietnam War at least as much as he wanted it to be about other issues. With the release of Unfit for Command, he got his wish.

And, in its own way, the book accepts the same dubious premise that Kerry embraced at his nominating convention: that the American public should judge the 2004 presidential candidate centrally on his military service long ago.

This "dubious premise," that Americans should judge candidates on their military service has in fact governed American elections since George Washington.

We had "Tippacanoe and Tyler too." After the war of Northern Aggression we four presidents elected on their war experience. In the South, after the Yankee occupation, no politician could be elected without honorable war service to point to.

Recall how liberal darling Ken Burns revived the iconography of Joshua Chamberlain for the twentieth century of a man who was four times elected Governor of Maine in his own post bellum era.

For a time it was not chic to admit that military service is a good and valid standard against which to measure a candidate's worth. Starting with Eisenhower and culminating with Clinton in my living memory, only red necks and reactionaries were benighted enough to care about service. But the generations of Americans who did not know how unenlightened they were continued to judge candidates on their military service.

After the civil war, in North or South, a man who aspired to have power over other men, that is to be a politician, had to demonstrate his worthiness in the cauldron of war. Phonies had a hard time finessing the memory of those who saw them fail to stand to their posts during the withering fire by columns which was the way of war then.

I for one do not think it such a bad standard. If one has not served, why not? Did he avoid or evade? If he did serve, did he serve honorably? Did the stress of combat reveal something outstanding in his character like Nathan Bedford Forrest or Joshua Chamberlain? Did the candidate distort his service and troll for medals like Lyndon Johnson who gamed a Silver Star? Johnson's shameful self promotion should have told us all we needed to know about the character of that man. Robert E. Lees service tells us what we need to know about the service of the noblest and sublimest American ever. It tells us how he would behave after the war.

Stress tears away contrivance and reveals character. There is no stress like combat. War service is a perfectly rational and valuable means of judging candidates who seek power over us.

This is to General McPeak - wherever you are in this God forsaken country and to anybody else in America that gives a damn.

For the remaining majority, throw it in the trash.

Several months ago I gathered the strength to go through an emotionally challenging project - a website (located at http://www.royblakeley.name) in honor of my father, Major Roy James Blakeley, USAF - killed in action on July 22, 1965.

I opened letters written by him in July, 1965 that I had never read before.

Every minute that I have be listen to Kerry's Silver Star "heroics"? - I am left with an empty feeling of betrayal of truth and justice in America.

Why should my father be deprived of a medal for this engagement and John Kerry receive one? Can you explain this to me General McPeak? Even when you know fully well that my father gave his life for this country - nobody awarded him a Silver Star. Everything he did during those 20 days in Vietnam he wrote about. Tell me why, General McPeak after 39 years I "still can't say goodbye"? http://www.royblakeley.name/larry_blakeley/songs/still_cant_say_goodbye.htm

Tell me General McPeak - why? Why did it take so long for the Pacific command to realize that after they pulled the F-104's off escort and put them to strafing that their pilot's were sitting ducks? Tell me why my father's squadron commander, Arriaga returned my grandmother's letter with "Return to Sender - Deceased"? Tell me why General McPeak you expect us to know the truth and still be patriotic? Why General McPeak did your commander General Horner - standing next to my father in the book, "Every Man a Tiger" devote 2 pages to those of us "left behind" - the women and children. Tell me this too, General McPeak - why did my father and his widow and children have to live on a Captains's salary when his promotion was effective in December, 1964. Tell me why, General? Tell me your answer to these questions. I don't see you on my father's "Bearer" list in front of me, but I see Capt. George Carey and Col. Ed McNeff from the fighter school at Luke AFB, Arizona. And, Brigadier General Darryl Cramer is saluting during the missing man formation flyover - all of these men you know. Tell me why, General McPeak you believe John Kerry deserves a Silver Star so that I can tell that to my mother, and my children - so that they can tpass your words down to their children - until nobody remembers what the story was anymore. Or, even cares - like today.

Tell me why we were forsaken, General McPeak. Tell me why I'm still "Broken" http://www.royblakeley.name/larry_blakeley/songs/broken.htm

Tell me why, General - I should care who you are going to vote for.

"Flew an outstanding mission the 15th. We had just got airborne and an Army unit was being ambushed and were pretty well cut up (lost 66 men) and they called us and asked for help. We spotted them and their attackers (Viet Cong) and rolled in on them. We killed 166 in about 10 minutes. The squadron here (436th) put all 4 of us in for an air medal. Will let you know if we get it. It made the papers over here." - July 19, 1965 letter to James Louis and Violet Blakeley (his parents) http://www.royblakeley.name/roy_james_blakeley/letter_rblakeley19650719.htm

"The 15th I flew a mission and we lucked out and caught a bunch of Viet Cong out in the open after they had ambushed an American convoy and we killed 175 and Zeb put me, Walt and Larry and Olson in for a medal!! How about that!!" - July 18, 1965 letter to Johnnye Blakeley http://www.royblakeley.name/roy_james_blakeley/letter_rblakeley19650718.htm

"Flew my 10th combat mission - 10 miles off the end of the runway!! Viet Cong had just finished ambushing a convoy and we were diverted from our original target. Caught about 200 Viet Cong in the open and really "ate" them up. The Marines were taking out casualties & we were striking over their heads. The Marines really appreciated the quick response to their call for "AIR". The Zip 4's were there immediately!!

Don't know when I'm going to get promoted. Supposed to be today but who knows." - July 16, 1965 letter to Lt. Colonel David Blakeley, United States Army (his brother) http://www.royblakeley.name/roy_james_blakeley/letter_rblakeley_david19650716.htm

- Larry Blakeley, son of Major Roy James Blakeley, USAF F-104C Starfighter pilot out of George AFB, California - a "true" American that was squandered by idiots.

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