Posted on 02/11/2004 5:36:13 PM PST by SAMWolf
Vietnam Veteran Larry J. O'Daniel has today challenged former fellow officer and veteran, John Forbes Kerry to come clean with charges Kerry has made in the past. O'Daniel, a decorated combat veteran from Vietnam and Phoenix says that the issue is one that the Senator himself has brought on.
Senator John Forbes Kerry is attempting to be our generation's Vietnam War hero, much the same way his avowed idol, John F. Kennedy was of that generation. Kerry falls short in many ways. I do not deny his heroism under fire. His Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Hearts all attest to that. Attempting to ride into the White House on those medals alone is not enough. As a former officer who served as a combat advisor and participant in a Special Operations program, I know a little bit about integrity, courage, and character. Kerry lacks what it takes to be Commander in Chief.
Kerry would be an extreme embarrassment to his party if nominated for President. On the surface, he seems to be the exact type of rival needed to run against a popular President with a military background, albeit not in combat. A popular President who proved his courage jockeying supersonic aircraft. On the surface, Kerry would seem to be able to cut into the military vote that has become increasingly one party over the past 30 years.
This senator is JFK from Massachusetts, a coincidence that he has played upon for years. Like the first JFK, he is a heroic Naval Officer. However, he has a record which speaks volumes about his current abilities and views. Kerry will both exploit his war record and run from it. His checkerboard past explains his actions today. He has been critical of the way the current war on terrorism has been waged. Inevitably, his criticism is always preceded by media notices of Kerry, decorated Vietnam war veteran. However, thirty two years ago, Kerry charged decorated war veterans with unspeakable crimes. Those charges were never proven accurate.
Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, Kerry asserted he represented veterans, honorably discharged and very highly decorated, who participated in war crimes. These crimes were not isolated incidents, he charged, but crimes committed on a day - to - day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. Crimes that this country made them do.
These veterans personally raped women, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned on the power. They cut off limbs; blew up bodies; randomly shot at civilians; razed villages like Ghenghis Khan; shot livestock for fun; poisoned food; and ravaged the Vietnamese countryside. From his personal experience, Kerry asserted that the Vietnamese only wanted to work in rice paddies without our helicopters strafing and napalming them and their villages. Our men died while our allies refused to help and fight. Kerry said we rationalized destroying villages in order to save them; accepted a My Lai; enforced free fire zones by shooting anything that moves. Our GIs falsified body counts while leaders glorified body counts. In a well orchestrated political move, he asked, how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? The well scrubbed veteran began his career that day.
A problem arises. Kerry's testimony was largely untrue. These charges were investigated then and since. My challenge as we honor veterans of that war and others - Prove them or apologize.
Kerry's widely covered charges largely paralleled that of another highly decorated veteran, LTC Anthony Herbert. Some of the unsubstantiated and uncorroborated accusations of Kerry were almost identical to specific charges leveled by Herbert. Both charged war crimes were ignored, uninvestigated, part of the routine.
I suspect the source of his rage against the war and his lies about his fellow officers and men stems from his own inexperienced behavior. I have read varying accounts of his "kills" and it sounds like a boatload of out of control people, who should have been under the command of Lt. Kerry. He was brought up in a normal, if privileged, manner and he likely suffered from enormous feelings of guilt about his own actions and his failure to command his men appropriately. Instead of taking personal responsibility for his failings, he decided to attempt to place the blame elsewhere to assuage his own guilt. I also suspect he is very vulnerable on this whole episode.
While he attempts to paint GW as serving less than honorably, I find that hard to swallow. He accepted two of his Purple Hearts for wounds that were nothing more than scratches, knowing that three PHs and he had a way out. His total tour was just four months. Obviously, he was a better guardhouse lawyer than I, as I had never heard of the three Purple Heart loophole, nor would I have applied for it under the circumstances Kerry did. On the other hand, no self-respecting officer would accept a Purple Heart for a "band-aid" wound if he had ever seen the men who truly earned the award. I cannot imagine an officer who would use a loophole to sneak out and leave his brothers to do the fighting. Most of us served out our tours as prescribed and didn't let down our fellow officers and men.
Now GW, on the other hand, graduated from USAF Undergraduate Pilot Training (UPT) in about the same era as I did and I know exactly what he had to do to make the grade. He went on to fly the F-102 Flying Coffin, which takes a special type of person. There is no crew to bail you out of trouble; it is just you and the airplane and you survive on your own skill and ability. I have respect for any man who had the right stuff to graduate from UPT -- 53 weeks of intensive training with never a let-up. As an aside, the F-102 was never assigned to South Vietnam; the closest GW would have been, even if activated, was Thailand. Despite what the media like to say, GW did not take the "easy way out", that was the province of the Klintoon and many others like him.
It seems to me that the realization is beginning to settle on the Dems that Kerry is going to lead the parade and they are terrified now that it has happened. He is not a leader and, in fact, is downright weak. We just have to exploit his flaws to our advantage.
Let's see
is he a Republican?
Senator Kerry makes me truly wonder if he ever could give our brave USA Troops the support and high regard that our President does.
On the other hand, no self-respecting officer would accept a Purple Heart for a "band-aid" wound if he had ever seen the men who truly earned the award. I cannot imagine an officer who would use a loophole to sneak out and leave his brothers to do the fighting. Most of us served out our tours as prescribed and didn't let down our fellow officers and men.
I agree with you there, Kerry was there to get his ticket punched for a future political career, image his dismay that when he got home the war had turned unpopular. So he now becomes a protester because that is what it took to be popular back then.
Can we get supporting documentation of this?
And if we can, we should HOLD all further JFK disclosures until AFTER he is selected as the dem candidate>
Thanks for your service.
Kerry Key to My Victory!
Taken from The Wall Street Journal, Thursday August 3, 1995
What did the North Vietnamese leadership think of the American antiwar movement? What was the purpose of the Tet Offensive? How could the U.S. have been more successful in fighting the Vietnam War? Bui Tin, a former colonel in the North Vietnamese army, answers these questions in the following excerpts from an interview conducted by Stephen Young, a Minnesota attorney and human-rights activist. Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of North Vietnam's army, received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975. He later became editor of the People's Daily, the official newspaper of Vietnam. He now lives in Paris, where he immigrated after becoming disillusioned with the fruits of Vietnamese communism.
Question: How did Hanoi intend to defeat the Americans?
Answer: By fighting a long war which would break their will to help South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh said, "We don't need to win military victories, we only need to hit them until they give up and get out."
Q: Was the American antiwar movement important to Hanoi's victory?
A: It was essential to our strategy. Support of the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us.
Q: Did the Politburo pay attention to these visits? A: Keenly. Q: Why? A: Those people represented the conscience of America. The conscience of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor. America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win.
I am going nuts trying to compile, link, and cross-reference ( link ) all this stuff.
It's unbelievable how tainted Kerry is. How he managed to rise to high office is an astounding testimony to how gullible voters, and the "watchdog press" are.
Shout it to the mountain tops!
As stunning as his charges, Kerry insisted that the barbaric acts of American soldiers were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.
As evidence for his sweeping indictment of the American soldier in Vietnam, Kerry cited the testimony from the Winter Soldier Investigation. As Kerry explained: The term Winter Soldier is a play on words of Thomas Paine's in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriots and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.
The Winter Soldier Investigation, Mackubin Thomas Owens recently wrote in National Review Online, was, in fact organized by the usual suspects among antiwar celebrities such as Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory, and Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theorist, Mark Lane. Owensis a professor of strategy and force planning at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He led a Marine infantry platoon in Vietnam in 1968-1969. He notes that Kerry's 1971 testimony includes every left-wing cliché about Vietnam and the men who served there.
Even worse, much of what Kerry said turned out to be demonstrably false.
Owens writes: In fact, the entire Winter Soldiers Investigation was a lie. It was inspired by Mark Lane's 1970 book entitled Conversations with Americans, which claimed to recount atrocity stories by Vietnam veterans. This 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 eye witnesses either had never served in Vietnam or had not done so in the capacity they claimed .
When the Naval Investigative Service attempted to interview the so-called witnesses, most refused to cooperate, even after assurances that they would not be questioned about atrocities they may 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. Guenter Lewy tells the entire study in his book, America in Vietnam.
http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/vietnamcenter/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/lesson.htm
. Was the American antiwar movement important to Hanois victory? A. It was essential to our strategy. Support for the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us.
Q. [Why] did the Politburo pay attention to these visits? A. These people represented the conscience of America. The conscience of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor. America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize the will to win. While we need not attribute North Vietnams victory solely to domestic dissent in the U.S., we need to recognize that such dissent poses some unresolved issues. Clearly in a democracy, the government shouldnt be able to mold public opinion. Dissent against an unwise or immoral war is a necessary part of democratic society. In some way, however, it must be possible to counter dissent which involves collaboration with the enemy. We must not allow the enemy to intervene in our domestic politics, even under the guise of dissent. However, this issue has yet to be satisfactorily resolved.
http://www.geocities.com/seavet72/AW/ws-kerry.htm
http://www.geocities.com/seavet72/LI/link-1.htm#AWP2-6
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