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... young Kerry had created great problems for him and the other top brass, by killing so many non-combatant civilians and going after other non-military targets...hmmm, if I believed all that psychology stuff I've read about I'd have to say that Kerry's speeches about the atrocities supposedly committed by troops in Vietnam were really projections of his own misdeeds, and his extensive anti-war activities in fact pathetic attempts to assuage his guilt over those misdeeds - he sounds pretty unstable to me.........

I agree with those who urge caution in accepting the apocryphal Zumwalt story. However, if you read the Globe account it's not hard to come to the conclusion that Kerry was a shoot first and identify later kind of trigger-happy guy. Just because an area was declared a "free-fire zone" didn't mean you were obligated to hose down anyone in sight, or that the law of land warfare no longer applied. It was tough to apply any humanity in that war, but the "good guys" tried like hell to do that.