[angkor]

There are plenty of instances that can be reinterpreted by Kerry's vision of things.

Why don't the Vietnamese themselves know of these "plenty of instances"? They were there, they talk, they would know. Why don't they?

Quite the opposite, every Vietnamese person I know - and that's substantially more than a handful - has the highest regard for U.S. troops on the Delta, whereas they absolutely despise the French and Japanese, and their behavior there is recalled as a horrorshow.

It's like the alleged Vietnamese "witness" to the Bob Kerry incident in Thanh Phong: the place was a known VC hamlet, the villagers all hardcore VC, and the "witness" herself was the wife of an admitted and longstanding VC operative (who presumably was out on a mission, since he all the other males were absent that night).

Nope, Kerry was and is a phan boi. Period.

[beckett]

Only problem with your take on the Bob Kerrey incident is that the female witness in some vital respects has been corroborated by a member of Kerrey's own squad. Bottom line, a group of villagers ended up tightly grouped and dead in the center of the village. Kerrey himself admits as much. If, as Kerrey claims, his squad fired into to the village from several hundred yards outside it, how did the dead end up tightly grouped? Was everyone just standing around waiting to get shot?

Kerrey's squad member has testified that those people were ordered out of their hootches into the center of the village by Kerrey and his men after the squad entered the village. What happened next is open to debate, but the fact that the villagers all ended up dead is not. And Kerrey's claim of longrange fire is clearly false.