Wow, that's a fairly severe take-down.
That is a very severe take-down. Nay, a smack-down worthy of a Texas Cage Death Match.
John Kerry's Silver Star citation has always bugged me. He won it after beaching his boat, jumping off his boat, and going after a wounded man to administer the coup de grace. I just don't get it.
When he beached his boat, he took away the one defense the Swift Boat truly had, it's mobility. Put yourself in an officer's position: your boat takes B-40 fire from the shore, Victor Charles gets up to fire another round at you, your 50 Man takes him down, and then you head into shore, beach your boat, abandon your vessel to make sure that B-40 Charlie is dead, dead, dead?
What if B-40 Charlie had been bait for a VC platoon hiding in the reeds or the thick foliage along the river? Kerry and his crew might have been captured, killed, and his boat damaged beyond repair.
I just don't get the citation, that's all. I would have reprimanded the young sumbitch, too. No, I would not have relieved him; Kerry was a young JG right out of 90 Day Wonder School. He wasn't in-country long enough to get laid, for God's sakes, so we shouldn't expect him to have developed any battlewise common sense by the time this happened. Unfortunately, you don't develop good officers without allowing them to learn from their mistakes. But he did put his boat in danger when it didn't have to be. I can only hope that some senior chief or Kerry's division CO had a good Come to Jesus conversation with him afterwards.
Now I was never in Vietnam, nor even in uniform for that matter, but there are things here that just violate all the laws of thermodynamics. There may have been a reason that Kerry sicked his bitches in the Mainstream Press on George W. Bush's ANG records. I think we're getting close to the reason why.
Be Seeing You,
Chris