Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Kerry is a Fraud -War Hero Manufactured (My Title)
Crown Publishers, NY, NY | 2001 | Gerald Nicosia

Posted on 03/03/2004 9:57:59 PM PST by Soliton

Following is an email I sent to gary

Thursday, February 26, 2004

You should try to interview Gerald Nicosia, the author of "Home to War, a History of the Viet Nam Veterans' Movement." Crown Publishers, NY, NY. The book attempts to paint Kerry in a positive light, but from a leftists prospective. In doing so it reveals several interesting things:

Kerry received notice that he would be drafted, so he "enlisted in the Navy, to see for himself what was going on and at the same time to stay out of combat". Pg 70, para 3.

There is also a precedent for Kerry releasing his FBI files mentioned in the Acknowledgements:

"Special thanks to John Kerry, David Attlestone, and a number of pro bono lawyers who banged on the door of the FBI (with letters and phone calls) for ten years, till it finally coughed up the ten foot stack of surveillance files on Viet Nam Veterans Against the War, which I had applied for through the Freedom of Information Act in 1988." Pg 667, para 3.

The book answers more questions, mostly on pages 70-72.

Q. If he joined the Navy to avoid combat duty, why volunteer for dangerous swift boat duty?

A. When he volunteered, swift boats were used for surveillance and were considered safe duty. The deployment to go up the rivers began two weeks before Kerry returned from five months of training in California.

Q. Did Kerry get special treatment when being awarded medals?

A. Kerry was put in for the Navy Cross, but Admiral Bud Zumwalt intercepted the paperwork because it would require congressional approval and awarded the silver star because he could authorize it himself. He then rushed the ceremony through as an "Impact Award" to "boost morale".

Other things I have found but not verified:

Kerry requested a graduate degree deferment that was rejected before volunteering.

Kerry was connected to Ted Kennedy, and so was Zumwalt.

Zumwalt later ran for the Senate in 1976 as a Democrat.

Zumwalt and Kerry pushed the Agent Orange investigation thru congress.

I am not a Republican nor involved with any campaign. I just hate to see Kerry get away with claiming to be a hero.

I would like to volunteer as a researcher, if you could use the help.

Also FYI, this book was favorably reviewed by David Hackworth and Oliver Stone.


TOPICS: Your Opinion/Questions
KEYWORDS: 2004; fraud; johnkerry; kerry; kerrywarrecord; kerrywatch; militaryrecord; vietgate; zumwalt
I sent this email to Gary Aldrich in response to his artical calling on Kerry to release his FBI files. I sent it to Quinn yesterday. No response.
1 posted on 03/03/2004 9:58:00 PM PST by Soliton
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: Soliton
Kerry was put in for the Navy Cross...

Who submitted Kerry's name for the Navy Cross?

2 posted on 03/03/2004 10:14:43 PM PST by randog (Everything works great 'til the current flows.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: randog
The book doesn't say. The point is that Zumwalt didn't wait to see if congress would approve it. He was pushing Kerry's reputation.
3 posted on 03/03/2004 10:16:21 PM PST by Soliton (Alone with everyone else.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: Soliton
Other things I have found but not verified:

Kerry requested a graduate degree deferment that was rejected before volunteering.

According to a Harvard Crimson feature on Kerry in 1970:

When he approached his draft board for permission to study for a year in Paris, the draft board refused and Kerry decided to enlist in the Navy.

A Navy Dove Runs for Congress

4 posted on 03/03/2004 10:16:52 PM PST by Plutarch
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Soliton; diotima; Interesting Times; Nick Danger
Interesting ping.

I'm not so sure about the quality of the thumbs up from Hackworth or Stone though.
5 posted on 03/03/2004 10:23:29 PM PST by abner (FREE THE MIRANDA MEMOS! http://www.intelmemo.com or http://www.wintersoldier.com)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Soliton
There's been some speculation on just who wrote up Kerry's medal requests/recommendations/whatever they're called. Some are saying that it was Kerry himself, but I've never seen anything to confirm that. I'm interested in finding out because it looks like Kerry was an anti-war activist first and a Vietnam soldier second, i.e. he just went to Nam to gain 'street cred' to further his career as an activist.
6 posted on 03/03/2004 10:24:41 PM PST by randog (Everything works great 'til the current flows.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: randog
I have seen that he put himself in for the first two purple hearts.
7 posted on 03/03/2004 10:34:10 PM PST by Soliton (Alone with everyone else.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: randog; Soliton; potlatch; Plutarch; abner; Liz
Here is one of the excerpts from Home to War I have posted on the Kerry Dossier thread. The wording is so self-serving that I wondered if Kerry was the source for the passage. Yup. Nicosia is real good about footnoting. He interviewed J F'n K late in 1988 and early in 1989. Italics are mine.

pp. 70-71: [In reference to Project RAW, Valley Forge]: "But by all accounts, the man who most stirred the vets was one of their own, Lieutenant (j.g.) John Forbes Kerry, a Silver Star winner who had gotten an early discharge to run for Congress from his native Fourth District in Massachusetts."

"Kerry had had an action-filled tour as a swift-boat commander in Vietnam, where he was severely wounded in an ambush, gaining three Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star, in addition to the Silver Star, which by all rights should have been a Navy Cross. But Admiral Elmo 'Bud' Zumwalt Jr. had intercepted the paperwork for Kerry's Navy Cross and changed it to a lesser award so that he could approve it himself (the Navy Cross requires congressional approval) and pin it on Kerry a few days later, as an 'impact award,' to boost morale.

Kerry could not help but sense the irony of his being a war hero, since he had not wanted to fight in the war at all. Before Vietnam, he had led a life of privilege. His father, a lawyer, had worked in the foreign service, and John had been schooled at St. Paul's and Yale, with summers in Europe. Exceedingly tall and rangy, Kerry was a good athlete, and at Yale he had distinguished himself as an orator; in fact, he delivered the senior oration at his graduation in 1966, criticizing the draft and the war. He had been planning to pursue his graduate studies abroad when he received a notice from his draft board that he would soon be called. Though he questioned the policy behind the war, he did not see either jail or exile as a reasonable alternative for himself; besides, he says he 'believed very strongly in the code of service to one's country.' So he enlisted in the Navy, to see for himself what was going on and at the same time to stay out of combat. To that end, he volunteered for assignment on one of the swift boats--short, fast aluminum craft that were used for patrol duty off the Vietnam coast. Two weeks before he arrived in Vietnam, the Navy began changing the deployment of the boats, sending them up the rivers instead to ferret out pockets of Viet Cong that were guarding the waterways for their own use. Still, Kerry shrugs off the attribution of heroism. In the action of February 1966 for which he was awarded the Silver Star, he maintains that he simply got tired of being ambushed. 'The riverbank just erupted with small weapons fire,' he recalls. 'We were caught in it. So I turned all the boats right into it and we charged the riverbank--beached right in the positions, ran ashore, and ran right over the ambush. Then I took one boat upstream with me, and we took [were hit by] a B-40 rocket on the boat, and I guess I just got pissed off again, and I went straight into the rocket position. I wanted to see some of the enemy and fight 'em. So we did, and we beat the hell out of 'em. We went into this village and captured a lot of weapons and people and VC flags.'"

Stationed in New York a few months later, in the spring of 1969, Kerry, showing the same gumption, went directly to Admiral Walter F. Schlech Jr. to request the early discharge. Before he had gone to Vietnam, he had spent hours debating the value of the war and the help we were allegedly giving the Vietnamese people, but once in combat 'the answers hit [him] pretty hard, right in the face.' He was appalled by 'the lack of strategy, the stupidity of many of the missions, the apparent lack of political will by this country to pursue [the war], the lack of a commitment to the men who were fighting in the field, [and] the absurdity of some of the losses that we were incurring,' as well as 'the corruption within the [South Vietnamese] government.' 'Everything added up,' he says in hindsight, explaining how 'this kid coming back from nowhere,' who 'wasn't known from Adam,' suddenly found it in his heart to run for Congress in order 'to make an antiwar statement.' Schlech, who disagreed with Kerry's position on the war, agreed to set him free from the Navy. 'To his enormous credit,' remembers Kerry, 'he understood where I was coming from, and he said, 'That's a fair request. You've served honorably, and you've done your duty, and I think you have a right to exercise your judgment.' Kerry's discharge came through on January 1, 1970."

"Kerry never did run for Congress that fall, but it wasn't because he got cold feet. His immediate target was the incumbent Democrat from the Fourth District, Philip Philbin, who had been consistently hawkish about the war. Kerry had felt that a highly decorated Vietnam vet such as himself running against Philbin would 'make clear the need to take action...lend to the debate and help in the process of ending the war.' But a coalition of antiwar forces had already come up with a redoubtable opponent to defeat Philbin in the Democratic primary, Father Robert F. Drinan, S. J., the dean of Boston College Law School and a widely known critic of the war. Kerry immediately pulled out of the race to make way for Drinan, and eventually became chairman of Drinan's campaign."

"While working for Drinan, Kerry, who was still 'so anxious to tell the story...just burning with this anger' to make the public aware of 'what was going on,' began speaking about his war experiences to various civic groups...."

8 posted on 03/03/2004 11:10:05 PM PST by ntnychik
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: Soliton
Kerry requested a graduate degree deferment that was rejected before volunteering.

This is extremely damning to Kerry's lies about Bush wanting to avoid service. It needs to go far and wide.

9 posted on 03/04/2004 12:51:31 AM PST by AmericaUnited
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: ntnychik
pp. 70-71: [In reference to Project RAW, Valley Forge]: "But by all accounts, the man who most stirred the vets was one of their own, Lieutenant (j.g.) John Forbes Kerry, a Silver Star winner who had gotten an early discharge to run for Congress from his native Fourth District in Massachusetts."

As a real Massachusetts native, I'm getting pretty tired of JF'nK's claim to nativity. It's a small thing, but in the end it's another Rat lie.

10 posted on 03/04/2004 1:53:16 AM PST by metesky ("Brethren, leave us go amongst them." Rev. Capt. Samuel Johnston Clayton - Ward Bond- The Searchers)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 8 | View Replies]

To: Soliton
Additional information might be gleaned from here, on another FR thread... About Kerry's Purple Hearts And Reassignment
11 posted on 03/04/2004 7:32:20 AM PST by syriacus (Kerry's Kerry ancestors "came over" from Europe ....FIRST CLASS!!!!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: metesky
Good point. Just heard of his birth state today: Colorado.
12 posted on 03/04/2004 7:53:29 PM PST by ntnychik
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 10 | View Replies]

To: ntnychik

Yep! I couldn't have said it better myself! Take a look at this... found it this morning. Kerry the "war hero" in art! It warms the heart.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=4323299289


13 posted on 09/07/2004 7:59:15 AM PDT by lauraok
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 8 | View Replies]

To: lauraok

Ha! Love the silver star with (never awarded) V for valor!


14 posted on 09/07/2004 7:33:24 PM PDT by ntnychik
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 13 | View Replies]

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson