I love it when his words come back to haunt him. He apparently said a lot over the years that is just flat out not true. Whoever is digging up this stuff, keep up the good work.
"...In his words, "I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there..."
I think he just saw "Apocalypse Now" once too often.
Hope this doesn't violate any excerpting rule.
Wow, the man is a compulsive liar and has apparently been one all his life.
Any insight on this?
incredulous bump!
What next?
LBJ was still prez in Dec 1968.
Maybe Kerry screwed wheels on his swift boat, cut a long pole and patrolled the Ho Chi Mihn trail.
Overview map (http://rectravel.com/kmt/)
Phu Quoc / An Thoi map (http://www.vngold.com/pq/map2.html)
In short, the patrol zones in that sector were VERY near and around Cambodia, but not IN Cambodia. Kerry exhibits nothing but mendacity and flip-flop.
Nam Vet
In the distance, an elderly man was tending his water buffalo -- and serving as human cover for a dozen Viet Cong manning a machine-gun nest.
"Open fire; let's take 'em," Kerry ordered, according to his second-in-command, James Wasser of Illinois. Wasser blasted away with his M-60, hitting the old man, who slumped into the water, presumably dead. With a clear path to the enemy, the fusillade from Kerry's Navy boat, backed by a pair of other small vessels, silenced the machine-gun nest.
When it was over, the Viet Cong were dead, wounded, or on the run. A civilian apparently was killed, and two South Vietnamese allies who had alerted Kerry's crew to the enemy were either wounded or killed.
On the same night, Kerry and his crew had come within a half-inch of being killed by "friendly fire," when some South Vietnamese allies launched several rounds into the river to celebrate the holiday.
To top it off, Kerry said, he had gone several miles inside Cambodia, which theoretically was off limits, prompting Kerry to send a sarcastic message to his superiors that he was writing from the Navy's "most inland" unit.
Back at his base, a weary, disconsolate Kerry sat at his typewriter, as he often did, and poured out his grief. "You hope that they'll courtmartial you or something because that would make sense," Kerry typed that night. He would later recall using court-martial as "a joke," because nothing made sense to him -- the war policy, the deaths, and his presence in the middle of it all.
To his crew, Kerry was one of the most daring skippers in the US Navy, relentlessly and courageously engaging the enemy. But the battles and moral dilemmas were in shades of gray, and Kerry to this day wrestles with the scenes of death he commanded.
In an intense three months of combat following that Christmas Eve battle, Kerry often would go beyond his Navy orders and beach his boat, in one case chasing and killing a teenage Viet Cong enemy who wore only a loin cloth and carried a rocket launcher. Kerry's aggressiveness in combat caused a commanding officer to wonder whether he should be given a medal or court-martialed. (End of snippet)
From the Boston Globe not Senate floor.
Hmmm. Christmas of 1968? Well then, I assume he's talking about LBJ, 'cause Nixon didn't assume office until January 20, 1969.
http://www.archives.gov/nixon/communications_agency/video/1969_post_inauguration.html
Man that guy can sure do a lot in 4 months! He's got my vote for sure!
He's worse than Clinton.
This should be relatively easy to find out via his military records. I'll be he's lying.
I suppose next he will be telling us he was a tunnel rat, too. Just before he was captured and held as a POW.
