Christmas In “Cambodia” (UNFIT FOR COMMAND)

If there is one story told over and over again by John Kerry since his return from Vietnam, it is the heart-wrenching tale of how he spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day illegally in Cambodia. From the early 1970s, when he used the tale as part of his proof for war crimes in Cambodia, through the mid-1980s and the 1990s, Kerry has spoken and written again and again of how he was illegally ordered to enter Cambodia.

On the floor of the U.S. Senate on March 27, 1986, Kerry launched one of his many attacks against President Reagan—this time charging that President Reagan’s actions in Central America were leading the United States into yet another Vietnam, claiming that he could recognize the error of the administration’s ways because he had experienced firsthand the duplicity of the Nixon administration in lying about American incursions into Cambodia during the Vietnam War.

Kerry charged that he had been illegally ordered into Cambodia during Christmas 1968:

I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared—seared—in me.

Kerry also described, for example, for the Boston Herald his vivid memories of his Christmas Eve spent in Cambodia:

I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real.

As recently as July 7, 2004, Michael Kranish of the Boston Globe repeated Kerry’s Christmas in Cambodia story on FOX News Channel’s Hannity & Colmes, indicating that it was a critical turning point in Kerry’s life. Kranish had no knowledge, even after his extensive study of Kerry, that he was simply repeating a total fabrication by Kerry. And Kranish was right: Study of the Christmas in Cambodia story is central to understanding John Kerry.

The story is also in the pages of the 2004 biography written by Krahish and other Boston Globe reporters. As we have come to expect, the story is twisted at the end to provide justification for yet another of Kerry’s political ruses, this time used to justify what Kerry portrays as his noble and continuing distrust of government pronouncements:

To top it off, Kerry said later that he had gone into Cambodia, despite President Nixon’s assurances to the American public that there was no combat action in this neutral territory. The young sailor began to develop a deep mistrust of the U.S. government pronouncements, he later recalled.

Even without minimal investigation, a critical press should have been able to spot the story as a total fabrication: Richard Nixon did not become president of the United States until twenty-six days after John Kerry’s Christmas in Cambodia.

Despite the dramatic memories of his Christmas in Cambodia, Kerry’s statements are complete lies. Kerry was never in Cambodia during Christmas 1968, or at all during the Vietnam War. In reality, during Christmas 1968, he was more than fifty miles away from Cambodia. Kerry was never ordered into Cambodia by anyone and would have been court-martialed had he gone there.

During Christmas 1968, Kerry was stationed at Coastal Division 13 in Cat Lo. Coastal Division 13’s patrol areas extended to Sa Dec, about fifty-five miles from the Cambodian border. Areas closer than fifty-five miles to the Cambodian border in the area of the Mekong River were patrolled by PBRs, a small river patrol craft, and not by Swift Boats. Preventing border crossings was considered so important at the time that an LCU (a large, mechanized landing craft) and several PBRs were stationed to ensure that no one could cross the border.

A large sign at the border prohibited entry. Tom Anderson, Commander of River Division 531, who was in charge of the PBRs, confirmed that there were no Swifts anywhere in the area and that they would have been stopped had they appeared.

All the living commanders in Kerry’s chain of command—Joe Streuhli (Commander of CosDiv 13), George Elliott (Commander of CosDiv 11), Adrian Lonsdale (Captain, USCG and Commander, Coastal Surveillance Center at An Thoi), Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann (Commander, Coastal Surveillance Force Vietnam, CTF 115), and Rear Admiral Art Price (Commander of River Patrol Force, CTF 116)—deny that Kerry was ever ordered to Cambodia. They indicate that Kerry would have been seriously disciplined or court-martialed had he gone there. At least three of the five crewmen on Kerry’s PCF 44 boat—Bill Zaldonis, Steven Hatch, and Steve Gardner—deny that they or their boat were ever in Cambodia. The remaining two crewmen declined to be interviewed for this book. Gardner, in particular, will never forget those days in late December when he was wounded on PCF 44, not in Cambodia, but many miles away in Vietnam.

Instead, Kerry replaces the story with a report about a mortar attack that occurred on Christmas Eve 1968 “near the Cambodia border” in a town called Sa Dec, some fifty-five miles from the Cambodian border.

Somehow, Kerry’s secret illegal mission to Cambodia, which he recounted on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1986, is now a firefight at Sa Dec and a Christmas day spent back at the base writing entries in his journal. The truth is that Kerry made up his secret mission into Cambodia.

Much like Kerry’s many other lies relating to supposed “war crimes” committed by the U.S. military in Vietnam, the lie about the illegal Cambodian incursion painted his superiors up the chain of command—men such as Commander Streuhli, Commander Elliott, Admiral Hoffmann, and Admiral Zumwalt, all distinguished Naval heroes and men of integrity—as villains faced down by John Kerry, a solitary hero in grave and exotic danger and forced illegally and against his will into harm’s way.

The same sorts of lies were repeated over and over in Kerry’s antiwar book, The New Soldier, a book filled with preposterous, false confessions of bogus war crimes committed by the participants (who were often not even real veterans) against their will and under orders from dishonest superiors. Kerry’s Christmas in Cambodia typifies the sort of lie upon which Kerry has built a false persona and a political career.

The story of Christmas 1968 has one final chapter. When refueling his PCF near Dong Tam, Kerry and his crew were told that the Bob Hope USO show was at the Dong Tam base. So Kerry decided to leave his station on the river and go searching for the Bob Hope Christmas show. Unable to find the show, he risked boat and crew by unknowingly blundering into one of the most dangerous canals in Vietnam, a canal that to those who knew the area was notorious for Viet Cong ambushes. Given the easy navigation by radar and map of the rivers involved—not much more difficult than driving a car—Kerry had just performed a feat of reverse navigation worthy of Wrong Way Corrigan.

There is, of course, no record that Kerry ever informed anyone of what he did, where he was, or where he was going—all required by regulations for the safety of the boat and crew. He did, however, record the Bob Hope adventure in his journal so he could be sure to share it in Tour of Duty.

www.swiftvets.com makes this statement in their FAQ:

John Kerry has been able to convince about 13 men who served on Swift boats in the Mekong Delta to support him, 7 or 8 of whom were at various times crew members on his own 6-man boat.

That "wiggle room" between "7 or 8" does not bode well for swiftvets' arguments. It means that they do not know.

www.swiftvets.com makes this statement in the very first line at their website:

Senator John Kerry has made his 4-month combat tour in Vietnam the centerpiece of his bid for the Presidency.

That statement is also not accurate. Senator Kerry has not made his combat tour the centerpiece. His combat tour is a key ingredient, but it is not the centerpiece of John Kerry's campaign.

His campaign is philanthropic bigwig limousine-liberal largesse, a government of issue-reactionaries, that is, at the behest of the trial-lawyer directorate a.k.a. socialist government by judiciary.

He proposes collegial consensus, that is, success is measured by "the dialog" and how much of it there is, but not how productive nor actually decisive.

He proposes no direction other than the the secret 5-year plan that Democrats are loathe to talk about publicly, but toward which, the public is herded by selections taken in response to "the politics of the moment," from the liberals' socialist thesarus of adjectives:

what we are told by the Democrats, the public must fear.

The centerpiece of the Kerry/Edwards campaign for the Presidency, is to make enemies of the state:

people who think critically,
people who are self-determined,
people who dare to show initiative without union bosses' sanctions, and
people who live by standards of decency not set by the nationalizing socialist directorate a.k.a. Democrat Party.

Kerry's problem is not that he overstates his case.

Kerry's problem is that he is wreckless when he is scared; he finds security in the sound of gunfire; he thinks that the measure of a person's success, on up to the White House, is the appearance of success.

He grew up among financially-conservative liberals, and he noted the appearance of their sucesses, and he modeled himself after those appearances, and he has been adjusting the rudder ever since.

His failure is not that so much that he has puffed up his own sails.

His failure is that he has not much of a basis in living as a producer of either goods or services and hence, knowing the burdens and consequences of what life is like at the top of a 5-store hardware chain spanning two States, keeping 74 employees on the job, paying taxes and replying to the federal leviathan's regulations of, ever-more, everything.

The secret, unfortunately, for his success, is that there is no secret. Rather, there is the appearance of their being a secret.

He grew up surrounded by the appearances of accomplishment(s), and so he sought to reproduce the same, in order to be accomplished.

That, is his campaign.

He's not a bad guy; he's really, still, just the new guy, because he never stuck around where he would have to live with his decisions as a leader or as a follower.

If he had, he might know why we have a Constitution and are supposed to make laws by way of, and due process of, our legislative bodies --- because he would have some understanding of construction, as distinguished from concocting stories.

Management is not all pressing the flesh.

High-strength bolts from the foundary must meet technical requirements. Every day. Without interruption.

The federal government is now, almost all about, interruption of productivity and interruption of economic growth, and interruption to the point of utter dictation about how people are supposed to press the flesh in the workplace.

Where it is getting uncomfortable enough that more and more people spend more and more time on seeking consensus, because they are not getting along well, under the burdens imposed upon their productivity.

The once simple act of using a de-burring knife to clean up a metal part, is now a Supreme Court case, because lawyers are stripping the federal government of the boundaries imposed upon it, by our Constitution, and the same lawyers are building up boundaries around the people.

Which might sink in, if you put down the iPod and step away from your reality, and try moving forward, toward the preservation of liberty and its foundations.

That gave us originally, our Constitution that was written as a testament of man's diversity, before the modern pop-diversity was marketed to give the appearance of individuality for the socialist "like-minded."

As a young man, John Kerry observed what was marketed as being successful, among high-up liberals, and his life's work has been to convince them that he is like-minded.

For as much as some people are focused on his military record, that unknown quantity, what he will really do, is as unknown among his political party's followers.

President Bush learned a hard lesson when the (Iraq) prison scandel blew up in his face; he learned that he must also be the IGl; he learned that he needed to do more, to learn "what happened on the plant floor."

Well, Bush is a failure alright, but that is because his failures are not a secret.

That, is becoming the secret of his success.

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