Posted on 08/10/2004 11:03:59 AM PDT by Steven W.
Aformer member of John Kerry's swift-boat crew says the Democratic presidential candidate's account of spending Christmas 1968 in Cambodia is not true. Steve Gardner, who served on board PCF-44 under Kerry's command in December 1968, as well as part of January 1969, says that at the time, in the area in which Kerry and his crew were operating, it was not possible to take a swift boat to Cambodia.
It was physically, totally, categorically, across-the-board impossible to get into the canal that went to Cambodia with a swift boat," says Gardner. "There were concrete pilings that were put in the water...plus, the Navy kept patrol boats there to make sure nobody went in. When I was on the 44 boat, it was a physical impossibility to take a swift boat into Cambodian waters."
Over the years, Kerry has said on a number of occasions that he spent the Christmas holiday in 1968 in Cambodia. For example, in September 1997, during a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific affairs, Kerry said, "I first was introduced to Cambodia when I spent Christmas Eve of 1968 in a river in Cambodia during the Vietnam conflict, and I found it to be a rather remarkable and very beautiful country...."
More recently, in a profile of Kerry that appeared in the Washington Post in June 2003, Kerry revealed that he kept an old camouflage hat from the war in a secret pocket in his briefcase. "My good luck hat," Kerry told the paper. "Given to me by a CIA guy as we went in for a special mission in Cambodia."
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On other occasions, Kerry has said he was not actually in Cambodia but rather "near" the country. In an interview with the Providence Journal-Bulletin that appeared in April, 1994, Kerry said "Christmas Eve I was up getting shot at somewhere near Cambodia." The account of Kerry's service in Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty says Kerry was on patrol near Cambodia, but does not mention him being in the country. "Because they were only an hour away from that neighboring country," Brinkley writes, "Kerry began reading up on Cambodia's history...." Brinkley also quotes from Kerry's journal Vietnam journal, in which Kerry wrote that he was "patrolling near the Cambodian line."
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Finally, another member of Kerry's crew, Jim Wasser, who supports Kerry in the presidential race, told the Dallas Observer last month that he wasn't sure where PCF-44 was at the time in question. "On Christmas in 1968, we were close [to Cambodia]," Wasser said. "I don't know exactly where we were. I didn't have the chart. It was easy to get turned around with all the rivers around there. But I'll say this: We were the farthest inland that night. I know that for sure."
Wasser's recollection introduces the idea that Kerry and some members of his crew might simply have been confused about where they were. While that conflicts with Gardner's recollection, it might still seem plausible if Kerry had, over the years, said only that he was in Cambodia at one time. Given today's questions, Kerry might now say that he simply believed he was there, but in retrospect sees that he might not have known his precise position at the time.
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That explanation, however, might be difficult for Kerry to attempt, because of the detailed descriptions he has offered about what he says was his time in Cambodia. He was there with at least one operative of the CIA on a "special mission," Kerry has said — a mission that the U.S. government was officially denying. The CIA man gave Kerry a hat on that special mission, a memento that is so meaningful to Kerry that he has kept it close — in his briefcase — for decades.
Supposedly, Kerry wrote a book where he says he was in Vietnam on that Christmas eve.
His own words prove the lie.
it was actually his personal diary as I understand it.
i understand the importance of proving this guy as a liar and flip-flopper, but this is a stupid arguement. who cares where he was that day? what really matters is he spent that Christmas calculating how he would receive his Purple Hearts and get his @$$ out of Nam.
Kerry is a fugging legend in his own mind. Christ, LBJ should have pulled the troops out of Vietnam and just turned loose the savage Hanoi John on the poor VC/NVA.
Special missions upriver, an objector to the way the war was being run....hmm, might make an interesting movie. Throw in scenes with "Ride Of The Valkyries" blairing in the background, and I think you've got a hit!
bump
The Washington Post article of June 2003, in which Kerry claims to have been give his lucky hat while inserting a CIA agent into Cambodia is also included on his own Kerry/Edwards website.
It will be fun to see him try to wiggle out of this one.
http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/news/news_2003_0601.html
Imagine the coming debates & how this phony can possibly ever conduct himself, now that this fraud is being exposed? How does he even begin preparing for such a debate? Obviously his entire being and supposed purpose, as it was "seared, seared" into him must now be exorcised lest all in the audience laugh at him for claiming supposed positions or beliefs derived from something supposedly engrained within his entire self-being yet, as we now know was so obviously concocted from whole cloth.
Yep! The "special mission" whopper will prevent him from saying he may have been mistaken all along and just thought he was in Cambodia. You don't go on a "special mission to nowhere" with CIA personnel on board. Sounds like he had just been inspired by reading a Robert Ludlum novel and decided to puff himself up into a more heroic figure. Amazing!
Remember his Senate speech? The details of his Christmas in Cambodia were SEARED....SEARED in his memory. The hits just keep on comin'.
"That's our slogan," quipped his ad man, Jim Margolis. "John Kerry: He's no weenie."
no, 'weenie' would be too generous. i say more like 'vienna sausage.'
More "war stories" from the lying traitor...
To hear this clown talk, you'd think he was the Navy's answer to Audie Murphy. LMAO
Some drug runner probably was looking for an easy mark to take him up river in Vietnam, spotted "Major Frank Burns" Kerry over there who thought he was a big wheel in the Delta, pawned off the "secret spook hat" on Kerry as proof of his bona fides, and got his goods up the river, leaving Kerry thinking he was in Cambodia. Seeing Kerry in action, its totally possible, the guy's a fool.
thanks for that link - I've seen purported references to that fact but the actual source is (literally) indisputable!
Kerry's Cambodia Claims Scrutinized
In an Oct. 14, 1979, letter to the editor of the Boston Herald, Kerry wrote: "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."
I'd like York to ask Wasser, the Kerry supporting crew member, if he recalls being shot at by South Vietnamese and what he makes of President Nixon being mentioned in the same passage Kerry is harking back to Christmas of 1968 when President Johnson was in office.
The entire point of Kerry coming up with the Cambodian story was to tell everyone that Nixon lied to America about the U.S. presence in Cambodia and Kerry then staked his claim on his account of being there himself disproving "President Nixon".
I hope Byron York, who is a pretty good journalist but evidently prone to bending over backward to "be fair" and try to figure out a way to excuse a liar for lies as being mere "mis-remembrances", contemplates the entire story and the implications and evidence that disproves Kerry completely.
Let's get with the program here and call a spade a spade: Kerry was lying about this story and he did it in order to paint the U.S. as a deceitful nation.
I think he may have been ferrying "Captain Willard" upstream to kill "Colonel Kurtz". No, wait, that happened in a movie - Kerry is the real thing. My bad....
hahaha, yeah i totally agree with you. all these seemingly nit-picky things are very revealing about his character. if he can't be trusted with keeping minute facts straight, how can he be trusted with the most powerful office in the world? i'm just saying we dont want to overkill lest the moderates get annoyed. i'm glad Bush released his records and disproved any discrepencies about his whereabouts.
but about the coming debates. thats exactly why i'm saying we should ease up just a little. if by the debates the public is so sick of hearing about "Christmas in Cambodia", the slightest mention of it might be counter-productive. i'm not saying it is of no importance whatsoever. to the contrary. but we need to be cautious is all im saying.
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