There's no down-side to the Bush campaign at this point in pushing the story along because Kerry's pratfall on Christmas-Eve-in-Cambodia-in-1968 provides blanket immunity to anyone asking tough questions about the rest of the story...See also THIS devastating (to Kerry) analysis:
.Holiday in Cambodia
NRO ^ | 8/18/04 | James S. Robbins
Posted on 08/18/2004 6:38:31 AM PDT by kattracks
Some historical facts.
One of the central events in John Kerry's personal mythology is the time he was sent illegally into Cambodia during the Vietnam conflict. It was an event that bestowed on him an aura of a victimhood to balance the fact that he served in uniform, endearing him to the Left while immunizing him from criticism from the Right. The most quoted statement is from a Kerry floor speech of March 27, 1986: 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 the Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and 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. He reiterated this during a September 4, 1997, Senate hearing: 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 which had an allure to me, and to many others, which has been sustained through those years.
And he gave a more detailed if somewhat less attractive version in an article in the April 3, 1994, Providence Journal: Christmas Eve I was up getting shot at somewhere near Cambodia. Stupid Vietnamese were celebrating Christmas by shooting tracers, fifty-caliber, right up into the air, and the goddamned things were coming right over our head. That was a wild night. That was a night like right out of "Apocalypse Now." It was just surreal. Mortars going off. Tracers piercing the sky. People crazy. Flares.
In Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard makes a dangerous, sometimes-trippy river passage to Cambodia on a PBR similar to the craft Kerry commanded. By the movie's account, once you got past the Viet Cong ambush parties and spear-throwing tribesmen, a ship-board excursion into neutral Cambodia was pretty much a lonely voyage through the steamy jungle, right on up to Colonel Kurtz's head-strewn temple-lair. But in fact the river route was much busier, and it would have been hard to just float on in unnoticed.
The North Vietnamese had a massive presence in southeastern Cambodia. At the time Kerry served in the Delta there were around five North Vietnamese (PAVN) divisions active in the area. A year earlier, during the months leading up to the Tet Offensive, 10,000 tons of supplies had been smuggled down river to Viet Cong assault teams. The supplies arrived in Cambodia by cargo ship to the southern port of Sihanoukville, and were carried overland by Chinese-owned trucks by way of Phnom Penh to the Vietnamese border areas to be readied for smuggling in-country. The brown-water Navy played an important role in helping check this infiltration. In October 1968, Operation SEALORDS commenced — the largest interdiction mission yet — seeking to seal the entire border up to Tay Ninh. John Kerry participated in this operation as part of Task Force 115.
The Cambodian government tried publicly to ignore the PAVN smuggling operation, as well as the occupation of large swaths of the border region by Communist troops, though some reports said the Cambodian army was profiting by skimming arms and selling food to the North Vietnamese. Cambodia finally admitted that the Viet Cong used their country for sanctuary on October 4, 1968. But while PAVN activities in Cambodia were whitewashed, even minor U.S. border violations brought stern protest. Cambodia had severed diplomatic relations with the U.S. in May 1965 over some alleged border crossings during military operations, and President Johnson was very sensitive to the issue. He wanted to keep Vietnam a limited war, and would not allow major combat operations against the Communist-occupied zone in Cambodia. This unwillingness actively to eliminate North Vietnamese safe-havens was a major constraint on the ability of our military forces to conduct the war effectively. Imagine if organized divisions of Iraqi insurgent forces were holed up over the Syrian and Iranian borders, conducting operations against our troops — it would be a very different ball game.
Not to say there weren't numerous cross-border covert operations (see the story about the origin of John Kerry's "lucky hat," given to him by a CIA operative he was ferrying to Cambodia — which also may have been based on Apocalypse Now, come to think of it). The covert ops were conducted under the auspices of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam Special Operations Group (MACV/SOG) reconnaissance unit Operations 35 (OPS-35). OPS-35 operated in Cambodia from 1965 to 1972 under code names "Daniel Boone" and "Salem House," chiefly using Army special-forces veterans and tribal mercenaries. The missions into Cambodia were strictly limited to observation, and could penetrate no more than 20 to 30 kilometers inside the country. They generally infiltrated by helicopter or overland.
Crossing into Cambodia by boat was not easy, unless one was patrolling the Bassac River, which runs along the southernmost border between the two countries, so if you landed on the wrong shore you were technically "in Cambodia." Steve Gardner, who served with Kerry on PCF-44 during the period in question, said it was impossible for their boat to have crossed the international border elsewhere because of concrete pilings and U.S. Navy patrols blocking the way. The barriers were intended as much to keep our people in South Vietnam as to keep theirs out; we had already run into problems with people making it too far upriver without an invitation. On July 17, 1968, the Cambodian Navy captured eleven Americans on a boat a mile inside Cambodian waters. The men were on a re-supply mission but, lacking proper charts, they had inadvertently strayed across the line. The Cambodians believed they were up to no good and put the men in detention, treating them well but rejecting U.S. requests that they be repatriated. The eccentric Cambodian ruler Prince Norodom Sihanouk demanded a bulldozer or tractor in exchange for each man, but the president refused to meet his terms. Sihanouk finally released them, along with another American who had fallen from a helicopter on the wrong side of the border on December 19, 1968. He said it was in honor of Christmas — a Buddhist making a goodwill gesture to Christians, as he put it. Thus on Christmas Eve, 1969, the border issue was a hot topic; it is doubtful President Johnson would have tolerated any sailors blundering their way into Cambodia to foment a new crisis, much less have ordered them there...
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