Why would Thurlow lie about something that denigrates his own medal. There has to be more to this.
"It's like a Hollywood presentation here, which wasn't the case," Thurlow said last night after being read the full text of his Bronze Star citation. "My personal feeling was always that I got the award for coming to the rescue of the boat that was mined. This casts doubt on anybody's awards. It is sickening and disgusting." Thurlow said he would consider his award "fraudulent" if coming under enemy fire was the basis for it. "I am here to state that we weren't under fire," he said. He speculated that Kerry could have been the source of at least some of the language used in the citation."
I agree completely, but the problem is that how we react to it will be far different from how the mainstream press reacts to it. Now that they have a talking point to discredit the story, they'll ram it down everyone's throats for the next few days.
How do you know he lied. Unless he wrote the after action report, nothing he has said about the events that day is contridicted here. If Kerry wrote the after action report, and said they were fired on, but no one else remembers them being fired at, than either Kerry remembers something they don't, or Kerry lied.
No, I think the language in Thurlow's military records is consistent with all prior statements from the Swift Vets. One of John O'Neill's strongest accusations against Kerry is that he lied to get his medals: he deliberately provided false after-action reports to his commanding officers on a number of occasions. This story by the Post will probably get Kerry into even more trouble, because it will focus attention on the false reports he provided to his superior officers. Not to worry about this. What a tangled web we weave....
"A document recommending Thurlow for the Bronze Star noted that all his actions itook place under constant enemy small arms fire which LTJG THURLOW completely ignored in providing immediate assistance' to the disabled boat and its crew. The citation states that all other units in the flotilla also came under fire.
" 'It's like a Hollywood presentation here, which wasn't the case,' Thurlow said last night after being read the full text of his Bronze Star citation. 'My personal feeling was always that I got the award for coming to the rescue of the boat that was mined. This casts doubt on anybody's awards. It is sickening and disgusting.' "
Thurlow didn't write this, someone else did. The case the Compost makes later is that that Kerry didn't author his own requests for medals, and if Thurlow didn't know what was written in the reccomendations, Kerry didn't either.