This might be easier to read.
Travis, below is some of the earliest lies about seals, by Blather and CBS. idkfa thanks for posting this.
"One of the most ingrained stereotypes that plague the 3.3 million Americans who served in Vietnam is the tainted image of the Vietnam vet as scruffy, jobless, homeless, mentally unstable, addicted, suicidal, and stranded on the fringes of society.
It is an image that has been reinforced by innumerable TV dramas, movies, and newscasts. It is also usually tied to stories about the horrors of war, atrocities, and other dark deeds that, allegedly, have caused these personal problems for the tragic vet.
The highly hyped 1988 CBS program, "The Wall Within," purporting to tackle the issue of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), is a perfect example of the lies and distortions about Vietnam that have been fed to three generations of Americans.
The program profiled six pathetic victims who it claimed were "representative" of those who served in Vietnam.
It claimed that the symptoms suffered by these men were shared by hundreds of thousands of other veterans.
The Dan Rather "documentary" became part of the CBS video history series on Vietnam and is graced with a formal introduction by liberal-left one-worlder Walter Cronkite.
This is how Dan Rather introduced his TV audience to one of his prize victims: "At age 16, Steve was a Navy SEAL, trained to assassinate. For almost two years, he operated behind enemy lines, then he broke. He came home in a straightjacket, addicted to alcohol and drugs."
According to the CBS propaganda piece, "Steve" had been trained to massacre and mutilate Vietnamese civilians and then blame the atrocities on the Communists. "You’re telling me that you went into the village, killed people, burned part of the village, then made it appear that the other side had done this?" Rather asked.
"Yeah," Steve responded. "For propaganda purposes at home," Rather added. "That’s correct," Steve confirmed. Terry Bradley, another supposed Vietnam vet suffering from PTSD, told a grisly tale of having, on one occasion, skinned alive up to 50 Vietnamese men, women and children.
He told of cutting out hearts and eyeballs, of mangling and stacking their bloody bodies. The CBS program showed the mentally tormented vet at night in a dark forest howling at the sky.
Another PTSD victim, George Greul, told the CBS team that he had been traumatized by witnessing his friend’s gruesome death on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier while the ship was on a "secret mission" off the coast of Vietnam.
He had seen his buddy accidentally walk into a spinning propeller blade and had been spattered with his blood.
The critically acclaimed "Wall Within" was a colossal fraud. The man identified as "Steve" turned out to be one Steve Southards, and through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, Burkett obtained his military records.
The truth, he found, was that "Southards was not a SEAL, nor had he taken any SEAL training.... In reality, Southards was an ‘internal communications repairman,’ assigned to rear area bases and had no combat decorations.
His only special training was a ‘motion picture operation course (16mm),’ at Subic Bay in the Philippines."
What’s more, he had spent time in the brig for going AWOL six times.
According to Burkett’s research, "Little that Southards had told Rather was true except that he had been in the Navy, and that his first name was Steve."
Terry Bradley was not a "fighting sergeant," as Dan Rather had described him, but another storytelling misfit who had spent 300 days either AWOL or in the stockade.
No evidence was provided by CBS, and Burkett could find none either, from official sources or otherwise, to verify Bradley’s tales of mass atrocities.
George Greul’s carrier, the Ticonderoga, was deployed on a training mission off the coast of California, not a "secret mission" off the coast of Vietnam, when the fatal propeller accident he referred to took place. But Greul was not present when the accident happened; he was merely repeating what he had heard.
However, his story had convinced the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) that he had been sufficiently traumatized to receive a couple thousand dollars a month in compensation.
Thanks for the editing.
Expert: Dan Rather Exaggerates Military Record
Case in point are Rather’s claims in "Bias.” Goldberg's book details a confrontation he had with Rather over the anchorman's compulsive liberal bias.
Goldberg recounts that when he told the network star in 1996 of his upcoming Wall Street Journal op-ed piece citing a specific CBS News report as an example of left-wing bias, Rather replied he was "getting viscerally angry about this.”
"Angry I was expecting,” Goldberg tell his readers. "What came next, I wasn’t.
"Rather’s voice started quivering, and he told me how in his young days, he had signed up with the Marines – not once, but twice!”
This is not the first time Rather has hid behind the flag and his own military service claims to deflect criticism of his reporting, Burkett said.
Burkett added that Rather is greatly exaggerating his record. First, Burkett says, Rather "misspoke” when he claimed he signed up for the Marines twice. He didn’t.
And Burkett is flabbergasted that Rather continues to proudly describe himself as a "Marine.”
"What he did, he signed up for the military twice, not the Marines,” Burkett said after thoroughly reviewing Rather’s military records.
But Burkett notes that Rather "never got through Marine recruit training because he couldn’t do the physical activity.”
Rather 'Unfit'
As Burkett explains in "Stolen Valor," Rather "was discharged less than four months later on May 11, 1954 for being medically unfit.” As a boy, Rather had suffered from rheumatic fever.
"This is like a guy who flunks out of Harvard running around saying he went to Harvard,” Burkett said.
Burkett also believes that, far from being a gung-ho military enlistee, Rather’s record shows he deftly avoiding entering the military during the Korean War.
Burkett says that Rather was a student at Sam Houston University at a time during the Korean War when "you could be drafted right out of college,” with deferments available only short term, for a semester.
"The way he got around being eligible for the draft was he joined a reserve unit – Army reserve but not the Marines.” Rather stayed in the reserve for the entire war.
"The second the Korean War was over, and he wasn’t in jeopardy anymore, he dropped out of the Army Reserve. He later graduated from college, and then went into the Marine Corps. So he signed up for the Marine Corps once,” Burkett said, not twice.
Rather knows he is skirting the truth about his record, Burkett believes. "He’s made such a big deal out of this ‘I’m a Marine’ thing. I mean, to a real Marine, you’re not a Marine – I mean even though you swore an oath and you’re technically on the payroll, you’re not a real Marine until you get out of basic training. And he never got out of recruit training.”
During Rather’s angry confrontation with Goldberg, the author of "Bias” says that "to his credit,” the anchorman emphasized that his Marine service was during "peacetime” so that "he was trying not to sound like some kind of war hero.”
Still, Rather never disclosed that his Marine service never got him past basic training.
Meanwhile, Burkett is miffed that Rather led media criticism of former Vice President Dan Quayle’s military record during his White House campaign.
"This is the same national broadcaster who, night after night during the 1988 presidential campaign, hammered Republican presidential candidate Dan Quayle for avoiding Vietnam by joining the National Guard,” he said.
"CBS was particularly heavy on Dan Quayle and his Guard experience. … It’s exactly the same thing Dan Rather did during the Korean War.
"If I had been in Rather’s position,” added Burkett, "I wouldn’t even have ever brought up the Marine Corps.”
Dan Rather is a Marine. Well, not exactly. But in his mind, he is a Marine. LOL!