Posted on 09/03/2003 1:31:41 PM PDT by Rocko
From this article
The Making of the Candidates: John Forbes Kerry
In many ways, it was Kerry's defining moment, a gutsy impulse that turned a junior officer into a hero, launching him on a trajectory of fame. An experience of war reduced to its essence - kill or be killed - that would transform an aggressive soldier into a more reflective veteran against the war, and finally, into a young candidate who wanted to bring that experience to Washington.
And Kerry just happens to have captured it all on film.
``I'll show you where they shot from. See? That's the hole covered up with reeds,'' says Kerry, showing the films on a recent evening, his hand tightening on the remote control as he clicks the images down to slow motion.
``This is just something that I improvised...The point was not to just take an ambush, but to go directly at them,'' adds Kerry, pointing to where he brought the boat ashore, and explaining how he returned later with a Super 8 millimeter hand-held movie camera to record highlights of the mission. ``That's me right there. One of my crew was filming all this.''
The films have the grainy quality of home movies. In their blend of the posed and the unexpected, they reveal something indelible about the man who shot them - the tall, thin, handsome Naval officer seen striding through the reeds in flak jacket and helmet, holding aloft the captured B-40 rocket. The young man so unconscious of risk in the heat of battle, yet so focused on his future ambitions that he would reenact the moment for film. It is as if he had cast himself in the sequel to the experience of his hero, John F. Kennedy, on the PT-109.
``John was thinking Camelot when he shot that film, absolutely,'' says Thomas Vallely, a fellow veteran and one of Kerry's closest political advisers and friends.
``He was thinking, `These are my moments fighting for a good cause,' '' adds Vallely, now director of Harvard's Indochina-Burma Program. ``But then he had to throw that away, Camelot and the whole thing, when he came out against the war. That is what makes John an interesting guy; it's what makes him real.''
Kerry dismisses the film record of his war as ``just something I did, no great meaning to it.'' But through hours of watching the films in the den of his newly renovated Beacon Hill mansion, it becomes apparent that these are memories and footage he returns to often. Kerry jumps repeatedly from the couch to adjust the Sony large screen TV in his home entertainment center, making sure the picture is clear, the color correct. He fast forwards, rewinds and freeze frames the footage. His running commentary - vivid, sometimes touching, sometimes self-serving - never misses a beat. At one point in the evening, his eyes well with tears, when he talks about a close friend killed by a Viet Cong rocket in the spring of 1969 on the same rivers he had left only two weeks before.
Competitive price?!?!
He gets half of her $350 million!!!
She must love him for his horsey french face and flowing lochs.
I'm hoping my kids will absorb these lessons when they're young so they can overcome the academic indoctrination they're going to get over the next fifteen or so years.
I share your hopes. "Avec les presstitutes, il y a Rat detestable" (tr: He is a disgusting, dishonest, detestable Rat who places politics over the good of this nation and our brave fighting troops along with the presstitutes who enable him--well, that's what I wanted to say about the French looking tool)...
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