Posted on 08/18/2004 5:10:48 PM PDT by dmanLA
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Kerry war journal contradicts key claim?
At least 9 days after Purple Heart, wrote he had not 'been shot at yet'
Posted: August 17, 2004 8:00 p.m. Eastern
By Art Moore
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
A previously unnoticed passage in John Kerry's approved war biography, citing his own journals, appears to contradict the senator's claim he won his first Purple Heart as a result of an injury sustained under enemy fire.
John Kerry receving medal for Vietnam service.
Kerry, who served as commander of a Navy swift boat, has insisted he was wounded by enemy fire Dec. 2, 1968, when he and two other men took a smaller vessel, a Boston Whaler, on a patrol north of his base at Cam Ranh Bay.
But Douglas Brinkley's "Tour of Duty," for which Kerry supplied his journals and letters, indicates that as Kerry set out on a subsequent mission, he had not yet been under enemy fire.
While the date of the four-day excursion on PCF-44 [Patrol Craft Fast] is not specified, Brinkley notes it commenced when Kerry "had just turned 25, on Dec. 11, 1968," which was nine days after the incident in which he claimed he had been wounded by enemy fire.
Brinkley recounts the outset of that mid-December journey, which included a crew of radarman James Wasser, engineman William Zaladonis, gunner's mate Stephen Gardner and boatswain's mates Drew Whitlow and Stephen Hatch:
"They pulled away from the pier at Cat Lo with spirits high, feeling satisfied with the way things were going for them. They had no lust for battle, but they also were were not afraid. Kerry wrote in his notebook, 'A cocky feeling of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel because we hadn't been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven't been shot at are allowed to be cocky.'" The diary entry apparently confirms assertions made by Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth, a group of more than 250 vets opposing his presidential candidacy who served in the Naval operation that patrolled the rivers and canals of the Mekong Delta area controlled by North Vietnam.
Kerry has made his four months of service in Vietnam a central theme in his campaign, arguing his purported war heroics help qualify him to be commander in chief.
In the swift-boat group's newly published book, "Unfit for Command," authors John O'Neill, who took over command of Kerry's boat, and Jerome Corsi assert the wound for which Kerry received his medal actually was caused by him firing an M-79 grenade launcher too close, "causing a tiny piece of shrapnel (one to two centimeters) to barely stick in his arm."
Could the "we" to which Kerry referred in his notebook entry have meant only that his crew, rather than Kerry in particular, had not encountered enemy fire?
At least one other PCF-44 crew member was with Kerry during the Boston Whaler incident, Zaldonis, according to the Boston Globe's account of the story.
Whatever the case, Corsi told WorldNetDaily he believes the apparent contradiction in Kerry's journal, as presented by Brinkley, deserves a response.
"We're not interested in charges that cannot be documented," he added.
The Kerry campaign's press staff has not answered WND's request for a response.
Corsi contends Kerry has a "pattern" of equivocation, "distinguishing and extending" his answers to charges, including responses to alleged participation in a 1971 Kansas City meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War where a plot to assassinate seven U.S. senators was considered.
"Finally, he said he was there, but he doesn't remember it," Corsi said.
Last week, Kerry was forced to revise his decades-long contention he was on a secret mission in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968.
"Tour of Duty" author Brinkley is reported to be writing a piece for the New Yorker saying it actually was January 1969 when Kerry was sent into Cambodia, not December 1968.
As WorldNetDaily reported, the authors of "Unfit for Command" claim that despite the senator's many public references to spending Christmas Eve in Cambodia – including a1986 speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate – the candidate was never in Vietnam's neighboring country. Rather, they say he was more than 50 miles from the Cambodian border at Sa Dec.
'Dear diary moment'
Conservative commentator and attorney Chris Horner, a defender of the swift-boats group who alerted WND to the diary entry, called it a "stunning" revelation.
On recent television and radio appearances, he said, claims made by eyewitnesses to events surrounding the first Purple Heart have been countered by "surrogates of Kerry" who do not address the substance of the charges.
"So finally, you have an eyewitness in a dear diary moment, saying, 'Dear diary, I still haven't been shot at,' confirming what the Swiftees have been saying," observed Horner, who has defended the group's claims in recent appearances on television news shows.
"Admittedly the source is questionable – John Kerry – but it at last provides a witness from his camp to address the charges that his first Purple Heart resulted from a scratch borne of his own fire," Horner said.
Kerry's journal entry indicating he had not yet been fired upon is noted in a soon-to-be released book by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, editors of the left-leaning, alternative newsletter Counterpunch. In an excerpt of their book, they write regarding Kerry's first Purple Heart, "there's no evidence that anyone had fired back, or that Kerry had been in combat, as becomes obvious when we read an entry from his diary about a subsequent excursion, written on December 11, 1968, nine days after the incident that got Kerry his medal."
Enemy fire?
According to "Unfit for Command," Kerry's initial requests to receive a Purple Heart for the wound were flatly rejected.
In "Tour of Duty," Brinkley quotes Kerry as saying he and his comrades were "scared s---less" that night, thinking fishermen in sampans might be Viet Cong.
When some of the sampan occupants began unloading something on the beach, Kerry lit a flare, causing the startled men on shore to run for cover. That's when Kerry says he and the other Americans began firing.
Said Kerry in "Tour of Duty":
My M-16 jammed, and as I bent down in the boat to grab another gun, a stinging piece of heat socked into my arm and just seemed to burn like hell. By this time one of the sailors had started the engine and we ran by the beach, strafing it. Then it was quiet. O'Neill and Corsi, however, claim there is no evidence whatsoever Kerry took any enemy fire that night.
Patrick Runyon was operating the engine on the Boston whaler during the incident.
"I can't say for sure that we got return fire or how [Kerry] got nicked," Runyon is quoted as saying in "Unfit for Command." "I couldn't say one way or the other. I know he did get nicked, a scrape on the arm."
Wrote O'Neill: "In a separate conversation, Runyon related that he never knew Kerry was wounded. So even in the [Boston] Globe biography accounting, it was not clear that there was any enemy fire, just a question about how Kerry might have been hit with shrapnel."
The book also asserts another one of Kerry's three Purple Hearts was self-inflicted.
Thank you for your service. Anyone who can stomach watchin the MSM and report back to us is a hero in my book!!!
Still though, not as much coverage as "BUSH MUST AHVE SKIPPED HIS DUTIES!".
Also. ..
Americans at war who haven't been shot at are allowed to be cocky.
Kerrys Rule of War Number 2..right after fleeing from a firefight.
Egad, I thought that said KERRY. My eyes are having Freudian fits or something!
Or both. He's a patholigical liar after all.
Rats. I thought it MEANT Kerry.
Kurtz got off the boat. He split from the whole f---ing program. How did that happen? What did he see here that first tour? 38 f---ing years old. If he joined the Green Berets, there was no way you'd ever get above Colonel. Kurtz knew what he was giving up. The more I read and began to understand, the more I admired him. His family and friends couldn't understand it, and they couldn't talk him out of it. He had to apply three times and he put up with a ton of s--t, but when he threatened to resign, they gave it to him. The next youngest guy in his class was half his age. They must have thought he was some far-out old man humping it over that course. I did it when I was 19 and it damn near wasted me. A tough motherf---er. He finished. He could have gone for General, but he went for himself instead...October 1967, on special assignment..., Kurtz staged Operation Archangel with combined local forces. Rated a major success. He received no official clearance. He just thought it up and did it. What balls! They were gonna nail his ass to the floorboards for that one, but after the press got ahold of it, they promoted him to Full Colonel instead. Ah man, the bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam, you needed wings to stay above it.
There are better confrontations to have than this one.
He lied to the congress and the entire country, too.
Funny. I can't help thinking that sounds as if it might have been written retrospectively (possibly long after the event), rather than contemporaneously. Wish I could say why; it just strikes me that way. Doesn't sound like something a young fellow would write if he's still out in the bush and doesn't know whether he might be shot at in the next minute -- especially considering the context -- he's just had a slight wound from an explosion a week or two earlier (even if it had nothing to do with enemy fire). Sounds more like the sort of thing a somewhat older and wiser guy might write after he's seen combat, looking back on his earlier innocence.
PS to my post no. 30: One thing for certain -- it was clearly written by someone who already had a well-developed, snotty attitude toward Americans.
not exactly, unless one develops a new cockiness on a daily basis after having previously been shot at ... he stated later in that journal entry that he had the cockiness of one who'd not yet been shot at ....
INTREP
ping
I don't like the cocky bit either. I don't like the reference to Americans are allowed to be cocky because he's saying the whole group is like that, i.e., he's speaking for all....just like when he came home.
More important than this possible lie is the unambiguous lie about being present at the VVAW meeting where the assassination of Senators was discussed.
We can ask of John Kerry as Cicero asked of Catiline:
---When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now? Do not the nightly guards placed on the Palatine Hill--do not the watches posted throughout the city--does not the alarm of the people, and the union of all good men--does not the precaution taken of assembling the senate in thus most defensible place--do not the looks and countenances of this venerable body here present, have any effect upon you? Do you not feel that your plans are detected? Do you not see that your conspiracy is already arrested and rendered powerless by the knowledge which every one here possesses of it? What is there that you did last night, what the night before-- where is it that you were--who was there that you summoned to meet you--what design was there which was adopted by you, with which you think that any one of us is unacquainted?---
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