Bob Novak brought it up first. Check out this little exchange (I added the bold formatting):
NOVAK: Congressman McDermott, last night we were talking about you. I hope your ears weren't burning. And your colleague, Congressman Fattah from Pennsylvania was defending you. He kept referring to you as a war veteran who had risked your life for the American people.
And I just want to get the record straight. With all due respect, you were chief psychiatrist at the Long Beach naval station with the rank of Lieutenant Commander. You never heard a shot fired in anger, did you?
MCDERMOTT: No.
NOVAK: OK. I just wanted to get the record straight. So you don't get a pass to go to Baghdad and call the president a liar because you were some kind of war hero.
MCDERMOTT: You know what I did do, Bob, I sat and dealt with the casualties that came back. If you ever saw the movie "Apocalypse Now" those kids were the ones I saw. I saw the Marines, and I know what happens when you send kids to war in a war where the government is not clear about what they are doing, in which they are not backed up.
Those kids came home confused and upset. And here we are going to a war with everybody saying we know what we're doing. We don't have any idea.
First the president says, oh, it's al Qaeda we're after. Oh, well no, it's after weapons of mass destruction. No, it's al Qaeda. What are we doing? He says it's all so sure.