John Kerry the Braggart: Unfit For Command, Part 4

[GePap]

Damn, Bush is such a scumbag liar!

I can't believe Ned, Drake and Ogie would ever vote for someone so blind and stupid as to ignore and not believe these "proven" accusations.

How could you guys even think of supporting this lowlife now?

Obviosuly you must vote now for Nader, or Liberterian

[Arrian]

No, GePap. The Lord Protector Bush has simply been misled by an advisor. He's a good guy, see, so he's gracious to his opponent. But the REAL TRUTH is the Kerry is still a filthy liar.

-Arrian

[Ming]

Originally posted by GePap
How could you guys even think of supporting this lowlife now?

Obviosuly you must vote now for Nader, or Liberterian

Hmmm... the same can be said to those considering voting for Kerry

[GePap]

Not at all- After all, I have always said that Kerry did earn his medals- and my choice has backed me up. But Bush has just committed an act of infamy and betrayed his most ardent supporters by listening to the pinko-commie media and not believing the "truth" about John Kerry! Inexcusable- he has spit on all veterans

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

I beleive I'm on record in the vote by state thread for voting for Badnarik.

Truth I guess that Bush is easily mislead by poor analysis. And since you've advocatied the near perfect record in George Bush being wrong on issues, I guess this is more than damning of how big a turd Kerry really is.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe
I beleive I'm on record in the vote by state thread for voting for Badnarik.

Truth I guess that Bush is easily mislead by poor analysis. And since you've advocatied the near perfect record in George Bush being wrong on issues, I guess this is more than damning of how big a turd Kerry really is.

(both the touche, and voting Badnarik)

[AnnC]

I read Bush's NYT interview this morning and found some of things he did and said mildly shocking. For example:

Showing none of the alarm about the North's growing arsenal that he once voiced regularly about Iraq, he opened his palms and shrugged when an interviewer noted that new intelligence reports indicate that the North may now have the fuel to produce six or eight nuclear weapons.

He shrugged? North Korea has missiles that can reach Seattle (where I live) and southern Alaska. Those of us who live within range of NK's missiles would prefer that the commander-in-chief take this threat very seriously.

And this:

"I don't think you give timelines to dictators,'' Mr. Bush said, speaking of North Korea's president, Kim Jong Il, and Iran's mullahs.

Isn't this the guy who gave Saddam a 48-hour deadline? If he no longer believes in giving timelines to dictators, does that count as a flip-flop?

As for the Swift Boat Vets, I've been following the controversy and trying to sort through the detailed allegations that they've made. And I gotta say, the first-person accounts by people who were physically near Kerry are a lot more credible than accounts from SBVs like Thurlow who were half a mile up the river.

I'll dig up the links and post a couple of articles.

[AnnC]

How Kerry won the Bronze Star

From the Wall Street Journal:

BY JIM RASSMANN
Tuesday, August 10, 2004 12:01 a.m.

I came to know Lt. John Kerry during the spring of 1969. He and his swift boat crew assisted in inserting our Special
Forces team and our Chinese Nung soldiers into operational sites in the Cau Mau Peninsula of South Vietnam. I worked
with him on many operations and saw firsthand his leadership, courage and decision-making ability under fire.

On March 13, 1969, John Kerry's courage and leadership saved my life.

While returning from a SEA LORDS operation along the Bay Hap River, a mine detonated under another swift boat.
Machine-gun fire erupted from both banks of the river, and a second explosion followed moments later. The second blast
blew me off John's swift boat, PCF-94, throwing me into the river. Fearing that the other boats would run me over, I
swam to the bottom of the river and stayed there as long as I could hold my breath.

When I surfaced, all the swift boats had left, and I was alone taking fire from both banks. To avoid the incoming fire, I
repeatedly swam under water as long as I could hold my breath, attempting to make it to the north bank of the river. I
thought I would die right there. The odds were against me avoiding the incoming fire and, even if I made it out of the
river, I thought I'd be captured and executed. Kerry must have seen me in the water and directed his driver, Del
Sandusky, to turn the boat around. Kerry's boat ran up to me in the water, bow on, and I was able to climb up a cargo
net to the lip of the deck. But, because I was nearly upside down, I couldn't make it over the edge of the deck. This left
me hanging out in the open, a perfect target. John, already wounded by the explosion that threw me off his boat, came
out onto the bow, exposing himself to the fire directed at us from the jungle, and pulled me aboard.

For his actions that day, I recommended John for the Silver Star, our country's third highest award for bravery under fire.
I learned only this past January that the Navy awarded John the Bronze Star with Combat V for his valor. The citation for
this award, signed by the Commander of U.S. Naval Forces, Vietnam, Vice Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, read, "Lieutenant
(junior grade) Kerry's calmness, professionalism and great personal courage under fire were in keeping with the highest
traditions of the United States Naval Service." To this day I am grateful to John Kerry for saving my life. And to this day I
still believe that he deserved the Silver Star for his courage.

It has been many years since I served in Vietnam. I returned home, got married, and spent many years as a deputy
sheriff for Los Angeles County. I retired in 1989 as a lieutenant. It has been a long time since I left Vietnam, but I think
often of the men who did not come home with us.

I am neither a politician nor an organizer. I am a retired police officer with a passion for orchids. Until January of this
year, the only public presentations I made were about my orchid hobby. But in this presidential election, I had to speak
out; I had to tell the American people about John Kerry, about his wisdom and courage, about his vision and leadership.
I would trust John Kerry with my life, and I would entrust John Kerry with the well-being of our country.

Nobody asked me to join John's campaign. Why would they? I am a Republican, and for more than 30 years I have
largely voted for Republicans. I volunteered for his campaign because I have seen John Kerry in the worst of conditions.
I know his character. I've witnessed his bravery and leadership under fire. And I truly know he will be a great
commander in chief.

Now, 35 years after the fact, some Republican-financed Swift Boat Veterans for Bush are suddenly lying about John
Kerry's service in Vietnam; they are calling him a traitor because he spoke out against the Nixon administration's failed
policies in Vietnam. Some of these Republican-sponsored veterans are the same ones who spoke out against John at
the behest of the Nixon administration in 1971. But this time their attacks are more vicious, their lies cut deep and are
directed not just at John Kerry, but at me and each of his crewmates as well. This hate-filled ad asserts that I was not
under fire; it questions my words and Navy records. This smear campaign has been launched by people without decency,
people who don't understand the bond of those who serve in combat.

As John McCain noted, the television ad aired by these veterans is "dishonest and dishonorable." Sen. McCain called on
President Bush to condemn the Swift Boat Veterans for Bush ad. Regrettably, the president has ignored Sen. McCain's
advice.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/forms/printThis.html?id=110005460

[AnnC]

How Kerry won the Silver Star

From the Chicago Tribune:

By William B. Rood
Chicago Tribune

August 22, 2004

There were three swift boats on the river that day in Vietnam more than 35 years ago--three
officers and 15 crew members. Only two of those officers remain to talk about what happened on
February 28, 1969.

One is John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate who won a Silver Star for what happened
on that date. I am the other.

For years, no one asked about those events. But now they are the focus of skirmishing in a
presidential election with a group of swift boat veterans and others contending that Kerry didn't
deserve the Silver Star for what he did on that day, or the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts he
was awarded for other actions.

Many of us wanted to put it all behind us--the rivers, the ambushes, the killing. Ever since that time, I have refused all
requests for interviews about Kerry's service--even those from reporters at the Chicago Tribune, where I work.

But Kerry's critics, armed with stories I know to be untrue, have charged that the accounts of what happened were
overblown. The critics have taken pains to say they're not trying to cast doubts on the merit of what others did, but their
version of events has splashed doubt on all of us. It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to
accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there.

Even though Kerry's own crew members have backed him, the attacks have continued, and in recent days Kerry has called
me and others who were with him in those days, asking that we go public with our accounts.

I can't pretend those calls had no effect on me, but that is not why I am writing this. What matters most to me is that this is
hurting crewmen who are not public figures and who deserved to be honored for what they did. My intent is to tell the story
here and to never again talk publicly about it.

I was part of the operation that led to Kerry's Silver Star. I have no firsthand knowledge of the events that resulted in his
winning the Purple Hearts or the Bronze Star.

But on Feb. 28, 1969, I was officer in charge of PCF-23, one of three swift boats--including Kerry's PCF-94 and Lt. j.g.
Donald Droz's PCF-43--that carried Vietnamese regional and Popular Force troops and a Navy demolition team up the
Dong Cung, a narrow tributary of the Bay Hap River, to conduct a sweep in the area.

The approach of the noisy 50-foot aluminum boats, each driven by two huge 12-cylinder diesels and loaded down with six
crew members, troops and gear, was no secret.

Ambushes were a virtual certainty, and that day was no exception.

Instructions from Kerry

The difference was that Kerry, who had tactical command of that particular operation, had talked to Droz and me
beforehand about not responding the way the boats usually did to an ambush.

We agreed that if we were not crippled by the initial volley and had a clear fix on the location of the ambush, we would turn
directly into it, focusing the boats' twin .50-caliber machine guns on the attackers and beaching the boats. We told our
crews about the plan.

The Viet Cong in the area had come to expect that the heavily loaded boats would lumber on past an ambush, firing at the
entrenched attackers, beaching upstream and putting troops ashore to sweep back down on the ambush site. Often, they
were long gone by the time the troops got there.

The first time we took fire--the usual rockets and automatic weapons--Kerry ordered a "turn 90" and the three boats
roared in on the ambush. It worked. We routed the ambush, killing three of the attackers. The troops, led by an Army
adviser, jumped off the boats and began a sweep, which killed another half dozen VC, wounded or captured others and
found weapons, blast masks and other supplies used to stage ambushes.

Meanwhile, Kerry ordered our boat to head upstream with his, leaving Droz's boat at the first site.

It happened again, another ambush. And again, Kerry ordered the turn maneuver, and again it worked. As we headed for
the riverbank, I remember seeing a loaded B-40 launcher pointed at the boats. It wasn't fired as two men jumped up from
their spider holes.

We called Droz's boat up to assist us, and Kerry, followed by one member of his crew, jumped ashore and chased a VC
behind a hooch--a thatched hut--maybe 15 yards inland from the ambush site. Some who were there that day recall the man
being wounded as he ran. Neither I nor Jerry Leeds, our boat's leading petty officer with whom I've checked my
recollection of all these events, recalls that, which is no surprise. Recollections of those who go through experiences like
that frequently differ.

With our troops involved in the sweep of the first ambush site, Richard Lamberson, a member of my crew, and I also went
ashore to search the area. I was checking out the inside of the hooch when I heard gunfire nearby.

Not long after that, Kerry returned, reporting that he had killed the man he chased behind the hooch. He also had picked up
a loaded B-40 rocket launcher, which we took back to our base in An Thoi after the operation.

John O'Neill, author of a highly critical account of Kerry's Vietnam service, describes the man Kerry chased as a "teenager"
in a "loincloth." I have no idea how old the gunner Kerry chased that day was, but both Leeds and I recall that he was a
grown man, dressed in the kind of garb the VC usually wore.

The man Kerry chased was not the "lone" attacker at that site, as O'Neill suggests. There were others who fled. There was
also firing from the tree line well behind the spider holes and at one point, from the opposite riverbank as well. It was not
the work of just one attacker.

Our initial reports of the day's action caused an immediate response from our task force headquarters in Cam Ranh Bay.

Congratulatory message

Known over radio circuits by the call sign "Latch," then-Capt. and now retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffmann, the task force
commander, fired off a message congratulating the three swift boats, saying at one point that the tactic of charging the
ambushes was a "shining example of completely overwhelming the enemy" and that it "may be the most efficacious method
of dealing with small numbers of ambushers."

Hoffmann has become a leading critic of Kerry's and now says that what the boats did on that day demonstrated Kerry's
inclination to be impulsive to a fault.

Our decision to use that tactic under the right circumstances was not impulsive but was the result of discussions well
beforehand and a mutual agreement of all three boat officers.

It was also well within the aggressive tradition that was embraced by the late Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, then commander of U.S.
Naval Forces, Vietnam. Months before that day in February, a fellow boat officer, Michael Bernique, was summoned to
Saigon to explain to top Navy commanders why he had made an unauthorized run up the Giang Thanh River, which runs
along the Vietnam-Cambodia border. Bernique, who speaks French fluently, had been told by a source in Ha Tien at the
mouth of the river that a VC tax collector was operating upstream.

Ignoring the prohibition against it, Bernique and his crew went upstream and routed the VC, pursuing and killing several.

Instead of facing disciplinary action as he had expected, Bernique was given the Silver Star, and Zumwalt ordered other
swifts, which had largely patrolled coastal waters, into the rivers.

The decision sent a clear message, underscored repeatedly by Hoffmann's congratulatory messages, that aggressive
patrolling was expected and that well-timed, if unconventional, tactics like Bernique's were encouraged.

What we did on Feb. 28, 1969, was well in line with the tone set by our top commanders.

Zumwalt made that clear when he flew down to our base at An Thoi off the southern tip of Vietnam to pin the Silver Star on
Kerry and assorted Bronze Stars and commendation medals on the rest of us.

Error in citation

My Bronze Star citation, signed by Zumwalt, praised the charge tactic we used that day, saying the VC were "caught
completely off guard."

There's at least one mistake in that citation. It incorrectly identifies the river where the main action occurred, a reminder
that such documents were often done in haste and sometimes authored for their signers by staffers. It's a cautionary note
for those trying to piece it all together. There's no final authority on something that happened so long ago--not the
documents and not even the strained recollections of those of us who were there.

But I know that what some people are saying now is wrong. While they mean to hurt Kerry, what they're saying impugns
others who are not in the public eye.

Men like Larry Lee, who was on our bow with an M-60 machine gun as we charged the riverbank, Kenneth Martin, who was
in the .50-caliber gun tub atop our boat, and Benjamin Cueva, our engineman, who was at our aft gun mount suppressing
the fire from the opposite bank.

Wayne Langhoffer and the other crewmen on Droz's boat went through even worse on April 12, 1969, when they saw Droz
killed in a brutal ambush that left PCF-43 an abandoned pile of wreckage on the banks of the Duong Keo River. That was
just a few months after the birth of his only child, Tracy.

The survivors of all these events are scattered across the country now.

Jerry Leeds lives in a tiny Kansas town where he built and sold a successful printing business. He owns a beautiful home
with a lawn that sweeps to the edge of a small lake, which he also owns. Every year, flights of purple martins return to the
stately birdhouses on the tall poles in his back yard.

Cueva, recently retired, has raised three daughters and is beloved by his neighbors for all the years he spent keeping their
cars running. Lee is a senior computer programmer in Kentucky, and Lamberson finished a second military career in the
Army.

With the debate over that long-ago day in February, they're all living that war another time.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-040821rood,1,663463,print.story?coll=chi-news-hed

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by GePap




(both the touche, and voting Badnarik)

In Ga, its a given Bush will win. My vote then at least gets to represent a desire for the repubs to look at the Lib platform (deluded as that desire maybe) given enough of us vote that way.

[Tattila the Hun]

Who cares about the US elections... In the Grand Scheme, they're a speck of dust.

[Arrian]

read Bush's NYT interview this morning and found some of things he did and said mildly shocking. For example:
quote:
Showing none of the alarm about the North's growing arsenal that he once voiced regularly about Iraq, he opened his palms and shrugged when an interviewer noted that new intelligence reports indicate that the North may now have the fuel to produce six or eight nuclear weapons.

He shrugged? North Korea has missiles that can reach Seattle (where I live) and southern Alaska. Those of us who live within range of NK's missiles would prefer that the commander-in-chief take this threat very seriously.

And this:
quote:
"I don't think you give timelines to dictators,'' Mr. Bush said, speaking of North Korea's president, Kim Jong Il, and Iran's mullahs.

Isn't this the guy who gave Saddam a 48-hour deadline? If he no longer believes in giving timelines to dictators, does that count as a flip-flop?

I understand your PoV, and I think Bush's double-standard on the issue of nutbag dictators who have nukes is appalling, the difference between NK and Iraq is that NK already has them, whereas Iraq (theoretically) was merely on its way to getting them. You can attack a country that is trying to get nukes. You cannot attack a country that already has them. They are immune to us. Hence the primary drive to get them in the first place. Have nukes, nobody can come in and take you down for whatever reason (no matter how valid).

NK, as far as I'm concerned, can just sit there and rot. Screw 'em. They're not going to shoot nukes at us because of MAD. They're going to continue to do what they've done for a long time now: extort things from us by dangling the possibility of giving up their nukes (which they have no intention whatsoever of doing). I say let 'em have the nukes, and to hell with them. Certainly the possibility of NK selling nukes or nuke tech to terrorists is worrisome, but we have that very same problem with Pakistan, and apparently that's ok.

-Arrian

[SpencerH]

I'd like to know what Inoue and Kerrey privately think of this issue.

[The Mad Monk]

What have they said publicly?

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Arrian
as far as I'm concerned, can just sit there and rot. Screw 'em. They're not going to shoot nukes at us because of MAD.

The problem with accepting NK with nukes as a new status quo is that it will be a major impetus for Japan getting nukes. Something that won't be good for the stability for the region.