I found an detailed article in the "Dallas Observer" from Jul 29th that has a lot of BG info on the Swift vets that I hadn't read before. Here are some clips and a URL.
A group of veterans says John Kerry stretches the truth about his Vietnam service. Who can you believe? Who knows?
BY JOHN GONZALEZ
john.gonzalez@dallasobserver.com
From the Week of Thursday, July 29, 2004
A few months ago, just as John Kerry began to dominate the Democratic presidential primary races, John O'Neill lay in bed at Houston's Methodist Hospital, recovering from surgery he'd undergone to donate a kidney to his wife, Anne. It's rare that a husband can successfully donate organs to his wife, but the O'Neills were lucky, and he was eager to do it, even though it meant an operation that would leave him weak and sickly. Anne soon regained enough strength to be released from the hospital. O'Neill's convalescence wasn't so smooth.
"It took me a long time to get out of the hospital," O'Neill says. "About three or four weeks--at least three weeks and a long time to recover after that...My wife actually visited me two or three times in the hospital, even though she was the one getting the transplant."
There wasn't much to do then except lie there, maybe read a book or watch television. One day he flipped on the news, and there was Kerry smiling back at him. The Massachusetts senator had just won another primary and was on his way to earning his party's presidential nomination. It made O'Neill sick, or sicker than he had been.
"I looked up, and I saw Kerry on the television monitor in a brown leather [bomber's] jacket, with some caption below the deal," O'Neill recalls. "I thought it was the Iowa [caucus], but I was later told it was probably the Wisconsin primary. But I was shocked, to tell you the truth. Of course, none of us wore brown leather jackets in Vietnam, because it was 90 degrees. It was political theater. I had never anticipated that Kerry could actually be nominated by the Democratic Party.".........
...."The only reason I got back into this deal--100 percent--is because he's running as a major party candidate for president of the United States," O'Neill counters. "And I think he would be a terrible president. There are many Democrats who I think would make wonderful presidents of the United States and wonderful commanders in chief.
"If we weren't talking about him running for president of the United States, I wouldn't be any more involved than I was in all the political campaigns he had. If I'm an opportunist, then I'm the Rip Van Winkle of opportunists."
Three decades after the fall of Saigon and the withdrawal of American troops, the Vietnam War still divides the hearts and minds of those who served, and its specter continues to influence politics. But like almost everything else dipped in that quagmire, the truth--about Kerry's service, his postwar politics, the motives of both sides and the funding behind his opposition--is obscured by the residue of a dirty war.
Shortly after forming, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT) hired a former FBI agent named Tom Rupprath, who is now a private investigator in Rockwall, to locate swift boat vets and to dig up whatever he could regarding Kerry's service record. (Rupprath did not return calls from the Dallas Observer.) In addition to criticizing Kerry for what he said about veterans and war crimes, SBVT has publicly levied some serious allegations about Kerry's recollection of his time in Vietnam and about how his medals (three Purple Hearts for being wounded in combat and a Bronze Star and a Silver Star for valor) were achieved.......
......."There are a lot of medals that really wouldn't make any difference to me," says O'Neill, whose decorations in Vietnam included two Bronze Stars. "The Purple Heart is a medal that really makes a big difference because it's a medal that people associate with genuinely being wounded. Maybe it makes more difference to me. My uncle was killed in Korea, and one of my earliest memories was sitting at the Naval Academy cemetery, and I watched them give my aunt, who had five little kids, a Purple Heart for my uncle, whose body has never been recovered. The Purple Heart is a big deal.
"You get somebody who fakes a Purple Heart, you know, that's the bottom rung of human conduct. You get somebody who fakes a Purple Heart and uses it to go home early, you're even further down. You get somebody who fakes it, uses it to come home early and then calls everyone else a chicken hawk? Son, you've got a real problem on your hands."
Rest at dallasobserver.com |
