Bcb, the following article re SwiftVet members highlights John Kerry's blink-of-the-eye 4month tour in Vietnam. Why does he hold so tenaciously to his losing "war hero" obsession? Most likely because he has nothing else to brag about. His senate career has been uneventful and he was hoping his radical post Vietnam activities would remain under wraps. He's trapped in a collapsing house of cards. News article:
Two Anti-Kerry Vets Get Jobs on VA Panel
04-Sep-2004
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Two former Vietnam prisoners of war who appear in ads attacking Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry were appointed to a panel advising the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The former POWs in the ad, Kenneth Cordier and Paul Galanti, serve on the VA's 12-member Former POW Advisory Committee. VA Secretary Anthony Principi appointed Cordier in 2002 and Galanti in 2003.
Cordier said the VA panel has nothing to do with the Bush campaign or the anti-Kerry group. "It's totally apolitical, and we meet twice a year to bring to the secretary's attention problems from around the country in VA hospitals," he said.
Cordier and Galanti appear in an anti-Kerry ad saying their Vietnamese captors used news of anti-war protests, such as ones Kerry organized, to taunt the prisoners.
Kerry has labeled the group running the ads, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a front for the Bush campaign. Kerry's campaign complained to the Federal Election Commission that the veterans' group was illegally coordinating its attacks with the Bush campaign.
Bush and his campaign have denied any coordination with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
Cordier said he got involved with the group because of his continuing outrage over anti-Vietnam war activists like Kerry. He said he got in touch with one of its leaders, John O'Neill, who later commanded the same Swift boat Kerry had overseen.
Galanti coordinated Arizona Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign in Virginia four years ago.
The anti-Kerry group's ads have accused Kerry of lying to get some of the five medals he won as a Swift boat commander in Vietnam.
Kerry himself has given differing accounts of some incidents, and his past claim to have been in Cambodia on Christmas 1968 is not substantiated by any documents so far.
The group released a letter to Kerry and 101 names on the letter match names of officers or enlisted men on the rolls of Kerry's units in Vietnam. Kerry was there from November 1968 through March 1969.
Van Odell, an enlisted man in Kerry's unit and a member of the group, said Swift Boat Veterans for Truth never claimed to be exclusively made up of veterans who served with Kerry. Finding such vets is difficult because Kerry was only in Vietnam for about four months, Odell said.
"It's hard to be there when he was," Odell said. "He was in and out so fast."
Before volunteering for Swift boat duty on Vietnam's rivers, Kerry served about five months on a Navy frigate offshore in the Gulf of Tonkin.
At least 30 men on the list, including one who appears in an anti-Kerry ad, served in Kerry's former Swift boat unit a year after Kerry left Vietnam, the records show. |
