I'm sure this is making the rounds, I just received in email:
Guys,
I confess to not knowing Swift Boat tactics in depth.
With that in mind, this came across my desk today and thought it worth a moment of thought.
Craig
++++++
I was in the Delta shortly after he left. I know that area well. I
know the operations he was involved in well. I know the tactics and the doctrine used. I know the equipment. Although I was attached to CTF-116
(PBRs) I spent a fair amount of time with CTF-115 (swift boats), Kerry's command.
Here are my problems and suspicions:
(1) Kerry was in-country less than four months and collected, a Bronze
Star, a Silver Star and three purple hearts. I never heard of anybody with
any outfit I worked with (including SEAL One, the Sea Wolves, Riverines and the River Patrol Force) collecting that much hardware so
fast, and for such pedestrian actions. The Swifts did a commendable job. But
that duty wasn't the worst you could draw. They operated only along the
coast and in the major rivers (Bassac and Mekong). The rough stuff in the
hot areas was mainly handled by the smaller, faster PBRs.
2) Three Purple Hearts but no limp. All injuries so minor that no
time lost from duty. Amazing luck. Or he was putting himself in for
medals every time he bumped his head on the wheel house hatch? Combat on the boats was almost always at close range. You didn't have minor wounds. At least not often. Not three times in a row. Then he used the three purple
hearts to request a trip home eight months before the end of his tour. Fishy.
(3) The details of the event for which he was given the Silver Star
make no sense at all. Supposedly, a B-40 was fired at the boat and missed. Charlie
jumps up with the launcher in his hand, the bow gunner knocks him down
with the twin .50, Kerry beaches the boat, jumps off, shoots Charlie, and retreives the launcher. If true, he did everything wrong.
(a) Standard procedure when you took rocket fire was to put your stern to the action and go balls to the wall. A B-40 has the ballistic
integrity of a frisbie after about 25 yards, so you put 50 yards or so between
you and the beach and begin raking it with your .50's.
(b) Did you ever see anybody get knocked down with a .50 caliber round
and get up? The guy was dead or dying. The rocket launcher was
empty. There was no reason to go after him (except if you knew he was no
danger to you just flopping around in the dust during his last few seconds on
earth, and you wanted some derring do in your after-action report). And we
didn't shoot wounded people. We had rules against that, too.
(c) Kerry got off the boat. This was a major breach of standing procedures. Nobody on a boat crew ever got off a boat in a hot area.
EVER!
The reason was simple. If you had somebody on the beach your boat was defenseless. It couldn't run and it couldn' t return fire. It was
stupid and it put his crew in danger. He should have been relieved and reprimanded. I never heard of any boat crewman ever leaving a boat
during or after a firefight.
Something is fishy.
Here we have a JFK wannabe (the guy Halsey wanted to court martial for
carelessly losing his boat and getting a couple people killed by
running across the bow of a Jap destroyer) who is hardly in Vietnam long
enough to get good tan, collects medals faster than Audie Murphy in a job where
lots of medals weren't common, gets sent home eight months early, requests
separation from active duty a few months after that so he can run for
Congress, finds out war heros don't sell well in Massachusetts in 1970
so reinvents himself as Jane Fonda, throws his ribbons in the dirt with
the cameras running to jump start his political career, gets Stillborn
Pell to invite him to address Congress and Bobby Kennedy's speech writer to do
the heavy lifting, winds up in the Senate himself a few years later, votes
against every major defense bill, says the CIA is irrelevant after the Wall
came down, votes against the Gulf War, a big mistake since that
turned out well, decides not to make the same mistake twice so votes for invading
Iraq, but oops, that didn't turn out so well so he now says he really didn't
mean for Bush to go to war when he voted to allow him to go to war.
I'm real glad you or I never had this guy covering our flanks in
Vietnam. I sure don't want him as Commander in Chief. I hope that somebody from
CTF-115 shows up with some facts challenging Kerry's Vietnam record.
I know in my gut it's wildy inflated. And fishy. |
