part 3 of Chapter 3

UNFIT FOR COMMAND
But in Kerry’s own unit, Coastal Division 14, his attempt to gain the
award through fraud marked him as someone who could never be
trusted. When Kerry was dispatched to go to An Thoi with Lieutenant
Tedd Peck (now Captain, USNR, retired), Peck told him, “Kerry, follow
me no closer than a thousand yards. If you get any closer, I’ll
teach you what a real Purple Heart is.”

A Trip to An Thoi
In contrast to the pretty beaches and placid existence at Cam Ranh
Bay where Kerry was stationed, Coastal Division 11 was engaged in a
gritty struggle against a North Vietnamese base area, deep in the mangrove
swamps in the extreme south and west of Vietnam. This area,
commonly known as the U Minh and Nam Can forests, had been
under North Vietnamese control since the 1940s and was used for
POW camps. Most POWs never left these camps. The city of Nam
Can, one of the few free outposts in the area, had been overrun by the
North Vietnamese in February 1968. Swift operations in the area were
supported from an offshore outpost at An Thoi, located on an island
off the coast.

The ultimate commander of United States Naval and Coast Guard
forces in Vietnam, Admiral Elmo “Bud” Zumwalt III developed a
strategy—with enthusiastic support of then-Captain Roy Hoffmann—
to use underutilized offshore naval assets to rip control of area waterways
from the North Vietnamese. His model was the Mississippi
River campaigns of the Civil War, which had effectively used specialized
craft.
Zumwalt was deeply admired by almost all Swiftees. A hero in
World War II, Zumwalt was also later known as the man who brought
women to the Naval Academy and into full participation in the Navy.
He was also recognized as a crusader against racism. Zumwalt was a

The Purple Heart Hunter
visionary whose sponsorship of missile ships and other innovations
mark today’s Navy. He also often rode into danger with the Swiftees.
Kerry’s later charge on Meet the Press in April 1971 that Zumwalt and
others were war criminals cut deeply at the heart of Swiftees. Perhaps
part of Kerry’s unjustifiable attack on Zumwalt was motivated by the
fact that it was Zumwalt’s decision to use Swift Boats on dangerous
riverine missions that ended with Kerry’s hopes of avoiding action.

THE DINNER THAT NEVER HAPPENED
Kerry’s Fictitious Journal Account
In Kerry’s account of the An Thoi transfer, he makes up an entire conversation
with the skipper of the landing ship tank (LST) who Kerry
claims invited him and Peck for dinner on their way to An Thoi. As
Kerry told the story in Tour of Duty, the LST captain launched into a
discussion about his role in what had become known as the “Bo De
massacre.” According to the version of the story told by Kerry, the
LST captain presented a defensive account, attempting to correct a
Stars and Stripes story criticizing him for LST covering fire that had
supposedly fallen short, exposing Swiftees on the mission to unnecessary
casualties.

But according to Captain Peck’s recollection and that of Kerry’s
crewman Steven Gardner, he and Kerry were at the LST only a few
minutes for refueling, not enough time for a comfortable dinner with
the LST captain—and there was no conversation about “the massacre”
as described by Kerry. Even more significant, Kerry’s account
of the “Bo De massacre” is a breathtaking lie. In Tour, Kerry presents
the first Swift incident on the Bo De as a “massacre” of Swiftees with
seventeen wounded caused by the incompetence of all commanders
whom he chose to blame rather than the vagaries of war or the
enemy. Kerry’s fabrication comes even though he was not there. Joe
Ponder was there as a Swiftee on the mission in question. Today, still

UNFIT FOR COMMAND
badly disabled and on crutches from the incident, Ponder says, “There
were only three persons wounded—not seventeen as Kerry states—
and I was the first. I do not understand his criticism of our officers.
I’ve always been proud of our officers.”
Ponder maintains today that the person who truly shamed and
offended him was John Kerry, whose fraudulent account of war
crimes in Tour of Duty has led his own grandchildren to ask him,
“Did you commit the war crimes John Kerry describes?” At the
press conference held by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in Washington,
D.C., on May 4, 2004, Ponder was in tears, not from his
wounds or the agony of standing with his braces, but from the
wounds that Kerry’s lies in Tour of Duty had left upon his heart and
his family.

THE BRIEF ASSIGNMENT IN AN THOI: KERRY’S VERSION
As Kerry has admitted in Tour of Duty, he was ordered against his
will to Coastal Division 11 in An Thoi in December 1968. Tedd
Peck recalls Kerry’s constant griping about the transfer. In Tour of
Duty, Brinkley writes that both Kerry and Peck were opposed to
their assignment. Following Kerry’s account, Brinkley quotes Peck
telling his men, “There was no way I was leaving Cam Ranh Bay
voluntarily to go up the rivers. That was a suicide mission.”16 Brinkley
relates a tortured explanation of why Kerry was finally forced to
accept the assignment: He claims that he missed one of the division
meetings held to solicit volunteers because he was at the Air
Force PX. Peck remembered Kerry distinctly objecting, saying that
he had not volunteered for the war that was occurring in the Nam
Can and U Minh forests. Peck believed that Kerry did not belong in
the Navy. In Brinkley’s account, the one guy who got Peck’s ire up
the quickest was John Kerry, who he found standoffish and condescending.
“I didn’t like anything about him,” Peck proclaimed,

The Purple Heart Hunter
“Nothing.” For his part, Kerry liked Peck, and decades later recalled
none of this supposed animosity between them.17
At any rate, Kerry’s time at An Thoi was short. Within a week,
Kerry and the crew of PCF 44 were on their way to the less hazardous
CosDiv 13, at Cat Lo. Kerry has tried to make it appear that he was
disappointed at being so quickly reassigned from An Thoi. Here is the
account he gave to biographer Douglas Brinkley:
“I tried to fight the change—not because we wanted to stay in
An Thoi and be shot at, but because we didn’t want to have to
move and resettle again,” Kerry noted. “Our mail was already
lost, and the trip back against the monsoon seas promised to be
nothing but a bitch. It was just that.”18

THE REAL REASON KERRY WAS REASSIGNED
When they got to An Thoi, Kerry continued to object to his placement
in this dangerous assignment against his will, so much so that
he was given routine offshore patrols not involving any possibility of
action until Coastal Division 11 could figure out a way to get rid of
him. Within a week, Kerry was transferred to Coastal Division 13,
headquartered near the former French resort town of Vung Tau. While
Coastal Division 13 had been involved in substantial action, it was
less than what Kerry avoided by his transfer. What his fellow Swiftees
concluded was that Kerry had a very high regard for his own wellbeing
and very little nerve for facing serious combat.
According to Peck, it was simply easier to get Kerry out of An Thoi
than to have to listen to his constant bellyaching about how he had
not volunteered for this kind of danger. Better just to get rid of Kerry
and let him be somebody else’s problem.
William Franke echoes Tedd Peck’s explanation of why Kerry was
so quickly transferred out of An Thoi:

UNFIT FOR COMMAND
Kerry vigorously protested being transferred to An Thoi, arguing
that he had volunteered only for coastal patrol and not for the
far more hazardous duty of missions within the inland waterways.
Indeed, his objections were so strong that, upon his first
assignment to An Thoi, he was transferred out within a week.19
So off Kerry went to Cat Lo, where the patrols were on wider, less
dangerous rivers than the treacherous canals of the U Minh forest and
Cau Mau peninsula.
Christmas In “Cambodia”
Vietnam, December 1968

JOHN KERRY’S STORY
If there is one story told over and over again by John Kerry since his
return from Vietnam, it is the heart-wrenching tale of how he spent
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day illegally in Cambodia. From the
early 1970s, when he used the tale as part of his proof for war crimes
in Cambodia, through the mid-1980s and the 1990s, Kerry has spoken
and written again and again of how he was illegally ordered to enter
Cambodia.
On the floor of the U.S. Senate on March 27, 1986, Kerry launched
one of his many attacks against President Reagan—this time charging
that President Reagan’s actions in Central America were leading
the United States into yet another Vietnam, claiming that he could
recognize the error of the administration’s ways because he had experienced
firsthand the duplicity of the Nixon administration in lying
about American incursions into Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
Kerry charged that he had been illegally ordered into Cambodia during
Christmas 1968:

The Purple Heart Hunter
I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia.
I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese
and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the president of
the United States telling the American people that I was not
there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory
which is seared—seared—in me.20
Kerry also described, for example, for the Boston Herald his vivid
memories of his Christmas Eve spent in Cambodia:
I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across
the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese
allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity
of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which
President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was
very real.21

As recently as July 7, 2004, Michael Kranish of the Boston Globe
repeated Kerry’s Christmas in Cambodia story on FOX News Channel’s
Hannity & Colmes, indicating that it was a critical turning point
in Kerry’s life. Kranish had no knowledge, even after his extensive
study of Kerry, that he was simply repeating a total fabrication by
Kerry. And Kranish was right: Study of the Christmas in Cambodia
story is central to understanding John Kerry.
The story is also in the pages of the 2004 biography written by
Krahish and other Boston Globe reporters. As we have come to
expect, the story is twisted at the end to provide justification for yet
another of Kerry’s political ruses, this time used to justify what Kerry
portrays as his noble and continuing distrust of government pronouncements:

UNFIT FOR COMMAND
To top it off, Kerry said later that he had gone into Cambodia,
despite President Nixon’s assurances to the American public
that there was no combat action in this neutral territory. The
young sailor began to develop a deep mistrust of the U.S. government
pronouncements, he later recalled.22
Even without minimal investigation, a critical press should have
been able to spot the story as a total fabrication: Richard Nixon did
not become president of the United States until twenty-six days after
John Kerry’s Christmas in Cambodia.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED: CHRISTMAS IN VIETNAM
Despite the dramatic memories of his Christmas in Cambodia,
Kerry’s statements are complete lies. Kerry was never in Cambodia
during Christmas 1968, or at all during the Vietnam War. In reality,
during Christmas 1968, he was more than fifty miles away from Cambodia.
Kerry was never ordered into Cambodia by anyone and would
have been court-martialed had he gone there.
During Christmas 1968, Kerry was stationed at Coastal Division
13 in Cat Lo. Coastal Division 13’s patrol areas extended to Sa Dec,
about fifty-five miles from the Cambodian border. Areas closer than
fifty-five miles to the Cambodian border in the area of the Mekong
River were patrolled by PBRs, a small river patrol craft, and not by
Swift Boats. Preventing border crossings was considered so important
at the time that an LCU (a large, mechanized landing craft) and
several PBRs were stationed to ensure that no one could cross the border.
A large sign at the border prohibited entry. Tom Anderson, Commander
of River Division 531, who was in charge of the PBRs,
confirmed that there were no Swifts anywhere in the area and that
they would have been stopped had they appeared.

The Purple Heart Hunter
All the living commanders in Kerry’s chain of command—Joe
Streuhli (Commander of CosDiv 13), George Elliott (Commander of
CosDiv 11), Adrian Lonsdale (Captain, USCG and Commander,
Coastal Surveillance Center at An Thoi), Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann
(Commander, Coastal Surveillance Force Vietnam, CTF 115),
and Rear Admiral Art Price (Commander of River Patrol Force, CTF
116)—deny that Kerry was ever ordered to Cambodia. They indicate
that Kerry would have been seriously disciplined or court-martialed
had he gone there. At least three of the five crewmen on Kerry’s PCF
44 boat—Bill Zaldonis, Steven Hatch, and Steve Gardner—deny that
they or their boat were ever in Cambodia. The remaining two crewmen
declined to be interviewed for this book. Gardner, in particular,
will never forget those days in late December when he was wounded
on PCF 44, not in Cambodia, but many miles away in Vietnam.
The Cambodia incursion story is not included in Tour of Duty.
Instead, Kerry replaces the story with a report about a mortar attack
that occurred on Christmas Eve 1968 “near the Cambodia border” in
a town called Sa Dec, some fifty-five miles from the Cambodian border.
23 Somehow, Kerry’s secret illegal mission to Cambodia, which he
recounted on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1986, is now a firefight at
Sa Dec and a Christmas day spent back at the base writing entries in
his journal.

The truth is that Kerry made up his secret mission into Cambodia.
Much like Kerry’s many other lies relating to supposed “war crimes”
committed by the U.S. military in Vietnam, the lie about the illegal
Cambodian incursion painted his superiors up the chain of command—
men such as Commander Streuhli, Commander Elliott, Admiral
Hoffmann, and Admiral Zumwalt, all distinguished Naval heroes and
men of integrity—as villains faced down by John Kerry, a solitary hero
in grave and exotic danger and forced illegally and against his will
into harm’s way.

UNFIT FOR COMMAND
The same sorts of lies were repeated over and over in Kerry’s antiwar
book, The New Soldier, a book filled with preposterous, false confessions
of bogus war crimes committed by the participants (who were
often not even real veterans) against their will and under orders from
dishonest superiors. Kerry’s Christmas in Cambodia typifies the sort
of lie upon which Kerry has built a false persona and a political career.
The story of Christmas 1968 has one final chapter. When refueling
his PCF near Dong Tam, Kerry and his crew were told that the Bob
Hope USO show was at the Dong Tam base. So Kerry decided to leave
his station on the river and go searching for the Bob Hope Christmas
show. Unable to find the show, he risked boat and crew by unknowingly
blundering into one of the most dangerous canals in Vietnam, a
canal that to those who knew the area was notorious for Viet Cong
ambushes. Given the easy navigation by radar and map of the rivers
involved—not much more difficult than driving a car—Kerry had just
performed a feat of reverse navigation worthy of Wrong Way Corrigan.
There is, of course, no record that Kerry ever informed anyone of
what he did, where he was, or where he was going—all required by
regulations for the safety of the boat and crew. He did, however,
record the Bob Hope adventure in his journal so he could be sure to
share it in Tour of Duty.24

The Purple Heart Hunter
If you’re interested in reading more from the shocking
Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans
Speak Out Against John Kerry, including chapters on:
ä War Crimes
ä More Fraudulent Medals
ä Kerry’s Antiwar Secrets
ä Kerry’s Communist Honors
ä Unfit for Command
then click here:
humaneventsonline.com
to get your FREE copy.