A summary from NRO of the Cambodia story. The wall of lies
has been breached.
KERRY'S EMBROIDERY
KERRY SPOT
John Kerry and about a dozen of his guys say that young Lt. Kerry earned all of his medals in Vietnam, performed heroically, and is a battle-tested leader who deserves to be the next president.
John O'Neill and about 250 of his guys say Kerry is a liar and a fraud, who received a Purple Heart for a self-inflicted wound, spent much of his time in Vietnam filming himself in scenarios carefully designed to look dangerous, and is thoroughly unfit to be the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces.
Both accounts can't be right. Somebody's lying.
Those of us who weren't there couldn't know with 100-percent certainty which side is lying unless we had access to some sort of documentary evidence clearly revealing that one side is wrong.
But now, in light of the Cambodia story, we can begin to get a sense of which side's account may be less than entirely accurate.
The big news on Wednesday was that Kerry shifted the location of his increasingly infamous tale of fighting in Cambodia on Christmas, 1968. Kerry campaign adviser Jeh Johnson said, "John Kerry has said on the record that he had a mistaken recollection earlier. He talked about a combat situation on Christmas Eve 1968, which at one point he said occurred in Cambodia. He has since corrected the recorded to say it was some place on a river near Cambodia and he is certain that at some point subsequent to that he was in Cambodia. My understanding is that he is not certain about that date... I believe he has corrected the record to say it was some place near Cambodia he is not certain whether it was in Cambodia but he is certain there was some point subsequent to that that he was in Cambodia."
This new explanation — that the story is generally correct but that Kerry was wrong about the date — doesn't quite get Kerry off the hook.
For starters, Kerry's earliest (and most detailed and specific) versions of the tale, dating from about a decade after the events, are the ones in which he most emphatically points out that he was in Cambodia, and quite a distance beyond the border.
As he put it to the Boston Herald in October 1979, "On more than one occasion, I, like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, took my patrol boat into Cambodia. In fact, I remember spending Christmas Day 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. But nowhere in Apocalypse Now did I sense that kind of absurdity."
Then there is his statement on the floor of the U.S. Senate on March 27, 1986:
Mr. President, I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by 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, that says to me, before we send another generation into harm's way we have a responsibility in the U.S. Senate to go the last step, to make the best effort possible in order to avoid that kind of conflict.
That memory says things to John Kerry. It speaks to him. It tells him what his responsibilities are as a U.S. senator. This is one powerful, chatty memory. Vital to the lesson, or moral, that Kerry took from this was that he was fighting in the territory of a sovereign nation that U.S. forces were not supposed to be fighting in. And the government was lying about it.
Michael Kranish, the Boston Globe reporter who co-wrote the paper's comprehensive biography of Kerry, described this story as a moment that changed Kerry's life:
<<<
KRANISH: Sean, I don't know if it's — that's a question that obviously some of the critics will raise. And I think what's fair to look at is how he was affected by Vietnam.
He himself would say that you really have to look at a lot of his thought process as what was happening during Vietnam. And in one short anecdote I'll tell you, that in Christmas of 1968, he was on a small boat with his men, basically in Cambodia at a time when Richard Nixon was telling the American public that we're not in Cambodia.
And he basically became skeptical. Well, the government is saying this, but he knew himself that wasn't true. And it's also why he says he came back to protest the war that he had served in.
HANNITY: Well, Michael...
KRANISH: So, from his perspective, and he's trying to — I think what he would say a little bit — I can't speak for him obviously — is that, you know, you look at a situation, very traumatic and sometimes you change your mind.
And clearly in Vietnam, when he volunteered, he served, came back to lead the protest.
This is not just some random anecdote. When Kerry has told this tale in the past, he has portrayed it as a decisive moment in his life. Were this a Hollywood movie, the music would swell over the explosions from the South Vietnamese and Kerry would look down, clench his jaw, ball his hands into fists, and then gaze up at the horizon, having learned a painful lesson and resolved to change the mixed-up world he has found himself in. On the Senate floor, he even repeated the word "seared" to demonstrate how clear and important that memory is.
But, it now appears, he wasn't in Cambodia. Which is, pretty much, the point of the story — not just that the South Vietnamese were a bunch of drunks and dangerous to be around on Christmas. The U.S. government wasn't being duplicitous. The president wasn't lying about him (partially because President Nixon wasn't going to be sworn into office for another month). In fact, one could conclude that it was Kerry in the intervening years who was duplicitous.
As the investigative Lexis-Nexis work of Instapundit revealed, Kerry kept repeating this story, always taking place at Christmas; he did adjust it to say "near Cambodia," although he was still in "a firefight that wasn't supposed to be taking place."
June 24, 1992, Wednesday
HEADLINE: Senate Committee Says Americans Left Behind in Vietnam
BYLINE: By Kimberly C. Moore, States News Service
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
...
Kerry, who served in Vietnam on a gunboat in the Mekong Delta from 1968 to 1969, said he was involved in a "black mission" near Cambodia. "On Christmas Eve of 1968, I was on a gunboat in a firefight that wasn't supposed to be taking place," Kerry recalled. "I thought, if I'm killed here, what will my family be told?"
Interestingly, the AP has the same story the same day, with Kerry saying he was across the border in Cambodia. (I'm a States News Service alumnus; I hope they didn't get it wrong.)
06/25 Kerry-MIA
Copyright, 1992. The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
By JOHN DIAMOND Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP)
...By Christmas 1968, part of Kerry's patrol extended across the border of South Vietnam into Cambodia. "We were told, `Just go up there and do your patrol. Everybody was over there (in Cambodia). Nobody thought twice about it," Kerry said. One of the missions, which Kerry, at the time, was ordered not to discuss, involved taking CIA operatives into Cambodia to search for enemy enclaves. "I can remember wondering, `If you're going to go, what happens to you,"' Kerry said.
Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia story doesn't appear in the official biography of his war years, Tour of Duty, by Douglas Brinkley. According to that book, Kerry spent Christmas of that year at Sa Dec, more than 50 miles from Cambodia. (Just how far away can a site or a boat be from a border and still be considered "near" Cambodia?)
In addition, there is a problem with Kerry's current claim that he had been in Cambodia at some other time. Kerry boat mates Bill Zaldonis, Steven Hatch, and Steve Gardner (a member of Swift Boat Vets for Truth) deny that they (or their boat) were ever in Cambodia. Maybe he was with a different crew? These are the sort of circumstances that might prompt a candidate to finally release all of his military records.
Now there is still this thorny question of how all of Kerry's guys or all of O'Neill's guys could be lying. They're all men who have served honorably, and gone on to have happy, productive lives. Why would they risk their reputations to promote a dishonest picture of Kerry?
Kerry was famous and controversial by 1971. Most of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth insist they are nonpartisan, but let's face it — probably most of these guys have voted Republican the last few presidential elections. They're ex-military men, and they reject the arguments of the Vietnam protesters. Most of them could probably be safely classified as culturally conservative.
As soon as the John Kerry of 1971 started appearing as a congressional witness, comparing U.S. forces to Genghis Khan, the men of the Swift Boat Vets for Truth developed strong opinions about him. He was trashing their reputations. He was calling them war criminals.
In this context, can memories of Lt. Kerry shift? Sure. Maybe Kerry is no longer remembered as aloof, but he is remembered as a self-aggrandizing jerk. Maybe they conclude he wasn't as competent as he seemed at the time. Positive first impressions are washed away, and a portrait of an incompetent, lying, dishonorable man remains.
Perhaps that explains the opinion of all 250 or so members of Swift Boat Vets for Truth.
But the reverse is also a possibility — that the men who stand so close and so proud to Kerry now have changed their opinion of him in light of who he has become today. In the shining spotlight of the war protests, a Senate career, and a White House bid, old memories of mistakes, bad judgments, and character flaws may fade. Suddenly moves that seemed reckless appear bold and brave in hindsight. Heavy enemy fire is recollected where before there had been none.
Put yourself in the shoes of the men who were under Kerry's command. He's now close to the presidency. Your old buddy could be the leader of the free world. Is that worth glossing over his less glamorous moments? Is it worth a little embellishment of battles long ago and far away? For a man who kept you alive in a war zone, would you forget his mistakes and amplify his triumphs, to give your old friend the help he needs at the moment he needs it?
Either side could be lying, but now we know Kerry embroidered a memory, putting himself in a place he was not, creating a cinematically perfect recollection, "like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now," creating a perfectly illustrative anecdote when he needed it in a debate on the floor of the Senate.
Kerry himself has made his war experience the centerpiece
of his campaign. He and John Edwards have invited — nay,
commanded — the public to evaluate his qualification for
the presidency based on that.
The public's evaluation continues. |
