New Book Aims to ‘Torpedo’ Kerry
Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Monday, Aug. 16, 2004
The lightly armored Swift Boats (PCFs) of the Vietnam era were festooned with .50 caliber and .30 caliber machine guns, complemented by an arsenal of M-16s and grenade launchers – all designed to interdict the enemy’s use of the waterways of South Vietnam as channels for the movement of supplies and men.
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In “Unfit for Command” John O’Neil and co-author Jerry Corsi figuratively blaze away with all that deadly hardware and more in an unrelenting assault on the John Kerry hero mystique that lasts from page one to the exhausting finish.
After putting down the book, letting the cordite clouds clear, and waiting for the ringing in the ears to stop, some readers will certainly be left shell-shocked – and wondering perhaps if Kerry is a good bet for dog-catcher, much less the Leader of the Free World. Click here to get this book FREE.
“What motivates us is a genuine fear for the consequences to our nation if its safety is placed in the hands of so cynical and shifting a commander in chief,” salvo the authors of “Unfit for Command, Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry” (216 pp Regnery).
O’Neil -- now an attorney in Houston, Texas, who served in the same naval unit as Kerry and who took over Lt. (j.g.) Kerry’s Swift Boat after he left Vietnam -- is perhaps best remembered for his debate with Kerry in 1971 on “The Dick Cavett Show.” O’Neill fought Kerry’s allegations that many Vietnam soldiers had routinely engaged in atrocities. At the time Kerry was the spokesman for the anti-war group Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).
In many ways “Unfit” is an extension of and the manifesto for a ground-swell movement against the Democratic candidate for president that like a dangerous rogue wave first crashed up against Kerry’s sacred war hero legacy last May at a press gathering.
Indeed, O’Neil gives prime space in his “Unfit” introduction to that kick-off “Swift Vets for Truth Press Conference,” which took place in a standing-room-only suite at Washington’s National Press Club.
NewsMax was there to witness and record spokesman O’Neill’s recounting to the media how the Senator from Massachusetts spent 45 minutes on the phone with group founder Rear Admiral Roy Hoffman, USN (ret) trying to “discourage” the band of brothers from going public with their united sentiment that Kerry is unfit to be the nation’s commander in chief.
The effort, of course, failed, and in an hour and one-half session one Swift Boat veteran after another described with brutal honesty why he fixed his signature to a public letter to the Democratic candidate, condemning Kerry’s war crimes charges and demanding that the former decorated Swift Boat skipper authorize the DoD to release all his military records.
But, as O’Neil recounts in his introduction, “Much of the pro-Kerry media, which routinely rotates a few pro-Kerry veterans, simply ignored the press conference.”
Hence was born the idea of “Unfit for Command” – a damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead assault on the Kerry heroism in Vietnam. Unlike the press conference that was short on details and long on vitriol, however, “Unfit” is a painstaking indictment that sallies forth to set the record straight.
The Real John Kerry
O’Neil and Corsi (the latter co-author conducted two major studies on the VVAW at Brandeis University’s Center for the Study of Violence) shotgun at page 12: “The real John Kerry of Vietnam was a man who filed false operating reports, who faked Purple Hearts, and who took a fast pass through the combat zones.”
The authors clearly revere the Purple Heart as the nation’s most hallowed award for wounds received in combat – but they revile how the decoration has in their opinion been tainted forever by a scheming and mercenary Kerry:
“They were concededly minor scratches at best, resulting in no lost duty time … and in two of cases, with incontrovertible and conclusive evidence that the minor injuries were caused by Kerry’s own hand and were not the result of hostile fire of any kind.”
With regard to the first Purple Heart episode (Kerry has three): “Kerry picked up an M-79 grenade launcher and fired a grenade too close, causing a tiny piece of shrapnel to barely stick in his arm…. There was no report of any hostile fire that day (as would be required), nor do the records at Cam Ranh Bay reveal any such hostile fire…. There was no casualty report.”
The authors’ pattern continues throughout the book -- taking apart and coldly examining the particulars of the Kerry saga. First is laid out “John Kerry’s” story, followed by vignettes entitled, “What Really Happened.”
Case-in-point: “I [Kerry] 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…”
What really happened?
“Kerry [conclude the authors] 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.”
Baby Killer
The authors reach for shock value in the “War Crimes” chapter that has as its preamble this ironic barb by Swift Boat veteran William Franke: “I will tell you in all candor that the only baby killer I knew in Vietnam was John F. Kerry.”
Detailed among other episodes is Kerry crewman Steve Gardner’s account of a night in mid-January 1969. A sampan suddenly appeared in front of Kerry’s boat while it laid in ambush. When an occupant of the sampan appeared to Gardner to reach for or hold a weapon, Gardner opened fire – killing a father with his child. Other weapons on the Kerry boat opened up as well.
Kerry, who apparently never detected the boat on his radar and who mysteriously appears on deck only after the firing ceases, covered up the incident, say the authors, “by filing an after-action report in which the child simply disappeared from the record and was replaced by a fleeing squad of Viet Cong, some likely killed by Kerry.”
The authors maintain that such fictional reports were but part of the self-serving Kerry modus operandi – perhaps culminating in the episode that got him his third Purple Heart and a trip home as one thrice-wounded.
Concentrating on a March 13, 1969 casualty report prepared by Kerry, the authors pierce the fog of war to provide their own spin on the events of the day. Kerry’s official story: he was wounded as the result of a mine explosion near his Swift Boat. But the authors suggest that other participants on the scene recall that neither weapons fire nor a mine explosion occurred near Kerry.
So what was the source of the “wounds” received?
Witness Larry Thurlow commanded the boat behind Kerry’s that day. Thurlow recalls that earlier in the day Kerry had wounded himself when standing too close while setting off a grenade to destroy a cache of rice.
The authors surmise that Kerry “dishonestly transferred the time and cause of the injury to coincide with the PCF action later in the day and claimed that the cause of the injury was the mine exploding during the action.”
Not exactly the stuff of “incontrovertible and conclusive evidence” as promised by the authors – but deeply troublesome nonetheless.
An issue that arguably is not given its due by the authors is explaining -- if Kerry was indeed the Prince of Darkness -- why does he have such good relations with about a dozen of his former crewmen to this day, his own band of brothers that he has been trotting out since first announcing his intent to run for the presidency?
Tom Wright, another PCF commander, who disliked Kerry’s style to the point that he finally objected to going on patrol with him, explained to the authors, “I can see how his crew thought he was a hero fighting out of situations he shouldn’t have been in to begin with. I had a lot of trouble getting him to follow orders….”
'Situations'
Wright was referencing infamous Kerry “situations” like driving his Swift Boat right into downtown Saigon for some impromptu liberty or getting lost in the canals searching for Bob Hope’s USO show.
The reader can deduce for himself or herself if the authors have satisfied a reasonable burden of proof as to whether Kerry engineered his impressive decorations.
As to that highest gong, the Silver Star, the authors maintain that Kerry schemed beforehand to grandstand by running his boat aground in hot pursuit of some enemy – when the right moment came. When the moment came, Kerry indeed charged ashore to confront a lone frightened teenager who had been totting a grenade launcher. The authors suggest, however, that all was choreographed and that the bulk of the credit for disrupting a VC nest and capturing a cache of weapons was due others.
Despite the dings at the raw service of Kerry in-country, the authors reserve the real heavy artillery for what they believe is his greatest trespass – dishonoring the brave men of the services by suggesting after he came home that war crimes were the order of the day in Vietnam, carried out routinely by American troops with the tacit approval of the chain of command.
Talisman Photo
The authors’ talisman for this particular Kerry perfidy is a photo of John Kerry and Vietnam’s former General Secretary of the Communist Party Do Muoi. The photo is part of an exhibit in the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City honoring heroes who had helped the Vietnamese Communists win the war against the United States.
The image in the museum memorializes the wound that has never healed for O’Neal and others. Referred to many times in the volume, this yet-scabbed injury appears in “Kerry’s Antiwar Secrets” as part of a sort of military court-martial charge sheet:
“Telling many slanderous and otherwise damaging lies in numerous public speeches, the effect of which was to malign the purpose and morality of the United States service personnel in the filed in Vietnam, fighting and dying as he spoke.
“Allowing his speeches and testimony to be used by the enemy in their propaganda efforts, included but not limited to the replaying of these speeches and testimony to American POWs being held in captivity by our enemies.”
Actually, this handy “charge sheet” provides a guide to even more of the book’s meat.
“Meeting with the enemy in Paris and coordinating ongoing meetings with various members of the VVAW, both in Paris and Hanoi, to arrange the release of American POWs to the VVAW…
“[H]e advocated a Vietnamese Communist peace proposal that would have called for a complete withdrawal of the United States military and an abandonment of the government of South Vietnam…
“Continuing his representation of the VVAW even after he was aware that various VVAW leaders had falsified their credentials and were not in fact Vietnam veterans…
The image the authors invoke throughout is one of a whining self-centered Kerry who thought he was volunteering for some safe duty as a kind of off-shore coast guard – only to discover to his chagrin that the powers that be had redeployed the small boats to the dangerous duty of ferreting out the lurking enemy in the jungle waterways.
According to Kerry crewman Gardner, however, Kerry went beyond whining and entered a bug-out mode:
“His job was to face into the fire, to quarter the boat so we could apply our twin .50 caliber machine guns on the enemy. That was our job in the canal, to stand our ground and suppress enemy fire. All Kerry wanted to do was turn and ‘get out of Dodge’ at the first sign of trouble.”
It’s rugged indictments like this that make the book so provocative. By the same token, however, the reader wants to know more – more particulars, more facts.
If the authors come up short in that department, they blame it on Kerry for not signing a blanket authority for those concerned to be able to view all his records, not just a selected few. Let’s take a look at those medical records of treatment of Kerry’s three wounds, beseech the authors. And don’t say it’s none of our business. You are running for the highest office in the land based upon a war record that perhaps presents more questions than it answers.
Who exactly was that young officer in Vietnam? Does he have the right stuff to face up to Terrorism?
For those that already detest the man, “Unfit” is more fodder. For those who are already committed to Kerry, “Unfit” may set them to wondering, but may not prompt them to commit Lt. Kerry to the briny deep. |
