Rush and John.
RUSH: We'd like to not waste any time and welcome to the program John O'Neill, who is doing yeoman's work and some would say the Lord's work, in this presidential campaign. Mr. O'Neill, thanks so much for giving us some time. Let me ask you a question. I talked to my brother -- and I did not know this -- he said that you're in the middle of this intense book tour, and, of course, you've got everybody, half the country, the Democratic Party gunning for you. You just donated a kidney to your ailing wife and you're in the midst of your recovery still doing all this?
O'NEILL: I did. Rush, the greatest thing I ever did in my life. I gave my wife a kidney on February the 12th which was a fabulous thing for my wife and I, and something I'm very proud of. And this isn't perfect timing for me, but I've done fine with it all.
RUSH: Well, you're bearing up just marvelously well. I know you're everywhere, and you're in demand, and you're trying to meet as many requests as you've got. And I want to say at the outset that I haven't seen every performance or every appearance that you made, and I may ask you some questions that you've gotten before, and I'm sure that happens to you every time you go out there, and you're still plugging away at it, and I appreciate it and I beg your indulgence on that. Could you just give us an overview of where you are now, what you think of what all has gone on, what you thought was going to happen when all this started, if anything's been a surprise to you, things of those natures?
O'NEILL: Yes. We -- it's not simply me -- but Admiral Hoffman, our commanding officer in Vietnam, then a captain but now an admiral, started calling all of us basically last January and February. We got together in March, and what we did, naïve souls that we were, we issued a letter to John Kerry saying basically, "Kerry, please admit you lied about our record back in '71 and also in your book tour, and please straighten out your record and quit exaggerating it." We had a press conference in Washington. We thought that people would go ahead, it would be covered, and then the matter would be straightened out. Instead of that, it received a little coverage but not very much, and we realized that writing a book was the best possible way of getting what is complicated, but is pretty conclusive evidence, in front of the American people. So my job, then, was to go ahead and write the book, and I began and did write the book with the assistance of more than 60 guys who were right there with Kerry. I've given the royalties from the book away so that there won't be any question that I'm trying to exploit our unit like Kerry has, and the book is divided into two parts. Half deals with his actual service in Vietnam and half with what he did afterwards.
RUSH: Did all of the swiftvets that worked with you on this know fully well what you were getting involved in as you joined a presidential campaign, so to speak?
O'NEILL: I think I did. I think I knew that when we sailed our little boat up alongside his battleship, that he would attack us all just as he did in '71. To be fair, I don't think that some of our guys did. We have several people who have been very viciously attacked that, you know, are tremendous heroes of the United States. I mean, they're legends within the Navy, and I don't think that they knew quite the violence of the attack would be directed towards them.
RUSH: That's somewhat surprising given the attack machine that the Democratic Party has demonstrated it's capable of mounting, going back. I mean, you look at what happened to Monica Lewinsky, the Arkansas state troopers, Gary Aldrich. Now, these are single individuals and it was easy to attack them. You've either got a group of 60 or over 200 here. The thing I've noticed, Mr. O'Neill, about all of this is that your campaign, your effort is working. Now, when I look at these things impartially and I try to figure out when you have two virtually competing stories, when somebody starts changing theirs, it tells me that the first version isn't true. It seems to me that your story isn't changing. It seems to me that Senator Kerry is changing a lot of his story to the extent that he'll deal with it. What struck me is that if you guys are lying, if you guys are strictly a political organization that is working in cahoots with people, and he can disapprove it, then he would. He would have done it right out of the box and he would have gotten rid of you guys and maybe sailed away to the election in a landslide. But he doesn't address what you're saying. He changes his version of the story.
O'NEILL: That's what's amazing, Rush. Honestly, this guy pretends to be a war hero. Forget that he was no hero, but at least he could have the integrity to come out in a sensible way, admit where he lied, set forth a straightforward version. Instead, when I go on shows there's always some Washington lawyer on the other side or there's never anybody that was really there because they know, like his Christmas in Cambodia story, they'd all start laughing even on his side. This story that he told about "no man left behind" where all of our boats were supposed to have fled and he came back, and in reality he fled and everybody else stayed to save the three boat, the same thing is true. He won't ever find a swift boat guy that will say that, because it's a lie. Would have to change the physical facts of the three boat actually being blown up, unable to move and keep on the water.
RUSH: One of the things that has struck me about this is we have two competing sets of veterans. In your case the swift boat vets. John McCain and the mainstream press, Kerry allies, have come out and immediately assumed that you all are dishonorable, even though you personally have been following this course since 1971. Everybody that remembers your Dick Cavett Show debate (Video) with then-Vietnam vet against the war Kerry. But nobody to my knowledge is examining the honorable status of Kerry's band of brothers. This is disquieting. As I said to the audience on Friday, there's a part of me that resented Kerry reopening this whole Vietnam wound by making his four months there the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. The other side of me says, "No, that's good because those wounds have been festering and they haven't healed and this is evidence of it, and it's about time we square this." And I think that's the role you're playing here and it's a good one.
O'NEILL: I think that's really true, Rush. We haven't attacked. There are very few people from our division that support Kerry. I guess he had 12 or 13 people on the stage. He may be able to produce 15 or 20, or something. We have 254 I guess so far that have signed our letter, they include 17 of the 23 officers that bunked with him most nights there and during the limited period of time he was there and the whole chain of command, most of the sailors. I think it's very, very important for two reasons. First, I don't think you can have someone as commander-in-chief of the United States that comes back and fabricates war crimes charges against the people that he was there with and against everybody else. I just can't conceive that in a free democracy, forget anything else or forget any party, that we would ever make someone like that president of the United States, particularly after they admit that the charges they made were exaggerated, over the top, not true, in fact were total lies. Second, I cannot conceive that where a guy shows up, even, you know, two or three weeks ago at the Democratic convention and fabricates major stories that are just totally untrue, that we would ever consider such a person to be commander-in-chief.
RUSH: Well, especially since he's made that the centerpiece of his campaign. Which part of the story is it that you think grates most on you and your group? Is it his postwar activities or --
O'NEILL: It is, to be fair. The portion of it that's more captured press attention is the first half of the book Unfit for Command. To all of us, though, when he came back and he met with the North Vietnamese, I mean, he met with them in Paris on almost the same day that our boat, the 94 boat, that he had commanded and that I was then commanding, was rocketed. He came back and said that we were "like the army of Ghengis Khan," that we were "committing war crimes on a day-to-day basis," that our officers were like Lieutenant Calley. Rush, we had people that sat and died. I mean, several of them very close to my boat. I had one guy die literally on my helmet because they went up into a canal without opening fire just to broadcast at very slow speeds. We did everything we could do to reduce civilian casualties, and so you can imagine what a -- I mean, the day he testified is the day as deeply emotional to the people in our unit, many other Vietnam veterans, as the day the Challenger went down or when Kennedy died, because it just dropped directly at the heart of all of us, our service, and the people we lost there.
RUSH: And he didn't see any of this. He even says that these are stories others told him, that he assumes and assigns to everybody else. Something else about this: why didn't Senator Kerry, if he heard about this and saw some of this while he was there, and admits to engaging in some of it himself, why didn't he report it then? Why didn't he go to a commanding officer and say, "Hey, atrocities are taking place. This is not right." Why did he wait till he gets back to start making political hay out of this, if it was so bad and so rotten when he saw it or heard about it? Why didn't he stop it then or try to?
O'NEILL: And as the book details, he was exactly the opposite. He was considered too aggressive, if anything. He never protested, never reported anyone. On that Dick Cavett Show I said, "Look, if some of this stuff occurred, tell people. For God's sake tell people and let's go prosecute whoever was involved." That was all those years ago. They never showed with anything. Of course, many of the people he was relying on were documented fakes. I mean, they were never in Vietnam. The classic is the guy who was the cochairman, the founder of his organization, Al Hubbard, who supposedly was a pilot in Vietnam wounded by shrapnel who had blown up villages, who turned out to never have gone to Vietnam; he was a sergeant in the Air Force on disability from playing on the basketball team and hurting his back. But the book Sold and Valor recounts case after case of total fakes.
RUSH: Senator Kerry says he's released all of his records. It's on his website. Is that true?
O'NEILL: Totally false. A good example of a record not released is his January 20th, 1969 report where he lies about this junk incident in which a small family is -- what is obviously a tragedy -- is shot and he reports it instead as a huge squad of Vietcong and reports the mother and baby as prisoners captured in action. There are many other examples. He has a ledger, a record, a diary that he maintained on Vietnam. He gives friendly people a peek at it but won't produce it. His medical records he will not produce. They, of course, would, you know, show that he had minor or non-existent injuries, and spent no time off. His first Purple Heart, there is no hostile fire report, and there is no casualty report as required for any Purple Heart. Instead, there's nothing to support it at all.
RUSH: What do you say about -- or what were your thoughts on Senator Dole's comments yesterday about, "He hasn't bled. He didn't spend any time in the hospital"?
O'NEILL: I was really proud of Senator Dole. It has to be hard to come forward. Look, we're all coming forward because this is a deeply personal thing. We just have to speak. We don't have a choice.
RUSH: How are you afraid this will manifest itself in a Kerry presidency? What kind of things would you be frightened of because of these, what you claim are lies, distortions, untruths of his service?
O'NEILL: The problem you really have, Rush, is this man as commander-in-chief is a disaster. In the military, trust has to run from the lowest guy all the way up the chain to the commander-in-chief. They have to believe that if something happens to him, he's going to come back in and get them. They have to believe that he's going to support their service. They have to believe in what he is saying. What we have here is a guy who is exactly the opposite. I mean, who came back to the United States and betrayed literally the guys he was in the field with at exactly the same time, who lied over and over and even characterized them as war criminals for political benefit, and then who has told massive lies about his own experience there. I'm going to tell you, I don't think the kids that are out there, I think they're coming home if this guy is the commander-in-chief, and I have one of them, it's my nephew, and an awful lot of children of my friends.
RUSH: We've got to take a break here. We'll come back here, and I want to ask you about the whole strategy of the Kerry campaign, get your reaction to it, of trying to take a war that nobody liked, pluck a hero from it, make it valorous in that sense, and then try to turn the current Iraq situation into Vietnam all over again. It's hard to follow this, and I think maybe I can get your insight as to -- because you've gotten to know him in your own ways and you know people who have known him personally.
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RUSH: We're honored to have John O'Neill with us here today for the hour as we talk about where they are now in the swift boat vet campaign and their effort here to educate and inform the American people as to their view of Senator John Kerry. Let me ask you about this question specifically, and this has to be at the root of one of the things that bothered you given the second half of the book. Here you have a war which the Democratic Party back then despised. They called it ignoble. It was immoral. It was unjust and almost criminal, and John Kerry comes around after the war and promotes that for apparent political gain. Now all of a sudden the Democratic Party, desperate during the war on terror to be able to say they have a candidate who was a war hero, pluck John Kerry out of a war they hated and despised and now try to turn that war into something valorous and him into something valorous -- which you dispute in the book -- and at the same time they do that, they then try to take the war in Iraq and the war on terror and try to make it sound as though it's no different than Vietnam. We have presidents "lying" to get us involved. We've got conspiratorial reasons. It seems to me it plays right into your hands.
O'NEILL: I think I speak for every one of us. We may have different feelings in our group about the war in Iraq, but we feel very, very strongly that the people that voted for that war, including Kerry, should support those kids over there and not just with mouth language but I'm talking seriously. With respect to what he did Vietnam, it's just unbelievable. He wrote a book, Rush, called The New Soldier. He wrote it in 1972. It begins with a caricature of the Iwo Jima Memorial and it goes downhill from there. It's basically a collection of many false war crimes confessions.
RUSH: Is this the one he doesn't want anybody to see?
O'NEILL: He won't let anybody see it. I've offered to reprint it. It costs, you know, over a thousand dollars to buy it on eBay. I promise you, Rush, any American voter whether they're Democrats or Republicans, whatever they are, if you stick that in their hands and say, "Look, you're going to have to tell the kids, the kids in the armed forces this is the new commander-in-chief." None of them would vote for him. So what he's attempted to do is suppress that book, The New Soldier.
RUSH: Now, what is it that makes you think he hasn't changed? Is it his Senate voting record?
O'NEILL: He's the same guy, completely the same guy, that everybody knew. You could start with the total lies at the Democratic convention about what he actually did in Vietnam. It's exactly the same thing. It's the lies he told in Vietnam to his commanders to get medals there. With respect to the ability to flip-flop, when he was in Vietnam he was regarded as sort of a harsh operator. People wouldn't operate with him because his fire control was so bad. He'd fire at anything, and then he comes back from Vietnam and instantly he's a war protester, supposedly, and we're all criminals. So we have a guy, at the heart of him there aren't the values and stuff that we all had. This is a guy literally where there's absolutely nothing there except ambition, no loyalty to comrades, no, allegiance to the truth.
RUSH: I was going to say --
O'NEILL: -- just basically ambiguous.
RUSH: -- it sounds like a totally calculating individual that you portray here. He's in Vietnam, behaves in a certain way to be perceived a certain way; comes home, finds out the public mood is different, changes the way he looks and says what he did, all to be received favorably at that point in time. No core there, it sounds like.
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