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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TideGlider who wrote (609219)	8/23/2004 11:05:35 PM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

("Never bled that I know of," said Mr. Dole, - What a lie!

To: TideGlider who wrote (609219)	8/23/2004 11:07:03 PM
From: jmhollen	Respond to of 769670

See ya, TG........... I'm headed for the Tele' myself. It'll take these Bozo's until tomorrow to come up with any new material worth tearing all to hail.... John :-) .

To: TideGlider who wrote (609219)	8/24/2004 3:47:33 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Cambodia: Kerry Dispute Revives Memory of Delta War By RICHARD PYLE The Associated Press Tuesday, August 24, 2004; 5:12 AM washingtonpost.com NEW YORK - The controversy over the Vietnam war record of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has trained a fresh light on one of that conflict's lesser-known episodes - the operations of America's "Brown Water Navy" in rivers, canals and mangrove swamps of the Mekong Delta. As commander of a 50-foot, heavily armed "swift boat," Kerry operated in a murky corner of the war. The enemy was not the North Vietnamese army but South Vietnam's homegrown insurgency: the Viet Cong. The missions were nighttime ambushes - intercepting sampans loaded with smuggled arms and carrying teams of SEALs and Green Berets on clandestine reconnaissance sorties into Cambodia. "Essentially, the mission was to bait the Viet Cong," says Joseph Muharsky, 57, a swift boat radarman who served in a different crew on Boat 94 - John Kerry's boat - in early 1969. As for interdicting supplies, "we probably achieved that mission to some extent and stopped a lot of the flow of arms, but on a larger scale it may not have done a lot of good," he said. The operations were dangerous. On swift boats operating from An Thoi, near the Cambodian border, 82 percent of crew members were killed or wounded in 1968, said Muharsky, now a heating contractor in Mentor, Ohio. "The boats had no armor - the aluminum skin wouldn't even stop a .22 caliber bullet," he said. The Mekong Delta is where the war began. Tabletop-flat, nourished by alluvial deposits of the Mekong River's 3,000-mile journey from Tibet, the region is Indochina's rice basket. Its unmatched fertility helped to spur 600 years of southward migration and wars, ending with Vietnam's 17th century annexation of what had been part of Cambodia's Khmer empire. The delta landscape was legendary as a sanctuary for renegades and pirates. "The delta was always Vietnam's wild west," says Carl Robinson, a one-time U.S. aid worker and journalist who is married to a delta native and now runs an Australia-based Vietnam tour business. "Being far from centralized power, the southerners have always been more individualistic, even anarchistic. Truly this is a frontier sort of society." The delta also gave birth in the 1950s to the National Liberation Front, or Viet Cong. The communist movement came to world attention in January 1963, when its black-pajama clad guerrillas defeated a South Vietnamese attack at the village of Ap Bac, shooting down five U.S. support helicopters. Even after the communists' 1968 Tet Offensive, which helped turn U.S. opinion against the war, delta warfare remained low-key: by day, grenades tossed into bridge guardposts from passing motorcycles; by night, Viet Cong squads visiting villages to spread propaganda and kidnap or kill Saigon sympathizers. The response was a village "pacification" program, also known as "winning hearts and minds," coupled with a U.S.-run counterinsurgency program called Phoenix. The purpose of Phoenix was to "neutralize" the Viet Cong by eliminating its leaders. At least 20,000 of them were killed between 1966 and 1973 - most of them in the delta where the Viet Cong remained most active. Some areas were designated "free fire zones," meaning U.S. forces did not require command clearance to fire on suspected enemy locations. That, combined with the sheer firepower they employed, contributed to many unintended civilian casualties. The arrival of U.S. combat forces in Vietnam 1965 signaled a shift from guerrilla warfare to set-piece battles with North Vietnamese regulars in central and northern South Vietnam. But in the delta, it remained a waterborne war. By 1968 the "Brown Water Navy" consisted of swift boats, helicopters, small outboard patrol craft and armored troop barges. The swift boats could make 32 knots with their twin 500-horsepower diesel engines and carried a crew of six and an array of .50 caliber machine guns, grenade launchers and other armament. Their main purpose was to stop the movement into the delta of enemy supplies brought from North Vietnam. As to whether the swift boats ever crossed into Cambodia at a time when that country was off limits to U.S. forces, "I wouldn't know if I did or not," Muharsky said. "There was no sign at the border reading 'Cambodia.'" --- Richard Pyle covered the Vietnam War for The Associated Press for five years. © 2004 The Associated Press