Bill Dyer at Beldar considers himself on a "mission from God."
Kerry brought the Belodeau Eulogy to Brinkley's specific attention
Yes, I admit that I'm obsessed with the Belodeau Eulogy, having previously posted about it on August 17, August 26, and most recently, on August 31, 2004. But I keep stumbling upon indications that Kerry biographer Douglas Brinkley — and indeed, Kerry himself — also regard the Belodeau Eulogy as particularly significant.
From the Epilogue chapter of Brinkley's Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, at page 436 (boldface mine):
Late in the summer of 2003 the fifty-nine-year-old junior U.S. senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry, sat at a desk in the study of his house high atop Boston's Beacon Hill, riffling through his Vietnam War files. He was searching for the long statement he had written for a memorial service held for an old Swift boat crewman who died in 1997. Kerry and Chelmsford native Thomas Belodeau had become friends serving together in Vietnam aboard PCF-94.... Belodeau had been the first of the Swift's mates to pass away. "I'm sorry he's not around for Charleston [referring to Kerry's official announcement of his 2004 presidential campaign, planned for September 2, 2003, with the historic U.S.S. Yorktown as a backdrop]," Kerry said softly. "He'll be with us in spirit, though."
My guess is that this passage is taken from Brinkley's interview with Kerry on June 30, 2003, as referenced in the list on page 466 of ToD; the next listed interview isn't until September 8, after the Charleston event. Perhaps Prof. Brinkley thinks of June 30 as being "late in the summer" in the same general sense that Chuck Hagel of Nebraska is described at page 453 as "Kerry's fellow Democratic Senator." Perhaps it's in that same general sense that the water-jet-propelled Patrol Boats (River), or PBRs, that are pictured at the bottom of ToD's ninth picture page (between text pages 274 and 275) are described by Brinkley as a "Swift boat [i.e., PCF] convoy."
Mid summer or late summer; PCFs or PBRs; Republican or Democrat; Rassmann falling overboard due to a sharp turn or due to a nearby mine blast — details, details, who cares about the details when you've got a candidate to help elect?
I'm left wondering exactly why Kerry was searching for a copy of his Belodeau Eulogy in the midst of one of Brinkley's brief twelve total hours of personal interviews (per the Author's Note on page xiii). Apparently, out of all the materials in his archives, Kerry thought the Belodeau Eulogy was important enough to bring to Brinkley's direct attention — although perhaps it didn't occur to Kerry that if a copy wasn't readily at hand in his desk, he could also find it online from the Congressional Record for January 28, 1999 (first page and second page in .pdf format).
We know that eventually, Brinkley somehow found a copy of the Belodeau Eulogy, because Brinkley quoted directly and extensively from it at page 264 in Chapter Twelve of ToD, as I wrote in my August 31 post. Shortly after writing that post, I found another direct quote from the Belodeau Eulogy later in Chapter Twelve of ToD (at page 267):
New Englander Tommy Belodeau felt an immediate kinship with his new lieutenant based on simple regional pride. "The crew didn't have to prove themselves to me," Kerry explained in retrospect. "I had to earn my spurs with them. When the chief petty officer, Del Sandusky — known as Sky — finally gave me the seal of enlisted man's approval, Tommy was the first to enthusiastically say: 'I told you so, Sky — he's from Massachusetts!'"
Brinkley actually omitted the words "who came from Illinois to be with Tom today" after the phrase "known as Sky," and did so without indicating the omission through an ellipsis, but otherwise that's another direct quote.
Although he clearly used the Belodeau Eulogy as a primary source for two direct quotes in Chapter Twelve, as I noted in my earlier post, Brinkley did not include it in his listed sources for that chapter in his unnumbered Notes section at the conclusion of the book (pp. 483-84). And neither does the Belodeau Eulogy appear in the Notes for the Epilogue chapter (pp. 495-97). Elsewhere in the Notes for various chapters in ToD, Brinkley at least mentions in general terms the unpublished source materials upon which he's drawn — for instance, for Chapter Eight he writes (at page 479), "Kerry's journals and correspondence for the crux of this chapter," and for Chapter Nine he writes (at page 480), "Again Kerry's war journals form the backbone of this chapter."
But in contrast to, say, Kerry's letters to his parents or his journal writings, the Belodeau Eulogy was originally delivered in a public setting, and was subsequently, deliberately, published by Kerry in the Congressional Record, both in print form and in a searchable online database. And yet the Belodeau Eulogy is nowhere listed in ToD's Selected Bibliography. As Alice cried from Wonderland, "Curiouser and curiouser!"
Posted by Beldar at 07:01 PM in Politics, SwiftVets | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Roy Rogers, Rambo, and Rassmann: What happened to Belodeau's weapon on 13Feb69, and what replacement was Rassmann bringing him?
I may be late in noticing this quote from Jim Rassmann in an August 19th press release on Kerry's campaign website (ellipsis in original; boldface mine):
"The [enemy] fire was strong enough to knock out Tommy Belodeau’s machine gun.… I was in the middle of the firefight," Rassmann has said of the false claims that there was no fire that day and that other boats rescued people from the water. "There was one person in the water that day and that was me, anyone who is telling you otherwise is giving you a lie."
This is almost certainly nonsense.
Let's give Mr. Rassmann a large benefit of the doubt when he said there was only "one person in the water that day." Perhaps he meant in his immediate area, excluding the injured crewmen who'd been blown off Lt. Pees' PCF 3 and those like Larry Thurlow who jumped into the water to rescue them.
But I haven't been able to find any reference in Mr. Rassmann's other statements about the "firefight" — for example, his August 10 WSJ op-ed, or his quotations in Michael Dobbs' August 22 WaPo article, or his quotations in Jeff Barnard's January 24 AP article — that are consistent with Mr. Rassmann's assertion in this press release that enemy fire "[knocked] out" Belodeau's M-60 machine gun on the bow of PCF 94. In the Dobbs article, for example, we read (boldface mine):
Almost simultaneously [with the explosion of the mine under Pees' PCF 3], Kerry's forward gunner, Tommy Belodeau, began screaming for a replacement for his machine gun, which had jammed. Rassmann grabbed an M-16 and worked his way sideways along the deck, which was only seven inches wide in places.
The Barnard article is silent as to what happened to Belodeau's M-60, but says (boldface mine):
Rassmann recalls sidling along the deck next to the pilot house, a rifle in each hand, intending to give one to the bow gunner [Belodeau], when a second mine detonated, launching him into the water....
In the Belodeau Eulogy, Sen. Kerry doesn't claim that Belodeau's gun was knocked out by enemy fire, although Kerry said there (boldface mine):
We were receiving incoming rocket and small arms fire and Tommy was returning fire with his M-60 machine gun when it literally broke apart in his hands. He was left holding the pieces unable to fire back while one of the Green Berets [Rassmann] walked along the edge of the boat to get Tommy another M-60. As he was doing so, the boat made a high-speed turn to starboard and the Green Beret kept going — straight into the river....
Now this contains its own inprobabilities. While an M-60 could be carried and fired by one man — think Rambo — it's a heavy weapon that was often mounted on a jeep, helicopter, or boat (as Belodeau's M-60 probably was), or else used with its own tripod:
It seems rather more likely that Rassmann was carrying an M-16 assault rifle in each hand — his own, plus a spare to give to Belodeau — than that he was lugging his own M-16 plus another M-60 for Belodeau.
Moreover, it seems rather more likely that Belodeau's M-60 jammed, or even that it broke apart from its own vibrations, than that it was shot apart in his hands by VC fire from the riverbanks — managing to hit only Belodeau's weapon, without hitting him, or anyone else, or the boat, would be a trick worthy of Roy Rogers on his best day.
So what does it say about Rassmann's credibility that he relies on trick-shooting VC to try to justify his claims of being under enemy fire?
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