Jim_p, never too late for another piece of information.
abcnews.go.com
Part 1.
Oct. 14, 2004 — In the controversy over Sen. John Kerry's service in Vietnam, Americans have heard from Kerry, from the crew of the Navy Swift boats he commanded, and from other Swift boat veterans who question the official account of a 1969 incident for which Kerry was awarded a Silver Star. But there is one group they have not heard from: the Vietnamese who were there that day.
According to the military citation, Kerry was awarded the medal for his actions during an intense firefight on Feb. 28, 1969, during which he shot and killed a Viet Cong fighter who was armed with a rocket launcher. Members of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group have charged that the Viet Cong fighter was a teenager who was alone, who was not part of a numerically superior force, and who was already wounded and running away when Kerry shot him.
Nightline traveled to Vietnam and found a number of witnesses who have never been heard from before, and who have no particular ax to grind for or against Kerry. Only one of them, in fact, even knew who Kerry is. The witnesses, all Vietnamese, are still living in the same villages where the fighting took place more than 35 years ago. A Nightline producer visited them and recorded their accounts of that day. The accounts were subsequently translated by a team of ABC News translators.
A Village Unchanged--Life along the Bay Hap River in Southern Vietnam has changed very little in those years. The river is lined with small hamlets and isolated shacks reachable only by boat. They are surrounded by marshland, separated by winding canals, and concealed by thick walls of vegetation.
The canals lead to Tran Thoi village, the coordinates of which are publicly available in the U.S. military's after-action report on the 1969 battle. The Vietnamese government initially rejected Nightline's request to visit the village, saying they did not want to somehow influence the U.S. presidential election. Once Nightline explained that the intention was to simply find out what the Vietnamese people remember and think of what happened there, permission was granted.
On Feb. 28, 1969, a convoy of three American Swift boats came up the river under the command of Lt. John Kerry, arriving at the village of Tran Thoi. According to Kerry's medal citation, the boats "came under intense automatic weapons and small arms fire from an entrenched enemy force less than 50 feet away. Unhesitatingly, Lieutenant [junior grade] Kerry ordered his boat to attack."
The Swift boats, which were transporting a group of the Americans' South Vietnamese allies, turned into the ambush and beached. According to the after-action report, the South Vietnamese troops stormed ashore, overwhelming the local insurgents.
The fierce firefight at Tran Thoi was just the beginning of the day that has become so central to Kerry's biography. Kerry's boat, PCF 94, and one of the other boats continued up river. The ABC News team took the same route to the site of the second deadly incident that day.
According to the Navy's official report, following the initial ambush, Kerry's boat, PCF 94, and another Swift boat continued up the river to an area where gunshots had been reported.
Less than a kilometer upriver is Nha Vi, a small hamlet. Vo Van Tam, now 54, was a local Viet Cong commander during the war. According to him, the area was a hotbed of guerrilla activity. They had recently been reinforced by a 12-man unit, supplied with small arms and one B-40 rocket launcher. He said the reinforcements had been dispatched from provincial headquarters specifically to target the Swift boats.
According to Vo, there were at least 20 Viet Cong soldiers at Nha Vi there that day. "There were 12 soldiers from the provincial level and eight from the district level," he said.
His wife, Vo Thi Vi, 54, said Feb. 28, 1969, is a day that the villagers of Nha Vi hamlet will never forget. "Everything was destroyed," she said. "There's no houses left. They leveled everything. There was no leaves left. The fighting was very fierce."
According to the citation for Kerry's Silver Star, when the boats approached the hamlet, "a B-40 rocket exploded close aboard PCF 94" — Kerry's boat. He "personally led a landing party ashore in pursuit of the enemy," the citation says, before commending Kerry's "extraordinary daring and personal courage" for "attacking a numerically superior force in the face of intense fire."
That account is disputed by Swift boat veteran John O'Neill, author of "Unfit for Command," who maintains in his book that the statement "is simply false. There was little or no fire."
Different Accounts--Villagers say this is what they saw:
"Firing from over here. Firing from over there. Firing from the boat," Vo Thi Vi told Nightline.
She was only a couple hundred yards away when a Swift boat turned and approached the shore, she said, adding that the boat was unleashing a barrage of gunfire as it approached.
"I ran," she recalled, "Running fast. … And the Americans came from down there, yelling 'Attack, Attack!' And we ran."
Her husband Tam said the man who fired the B-40 rocket was hit in this barrage of gunfire. Then, he said, "he ran about 18 meters before he died, falling dead." |
