TopCat, you are a typical Bushie smear artist. You take one sentence out of a long story and pretend that's the meaning of it. It is true that Kerry had strong misgivings about the war (what sane person didn't?) But he specifically volunteered for Vietnam which is the same as now volunteering for Iraq, meaning you're either gun ho or not afraid of combat, take your pick. Once on the Mekong, Kerry threw himself into it, but he never stopped having misgivings about the war itself, because let's face it, that was was FUBAR and wrong. Also notice the last sentence of this section, where smearvet Admiral Hoffman commends Kerry for his bravery, so Hoffman lied in 2004 and contradicted himself. Hoddman was in fact the commander who ordered hootches burned down and wanted to cover that up. Kerry exposed it to congress. That's the reason Hoffman was afraid of (thereby hating) Kerry.
Read on:
" Kerry went back in the rivers. Indeed, it was after this meeting that he began his most deadly round of combat. Within days of the Saigon meeting, he joined a five-man crew on swift boat No. 94 on a series of missions in which he won the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and two of his three Purple Hearts. Starting in late January 1969, this crew completed 18 missions over an intense and dangerous 48 days, almost all of them in the dense jungles of the Mekong Delta.
Kerry's crew included engineman Eugene Thorson, later an Iowa cement mason; David Alston, then the crew's only African-American and today a minister in South Carolina; petty officer Delbert Sandusky of Illinois; rear gunner and quartermaster Michael Medeiros of California; and the late Tom Belodeau, who joined the crew fresh out of Chelmsford High School in Massachusetts. Others rotated in and out of the crew. (*ALL THESE CREWMEN 100% KERRY AND NOTICE NO SMEARVETS ON HIS BOAT)
The most intense action came during an extraordinary eight days of more than 10 firefights, remembered by Kerry's crew as the "days of hell."
On Feb. 20, 1969, Kerry earned his second Purple Heart after sustaining a shrapnel wound in his left thigh. According to a previously unreported Navy report on the battle, a two-boat patrol spotted three men on a riverbank who were wearing black pajamas and running and engaged them in a firefight. While not criticizing this engagement, the Navy report did challenge the decision of unnamed skippers to fire at other "targets of opportunity" in the area.
"Area seemed extremely prosperous and open to psyops action, minimum number of defensive and no offensive bunkers detected," the report said. The naval official who wrote the report concluded: "Future missions in this area should be oriented toward psyops rather than destruction."
The destruction included 40 sampans, 10 hut-style hootches, three bunkers, and 5,000 pounds of rice. The crews from two swift boats had expended more than 14,000 rounds of.50-caliber ammunition. No enemy casualties were reported.
In a recent interview, Kerry dismissed the report's questioning of firing at targets of opportunity. "The problem is ... three guys are ducking behind a bank, and you start taking arms fire," Kerry said. "At any place, at any time, anybody could turn around and kill you. That was the problem with the war."
Five days later Kerry's boat was on patrol when a supporting helicopter ran out of ammunition. Instead of retreating, Kerry turned his boat directly toward hidden snipers, then beached the boat, and ordered an assault party onshore. This was not standard procedure. The swift boat crews weren't trained to fight on the muddy landscape; their shoes were closer to deck wear than combat boots.
None of that deterred Kerry. With a second swift boat providing support, Medeiros and Kerry rushed ashore and found what they thought was a Viet Cong guerrilla inside a bunker. After Kerry sought a surrender, Medeiros threw a grenade. The two assumed an enemy had been killed, although Medeiros said he never saw the victim and wonders now whether it could have been an animal.
The next day Kerry's swift boat convoy detected five Viet Cong in the river. Some of them appeared to be dead, but they were actually playing dead in an effort to stall the swift boat crews. It was a trap, and the swift boats came under rocket fire from the shore. The crews managed to capture the five guerrillas and sped away.
On the following day, Feb. 27, Kerry's boat was nearly hit in a rocket attack, and a crew member was shot.
Ambush in the Mekong Delta
This exhausting and harrowing week was only the beginning for Kerry. On Feb. 28, 1969, Kerry's boat received word that a swift boat was being ambushed. As Kerry raced to the scene, his boat became another target, as a Viet Cong B-40 rocket blast shattered a window. Kerry could have ordered his crew to hit the enemy and run. But the skipper had a more aggressive reaction in mind. Beach the boat, Kerry ordered, and the craft's bow was quickly rammed upon the shoreline. Out of the bush appeared a teenager in a loin cloth, clutching a grenade launcher. (* SMEARVETS LIE ABOUT THIS AND SAY KERRY MURDERED AN UNARMED BOY)
An enemy was just feet away, holding a weapon with enough firepower to blow up the boat. Kerry's forward gunner, Belodeau, shot and clipped the Viet Cong in the leg. Then Belodeau's gun jammed, according to other crewmates (Belodeau died in 1997). Medeiros tried to fire at the Viet Cong, but he couldn't get a shot off.
In an interview, Kerry added a chilling detail.
"This guy could have dispatched us in a second, but for ... I'll never be able to explain, we were literally face to face, he with his B-40 rocket and us in our boat, and he didn't pull the trigger. I would not be here today talking to you if he had," Kerry recalled. "And Tommy clipped him, and he started going [down.] I thought it was over."
Instead, the guerrilla got up and started running. "We've got to get him, make sure he doesn't get behind the hut, and then we're in trouble," Kerry recalled.
So Kerry shot and killed the guerrilla. "I don't have a second's question about that, nor does anybody who was with me," he said. "He was running away with a live B-40, and, I thought, poised to turn around and fire it." Asked whether that meant Kerry shot the guerrilla in the back, Kerry said, "No, absolutely not. He was hurt, other guys were shooting from back, side, back. There is no, there is not a scintilla of question in any person's mind who was there [that] this guy was dangerous, he was a combatant, he had an armed weapon."
The crewman with the best view of the action was Frederic Short, the man in the tub operating the twin guns. Short had not talked to Kerry for 34 years, until after he was recently contacted by a Globe reporter. Kerry said he had "totally forgotten" Short was on board that day.
Short had joined Kerry's crew just two weeks earlier, as a last-minute replacement, and he was as green as the Arkansas grass of his home. He said he didn't realize that he should have carried an M-16 rifle, figuring the tub's machine guns would be enough. But as Kerry stood face to face with the guerrilla carrying the rocket, Short realized his predicament. With the boat beached and the bow tilted up, a guard rail prevented him from taking aim at the enemy. For a terrifying moment, the guerrilla looked straight at Short with the rocket.
Short believes the guerrilla didn't fire because he was too close and needed to be a suitable distance to hit the boat squarely and avoid ricochet debris. Short tried to protect his skipper.
"I laid in fire with the twin .50s, and he got behind a hootch," recalled Short. "I laid 50 rounds in there, and Mr. Kerry went in. Rounds were coming everywhere. We were getting fire from both sides of the river. It was a canal. We were receiving fire from the opposite bank, also, and there was no way I could bring my guns to bear on that."
Short said there is "no doubt" that Kerry saved the boat and crew. "That was a him-or-us thing, that was a loaded weapon with a shape charge on it. ... It could pierce a tank. I wouldn't have been here talking to you. I probably prayed more up that creek than a Southern Baptist church does in a month."
Charles Gibson, who served on Kerry's boat that day because he was on a one-week indoctrination course, said Kerry's action was dangerous but necessary. "Every day you wake up and say, `How the hell did we get out of that alive?"' Gibson said. "Kerry was a good leader. He knew what he was doing."
When Kerry returned to his base, his commanding officer, George Elliott, raised an issue with Kerry: the fine line between whether the action merited a medal or a court-martial.
"When [Kerry] came back from the well-publicized action where he beached his boat in middle of ambush and chased a VC around a hootch and ended his life, when [Kerry] came back and I heard his debrief, I said, `John, I don't know whether you should be court-martialed or given a medal, court-martialed for leaving your ship, your post,"' Elliott recalled in an interview.
"But I ended up writing it up for a Silver Star, which is well deserved, and I have no regrets or second thoughts at all about that," Elliott said. A Silver Star, which the Navy said is its fifth-highest medal, commends distinctive gallantry in action.
Asked why he had raised the issue of a court-martial, Elliott said he did so "half tongue-in-cheek, because there was never any question I wanted him to realize I didn't want him to leave his boat unattended. That was in context of big-ship Navy -- my background. A C.O. [commanding officer] never leaves his ship in battle or anything else. I realize this, first of all, it was pretty courageous to turn into an ambush even though you usually find no more than two or three people there. On the other hand, on an operation some time later, down on the very tip of the peninsula, we had lost one boat and several men in a big operation, and they were hit by a lot more than two or three people."
Elliott stressed that he never questioned Kerry's decision to kill the Viet Cong, and he appeared in Boston at Kerry's side during the 1996 Senate race to back up that aspect of Kerry's action.
"I don't think they were exactly ready to court-martial him," said Wade Sanders, who commanded a swift boat that sometimes accompanied Kerry's vessel, and who later became deputy assistant secretary of the Navy. "I can only say from the certainty borne of experience that there must have been some rumbling about, `What are we going to do with this guy, he turned his boat,' and I can hear the words, `He endangered his crew.' But from our position, the tactic to take is whatever action is best designed to eliminate the enemy threat, which is what he did."
Indeed, the Silver Star citation makes clear that Kerry's performance on that day was both extraordinary and risky. "With utter disregard for his own safety and the enemy rockets," the citation says, Kerry "again ordered a charge on the enemy, beached his boat only 10 feet from the Viet Cong rocket position and personally led a landing party ashore in pursuit of the enemy. ... The extraordinary daring and personal courage of Lt. Kerry in attacking a numerically superior force in the face of intense fire were responsible for the highly successful mission."
Michael Bernique, who was revered as one of the gutsiest swift boat commanders, marveled at Kerry's brazen approach to battle. Bernique recalled how Kerry one day "went ashore in an area that I thought might be mined. I said, `Get the blankety-blank out of there.' John just shrugged his shoulders and left. John just was fearless.
"If you are asking, `Was he foolhardy?' -- he survived," Bernique said. "I don't recall anybody saying they didn't want to serve with him. I would not have worried about my back if John was with me."
Roy Hoffmann, who commanded the coastal division in which Kerry served, worried about Kerry, at least at the beginning. He said Kerry and some other skippers initially "had difficulty carrying out direct orders. You know, they were playing the cowboy a little bit. John Kerry was one of them. You don't go out on your own when you are given certain type of patrols, and we were having difficulty with that."
Hoffmann said the problem was corrected and he supported the actions on the day Kerry won the Silver Star. "It took guts, and I admire that," Hoffman said. (* HOFFMAN WAS ONE OF THE TOP SMEARVETS WHO LIED ABOUT KERRY AND ALLOWED OTHER SMEARVETS TO FABRICATE PHONY STORIES AND ACCUSATIONS ABOUT THE VERY EVENTS HOFFMAN KNEW WERE HEROIC AND COURAGEOUS, AGAIN PROVING HOW DISHONEST THE SMEARVETS ARE) |
