Unfit for
Command
by John O’Neill and Dr. Jerome Corsi
Chapter 3
THE PURPLE HEART HUNTER
“Many took exception to the Purple Hearts awarded to Kerry. His ‘wounds’
were suspect, so insignificant as to not be worthy of the award of such a
medal. That Kerry would seek the Purple Heart for such ‘wounds’ is a mockery
of the intent of the Purple Heart and an abridgement of the valor of those
to whom the Purple Heart had been awarded with justification.”
WILLIAM FRANKE Swift Boat veteran
A normal tour of duty in Vietnam was at least one year for all personnel.
Many sailors, like Tom Wright (who would later object to operating with
Kerry in Vietnam) and Steven Gardner (the gunner’s mate who sat behind and
above Kerry for most of his Vietnam stay and came to regard him as
incompetent and dishonest), stayed for longer periods either because of the
special needs of the Navy or because they had volunteered to do so. With
very few exceptions in the history of Swift Boats in Vietnam, everyone
served a one year tour unless he was seriously wounded. One exception was
John Kerry, who requested to leave Vietnam after four months, citing an
obscure regulation that permitted release of personnel with three Purple
Hearts. John Kerry is also the only known Swiftee who received the Purple
Heart for a self-inflicted wound.
None of Kerry’s Purple Hearts were for serious injuries. They were
concededly minor scratches at best, resulting in no lost duty time. Each
Purple Heart decoration is very controversial, with considerable evidence
(and in two of the cases, with incontrovertible and conclusive evidence)
that the minor injuries were caused by Kerry’s own hand and were not the
result of hostile fire of any kind. They are a subject of ridicule within
our unit. “I did get cut a few times, but I forgot to recommend myself for a
Purple Heart. Sorry about that,” wrote John Howland, a boat commander with
call sign “Gremlin.” Moreover, many Swiftees have now come forth to question
Kerry’s deception. “I was there the entire time Kerry was and witnessed two
of his war ‘wounds.’ I was also present during the action [in which] he
received his Bronze Star. I know what a fraud he is. How can I help?” wrote
Van Odell, a gunner from Kerry’s unit in An Thoi. Commander John Kipp, USN
(retired), of Coastal Division 13 also volunteered, “If there is anything I
can do to unmask this charlatan, please let me know. He brings disgrace to
all who served.”
Swiftees have remarked that, if Kerry faked even one of these awards, he
owes the Navy 243 additional days in Vietnam before he runs for anything. In
a unit where terribly wounded personnel like Shelton White (now an undersea
film producer who records specials for National Geographic) chose to return
to duty after three wounds on the same day, Kerry’s actions were
disgraceful. Indeed, many share the feelings of Admiral Roy Hoffmann, to
whom all Swiftees reported: Kerry simply “bugged out” when the heat was on.
For military personnel no medal or award (with the exception of the
Congressional Medal of Honor) holds the significance of the Purple Heart.
John O’Neill remembers witnessing, as a five-year-old child, the
presentation of the Purple Heart to his widowed aunt, standing with her five
children, at a memorial service for his uncle, a fighter pilot lost in
Korea. Many remember the Purple Heart pinned on the pillows of the badly
wounded in military hospitals throughout the world during America’s wars in
defense of freedom. For this reason, there were those in Coastal Division 11
who turned down Purple Hearts because, when the medals were offered, these
honorable men felt they did not really deserve them. Veteran Gary Townsend
wrote, “I was on PCF 3 [from] 1969 to 1970 . . . I also turned down a Purple
Heart award (which required seven stitches) offered to me while in Nam
because I thought a little cut was insignificant as to what others had
suffered to get theirs.”
To cheat by getting a Purple Heart from a self-inflicted wound would be
regarded as befitting the lowest levels of military conduct. To use such a
faked award to leave a combat sector early would be lower yet. Finally, to
make or use faked awards as the basis for running for president of the
United States, while faulting one’s political opponents for not having
similar military decorations, would represent unbelievable hypocrisy and the
truly bottom rung of human conduct. Anyone engaging in such conduct would be
unfit for even the lowest rank in the Navy, to say nothing of the commander
in chief.
The Purple Heart Adventure in the Boston Whaler
John Kerry’s Story:
John Kerry’s website presents his first Purple Heart incident in typical
heroic fashion: “December 2, 1968—Kerry experiences first intense combat;
receives first combat related injury.” As Kerry described the situation to
Brinkley, who recounts the event in Tour of Duty, he grew bored in his first
two weeks in Vietnam while awaiting the assignment of his own boat. So he
volunteered for a “special mission” on a boat the Navy calls a skimmer but
which Kerry knew as a “Boston whaler.” The craft was a foam-filled boat, not
a PCF Swift Boat. Kerry and two enlisted men were patrolling that night, as
Kerry described it, “the shore off a Viet Cong–infested peninsula north of
Cam Ranh.” Kerry claims that he and his two crew members spent the night
being “scared shitless,” creeping up in the darkness on fishermen in
sampans. They feared that the fishermen in sampans with no lights might be
Viet Cong. According to Kerry, the action started early in the morning,
around 2 or 3 a.m., when it was still dark. Here are Kerry’s words, quoted
by Brinkley: The jungle closed in on us on both sides. It was scary as hell.
You could hear yourself breathing. We were almost touching the shore.
Suddenly, through the magnified moonlight of the infrared “starlight scope,”
I watched, mesmerized, as a group of sampans glided in toward the shore. We
had been briefed that this was a favorite crossing area for VC trafficking
contraband. Kerry reports that he turned off the motor and paddled the
Boston Whaler out of the inlet into the bay. Then he saw the Vietnamese pull
their sampans onto the beach; they began to unload something. Kerry decided
to light a flare to illuminate the area. The entire sky seemed to explode
into daylight. The men from the sampans bolted erect, stiff with shock for
only an instant before they sprang for cover like a herd of panicked
gazelles [Kerry] had once seen on TV’s “Wild Kingdom.” We opened fire . . .
The light from the flares started to fade, the air was full of explosions.
My M-16 jammed, and as I bent down in the boat to grab another gun, a
stinging piece of heat socked into my arm and just seemed to burn like hell.
By this time one of the sailors had started the engine and we ran by the
beach, strafing it. Then it was quiet. That was the entire action. As Kerry
explained to Brinkley, he was not about to go chasing after the Vietnamese
running away. “We stayed quiet and low because we did not want to illuminate
ourselves at this point,” Kerry explains.
In the dead of night, without any knowledge of what kind of force was there,
we were not all about to go crawling on the beach to get our asses shot off.
We were unprotected; we didn’t have ammunition; we didn’t have cover; we
just weren’t prepared for that. . . . So we first shot the sampans so that
they were destroyed and whatever was in them was destroyed. In the
introduction of the incident in the book, Kerry said that it “was a
half-assed action that hardly qualified as combat, but it was my first, and
that made it exciting.” Kerry and his crew loaded their gear in the Swift
Boat that was there to cover them, and with the Boston Whaler in tow, they
headed back to Cam Ranh Bay. Brinkley ends his discussion by quoting Kerry’s
summary, an account that again paints a larger-than-life picture: “I felt
terribly seasoned after this minor skirmish, but since I couldn’t put my
finger on what we had really accomplished or on what had happened, it was
difficult to feel satisfied,” Kerry recalled. “I never saw where the piece
of shrapnel had come from, and the vision of the men running like gazelles
haunted me. It seemed stupid. My gunner didn’t know where the people were
when he first started firing. The M-16 bullets had kicked up the sand way to
the right of them as he sprayed the beach, slowly walking the line of fire
over to where the men had been leaping for cover. I had been shouting
directions and trying to unjam my gun. The third crewman was locked in a
personal struggle with the engine, trying to start it. I just shook my head
and said, ‘Jesus Christ.’ It made me wonder if a year of training was worth
anything.” Nevertheless, the episode introduced Kerry to combat with the VC
and earned him a Purple Heart.
The Boston Globe’s Account:
A somewhat different version is recounted in the Kerry biography written by
the Boston Globe reporters. In this account, Kerry had emphasized that he
was patrolling with the Boston Whaler in a freefire curfew zone, and that
“anyone violating the curfew could be considered an enemy and shot.” By the
time the Globe biography was written, questions had been raised about
whether the incident involved any enemy fire at all. The Globe reporters
covered this point as follows: The Kerry campaign showed the Boston Globe a
one-page document listing Kerry’s medical treatment during some of his
service time. The notation said: “3 DEC 1968 U.S. NAVAL SUPPORT FACILITY CAM
RANH BAY RVN FPO Shrapnel in left arm above elbow. Shrapnel removed and
apply Bacitracin dressing. Ret to duty.”
The Globe asked the campaign whether Kerry was certain that he received
enemy fire and whether Kerry remembers the Purple Heart being questioned by
a superior officer. The campaign did not respond to those specific questions
and, instead, provided a written statement about the fact that the Navy did
find the action worthy of a Purple Heart. The two men serving alongside
Kerry that night had similar memories of the incident that led to Kerry’s
first wartime injury. William Zaldonis, who was manning an M-60, and Patrick
Runyon, operating the engine, said they spotted some people running from a
sampan to a nearby shoreline. When they refused to obey a call to stop,
Kerry’s crew began shooting. “When John told me to open up, I opened up,”
Zaldonis recalled. Zaldonis and Runyon both said they were too busy to
notice how Kerry was hit. “I assume they fired back,” Zaldonis said. “If you
can picture me holding an M-60 machine gun and firing it—what do I see?
Nothing. If they were firing at us, it was hard for me to tell.”
Runyon, too, said that he assumed the suspected Viet Cong fired back because
Kerry was hit by a piece of shrapnel. “When you have a lot of shooting going
on, a lot of noise, you are scared, the adrenaline is up,” Runyon said. “I
can’t say for sure that we got return fire or how [Kerry] got nicked. I
couldn’t say one way or the other. I know he did get nicked, a scrape on the
arm.” In a separate conversation, Runyon related that he never knew Kerry
was wounded. So even in the Globe biography accounting, it was not clear
that there was any enemy fire, just a question about how Kerry might have
been hit with shrapnel.
The Globe reporters noted that, upon the group’s return to base, Kerry’s
commander, Grant Hibbard, was very skeptical about the injury. The Globe
account also quoted William Schachte, the officer in command for the
operation. As the Globe reporters recount, Another person involved that day
was William Schachte, who oversaw the mission and went on to become an
admiral. In 2003, Schachte responded: ‘It was not a very serious wound at
all.’ Still, on Sunday, April 18, 2004, when NBC correspondent Tim Russert
questioned Kerry on national television about the skimmer incident, Kerry
described the incident as “the most frightening night” of his Vietnam
experience. The Globe reporters noted that Kerry had declined to be
interviewed about the Boston Whaler incident for their book. Kerry’s refusal
to be interviewed may well have been because witnesses such as Commander
Hibbard, Dr. Louis Letson, Rear Admiral William Schachte, and others had
begun to surface, and Kerry’s fabricated story of “the most frightening
night” had begun to unravel.
What Really Happened:
The truth is that at the time of this incident Kerry was an officer in
command (OinC) under training, aboard the skimmer using the call sign
“Robin” on the operation, with now-Rear Admiral William Schachte using the
call sign “Batman,” who was also on the skimmer. After Kerry’s M-16 jammed,
Kerry picked up an M-79 grenade launcher and fired a grenade too close,
causing a tiny piece of shrapnel (one to two centimeters) to barely stick in
his arm. Schachte berated Kerry for almost putting someone’s eye out. There
was no hostile fire of any kind, nor did Kerry on the way back mention to
PCF OinC Mike Voss, who commanded the PCF that had towed the skimmer, that
he was wounded. There was no report of any hostile fire that day (as would
be required), nor do the records at Cam Ranh Bay reveal any such hostile
fire. No other records reflect any hostile fire. There is also no casualty
report, as would have been required had there actually been a casualty.
Following “the most frightening night” of his life, to the surprise of both
Schachte and the treating doctor, Louis Letson, Kerry managed to keep the
tiny hanging fragment barely embedded in his arm until he arrived at sickbay
a number of miles away and a considerable time later, where he was examined
by Dr. Letson. Dr. Letson, who has never forgotten the experience, reported
it to his Democratic county chairman early in the 2004 primary campaign.
When Kerry appeared at sickbay, Dr. Letson asked, “Why are you here?” in
surprise, observing Kerry’s unimpressive scratch. Kerry answered, “I’ve been
wounded by hostile fire.” Accompanying crewmen then told Dr. Letson that
Kerry had wounded himself. Dr. Letson used tweezers to remove the tiny
fragment, which he identified as shrapnel like that from an M-79 (not from a
rifle bullet, etc.), and put a small bandage on Kerry’s arm. The following
morning Kerry appeared at the office of Coastal Division 14 Commander Grant
Hibbard and applied for the Purple Heart. Hibbard, who had learned from
Schachte of the absence of hostile fire and self-infliction of the “wound”
by Kerry himself, looked down at the tiny scratch (which he said was smaller
than a rose thorn prick) and turned down the award since there was no
hostile fire. When we interviewed Grant Hibbard for this book, he was
equally emphatic that Kerry’s slight injury, in his opinion, could not
possibly merit the Purple Heart:
Q: When did you first meet John Kerry?
GH: Kerry reported to my division in November 1968. I didn’t know
him from Adam.
Q: Can you describe the mission in which Kerry got his first Purple
Heart?
GH: Kerry requested permission to go on a skimmer operation with
Lieutenant Schachte, my most senior and trusted lieutenant, using a Boston
Whaler to try to interdict a Viet Cong movement of arms and munitions. The
next morning at the briefing, I was informed that no enemy fire had been
received on that mission. Our units had fired on some VC units running on
the beach. We were all in my office, some of the crew members, I remember
Schachte being there. This was thirty-six years ago; it really didn’t seem
all that important at the time. Here was this lieutenant, junior grade, who
was saying “I got wounded,” and everybody else, the crew that were present
were saying, “We didn’t get any fire. We don’t know how he got the scratch.”
Kerry showed me the scratch on his arm. I hadn’t been informed that he had
any medical treatment. The scratch didn’t look like much to me; I’ve seen
worse injuries from a rose thorn.
Q: Did Kerry want you to recommend him for a Purple Heart?
GH: Yes, that was his whole point. He had this little piece of
shrapnel in his hand. It was tiny. I was told later that Kerry had fired an
M-79 grenade and that he had misjudged it. He fired it too close to the
shore, and it exploded on a rock or something. He got hit by a piece of
shrapnel from a grenade that he had fired himself. The injury was
self-inflicted, that’s what made sense to me. I told Kerry to “forget it.”
There was no hostile fire, the injury was self-inflicted for all I knew,
besides it was nothing really more than a scratch. Kerry wasn’t getting any
Purple Heart recommendation from me.
Q: How did Kerry get a Purple Heart from the incident then?
GH: I don’t know. It beats me. I know I didn’t recommend him for a
Purple Heart. Kerry probably wrote up the paperwork and recommended himself,
that’s all I can figure out. If it ever came across my desk, I don’t have
any recollection of it. Kerry didn’t get my signature. I said “no way” and
told him to get out of my office.
Amazingly, Kerry somehow “gamed the system” nearly three months later to
obtain the Purple Heart that Hibbard had denied. How he obtained the award
is unknown, since his refusal to execute Standard Form 180 means that
whatever documents exist are known only to Kerry, the Department of Defense,
and God. It is clear that there should be numerous other documents, but only
a treatment record reflecting a scratch and a certificate signed three
months later have been produced. There is, of course, no “after-action”
hostile fire or casualty report, as occurred in the case of every other
instance of hostile fire or casualty. This is because there was no hostile
fire, casualty, or action on this “most frightening night” of Kerry’s
Vietnam experience. Dr. Louis Letson agreed with Grant Hibbard. Kerry’s
injury was minor and probably self-inflicted: The incident that occasioned
my meeting with Lieutenant Kerry began while he was patrolling the coast at
night just north of Cam Ranh Bay where I was the only medical officer for a
small support base. Kerry returned from that night on patrol with an injury.
Kerry reported that he had observed suspicious activity on shore and fired a
flare to illuminate the area. According to Kerry, they had been engaged in a
firefight, receiving small arms fire from on shore. He said that his injury
resulted from this enemy action.
The story he told was different from what his crewmen had to say about that
night. Some of his crew confided that they did not receive any fire from
shore, but that Kerry had fired a grenade round at close range to the shore.
The crewman who related this story thought that the injury was from a
fragment of the grenade shell that had ricocheted back from the rocks. That
seemed to fit the injury I treated. What I saw was a small piece of metal
sticking very superficially in the skin of Kerry’s arm. The metal fragment
measured about one centimeter in length and was about two or three
millimeters in diameter. It certainly did not look like a round from a
rifle. I simply removed the piece of metal by lifting it out of the skin
with forceps. I doubt that it penetrated more than three or four
millimeters. It did not require probing to find it, nor did it require any
anesthesia to remove it. It did not require any sutures to close the wound.
The wound was covered with a band-aid. No other injuries were reported and I
do not recall that there was any injury to the boat.
Lieutenant Kerry’s crew related that he had told them that he would be
president one day. He liked to think of himself as the next JFK from
Massachusetts. I remember that Jess Carreon was present at the time and he,
in fact, made the entry into Lieutenant Kerry’s medical record.15 Both
Hibbard and Letson wondered why Kerry had even bothered to go to the
dispensary. Kerry’s report of the injury as a combat injury seemed at best
to be exaggerated. The crewmen present maintained that there was no evidence
of enemy fire, and their conclusion was that Kerry had been hit by a
fragment of his own grenade. Kerry’s proponents have also pointed to a
fitness report for Kerry that was filed by Hibbard rating Kerry “excellent”
as proof that Kerry’s service in Cam Ranh was unusually good. In reality,
the Kerry fitness report (which leaves fourteen of the eighteen categories,
including “integrity,” marked “unobserved”) is a marginal report. Hibbard
has stated that he wished to provide in the report a mediocre evaluation
without permanently destroying Kerry, given his short four-week period of
evaluation. At the time the report was made, Hibbard did not know of Kerry’s
later-finagled first Purple Heart. Most Swiftees who were with Kerry at Cam
Ranh Bay never knew until Kerry decided to run for president that he had
somehow successfully maneuvered his way to this undeserved Purple Heart. But
in Kerry’s own unit, Coastal Division 14, his attempt to gain the award
through fraud marked him as someone who could never be trusted. When Kerry
was dispatched to go to An Thoi with Lieutenant Tedd Peck (now Captain, USNR,
retired), Peck told him, “Kerry, follow me no closer than a thousand yards.
If you get any closer, I’ll teach you what a real Purple Heart is.”
A Trip to An Thoi
In contrast to the pretty beaches and placid existence at Cam Ranh Bay where
Kerry was stationed, Coastal Division 11 was engaged in a gritty struggle
against a North Vietnamese base area, deep in the mangrove swamps in the
extreme south and west of Vietnam. This area, commonly known as the U Minh
and Nam Can forests, had been under North Vietnamese control since the 1940s
and was used for POW camps. Most POWs never left these camps. The city of
Nam Can, one of the few free outposts in the area, had been overrun by the
North Vietnamese in February 1968. Swift operations in the area were
supported from an offshore outpost at An Thoi, located on an island off the
coast.
The ultimate commander of United States Naval and Coast Guard forces in
Vietnam, Admiral Elmo “Bud” Zumwalt III developed a strategy—with
enthusiastic support of then-Captain Roy Hoffmann— to use underutilized
offshore naval assets to rip control of area waterways from the North
Vietnamese. His model was the Mississippi River campaigns of the Civil War,
which had effectively used specialized craft.
Zumwalt was deeply admired by almost all Swiftees. A hero in World War II,
Zumwalt was also later known as the man who brought women to the Naval
Academy and into full participation in the Navy. He was also recognized as a
crusader against racism. Zumwalt was a visionary whose sponsorship of
missile ships and other innovations mark today’s Navy. He also often rode
into danger with the Swiftees. Kerry’s later charge on Meet the Press in
April 1971 that Zumwalt and others were war criminals cut deeply at the
heart of Swiftees. Perhaps part of Kerry’s unjustifiable attack on Zumwalt
was motivated by the fact that it was Zumwalt’s decision to use Swift Boats
on dangerous riverine missions that ended with Kerry’s hopes of avoiding
action.
The Dinner that Never Happened:
Kerry’s Fictitious Journal Account
In Kerry’s account of the An Thoi transfer, he makes up an entire
conversation with the skipper of the landing ship tank (LST) who Kerry
claims invited him and Peck for dinner on their way to An Thoi. As Kerry
told the story in Tour of Duty, the LST captain launched into a discussion
about his role in what had become known as the “Bo De massacre.” According
to the version of the story told by Kerry, the LST captain presented a
defensive account, attempting to correct a Stars and Stripes story
criticizing him for LST covering fire that had supposedly fallen short,
exposing Swiftees on the mission to unnecessary casualties.
But according to Captain Peck’s recollection and that of Kerry’s crewman
Steven Gardner, he and Kerry were at the LST only a few minutes for
refueling, not enough time for a comfortable dinner with the LST captain—and
there was no conversation about “the massacre” as described by Kerry. Even
more significant, Kerry’s account of the “Bo De massacre” is a breathtaking
lie. In Tour, Kerry presents the first Swift incident on the Bo De as a
“massacre” of Swiftees with seventeen wounded caused by the incompetence of
all commanders whom he chose to blame rather than the vagaries of war or the
enemy. Kerry’s fabrication comes even though he was not there. Joe Ponder
was there as a Swiftee on the mission in question. Today, still badly
disabled and on crutches from the incident, Ponder says, “There were only
three persons wounded—not seventeen as Kerry states— and I was the first. I
do not understand his criticism of our officers. I’ve always been proud of
our officers.”
Ponder maintains today that the person who truly shamed and offended him was
John Kerry, whose fraudulent account of war crimes in Tour of Duty has led
his own grandchildren to ask him, “Did you commit the war crimes John Kerry
describes?” At the press conference held by the Swift Boat Veterans for
Truth in Washington, D.C., on May 4, 2004, Ponder was in tears, not from his
wounds or the agony of standing with his braces, but from the wounds that
Kerry’s lies in Tour of Duty had left upon his heart and his family.
The Brief Assignment in An Thoi:
Kerry’s Version
As Kerry has admitted in Tour of Duty, he was ordered against his will to
Coastal Division 11 in An Thoi in December 1968. Tedd Peck recalls Kerry’s
constant griping about the transfer. In Tour of Duty, Brinkley writes that
both Kerry and Peck were opposed to their assignment. Following Kerry’s
account, Brinkley quotes Peck telling his men, “There was no way I was
leaving Cam Ranh Bay voluntarily to go up the rivers. That was a suicide
mission.” Brinkley relates a tortured explanation of why Kerry was finally
forced to accept the assignment: He claims that he missed one of the
division meetings held to solicit volunteers because he was at the Air Force
PX. Peck remembered Kerry distinctly objecting, saying that he had not
volunteered for the war that was occurring in the Nam Can and U Minh
forests. Peck believed that Kerry did not belong in the Navy. In Brinkley’s
account, the one guy who got Peck’s ire up the quickest was John Kerry, who
he found standoffish and condescending. “I didn’t like anything about him,”
Peck proclaimed, “Nothing.” For his part, Kerry liked Peck, and decades
later recalled none of this supposed animosity between them.
At any rate, Kerry’s time at An Thoi was short. Within a week, Kerry and the
crew of PCF 44 were on their way to the less hazardous CosDiv 13, at Cat Lo.
Kerry has tried to make it appear that he was disappointed at being so
quickly reassigned from An Thoi. Here is the account he gave to biographer
Douglas Brinkley:
“I tried to fight the change—not because we wanted to stay in An Thoi and
be shot at, but because we didn’t want to have to move and resettle again,”
Kerry noted. “Our mail was already lost, and the trip back against the
monsoon seas promised to be nothing but a bitch. It was just that.”
The Real Reason Kerry was Reassigned:
When they got to An Thoi, Kerry continued to object to his placement in this
dangerous assignment against his will, so much so that he was given routine
offshore patrols not involving any possibility of action until Coastal
Division 11 could figure out a way to get rid of him. Within a week, Kerry
was transferred to Coastal Division 13, headquartered near the former French
resort town of Vung Tau. While Coastal Division 13 had been involved in
substantial action, it was less than what Kerry avoided by his transfer.
What his fellow Swiftees concluded was that Kerry had a very high regard for
his own well-being and very little nerve for facing serious combat.
According to Peck, it was simply easier to get Kerry out of An Thoi than to
have to listen to his constant bellyaching about how he had not volunteered
for this kind of danger. Better just to get rid of Kerry and let him be
somebody else’s problem.
William Franke echoes Tedd Peck’s explanation of why Kerry was so quickly
transferred out of An Thoi:
Kerry vigorously protested being transferred to An Thoi, arguing that he
had volunteered only for coastal patrol and not for the far more hazardous
duty of missions within the inland waterways. Indeed, his objections were so
strong that, upon his first assignment to An Thoi, he was transferred out
within a week. So off Kerry went to Cat Lo, where the patrols were on wider,
less dangerous rivers than the treacherous canals of the U Minh forest and
Cau Mau peninsula.
Christmas In “Cambodia” Vietnam, December 1968
John Kerry’s Story:
If there is one story told over and over again by John Kerry since his
return from Vietnam, it is the heart-wrenching tale of how he spent
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day illegally in Cambodia. From the early 1970s,
when he used the tale as part of his proof for war crimes in Cambodia,
through the mid-1980s and the 1990s, Kerry has spoken and written again and
again of how he was illegally ordered to enter Cambodia.
On the floor of the U.S. Senate on March 27, 1986, Kerry launched one of his
many attacks against President Reagan—this time charging that President
Reagan’s actions in Central America were leading the United States into yet
another Vietnam, claiming that he could recognize the error of the
administration’s ways because he had experienced firsthand the duplicity of
the Nixon administration in lying about American incursions into Cambodia
during the Vietnam War. Kerry charged that he had been illegally ordered
into Cambodia during Christmas 1968:
I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember
what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and
Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the American
people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that
memory which is seared—seared—in me.20 Kerry also described, for example,
for the Boston Herald his vivid memories of his Christmas Eve spent in
Cambodia: I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the
Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk
and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own
allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American
troops was very real.
As recently as July 7, 2004, Michael Kranish of the Boston Globe repeated
Kerry’s Christmas in Cambodia story on FOX News Channel’s Hannity & Colmes,
indicating that it was a critical turning point in Kerry’s life. Kranish had
no knowledge, even after his extensive study of Kerry, that he was simply
repeating a total fabrication by Kerry. And Kranish was right: Study of the
Christmas in Cambodia story is central to understanding John Kerry. The
story is also in the pages of the 2004 biography written by Krahish and
other Boston Globe reporters. As we have come to expect, the story is
twisted at the end to provide justification for yet another of Kerry’s
political ruses, this time used to justify what Kerry portrays as his noble
and continuing distrust of government pronouncements: To top it off, Kerry
said later that he had gone into Cambodia, despite President Nixon’s
assurances to the American public that there was no combat action in this
neutral territory. The young sailor began to develop a deep mistrust of the
U.S. government pronouncements, he later recalled. Even without minimal
investigation, a critical press should have been able to spot the story as a
total fabrication: Richard Nixon did not become president of the United
States until twenty-six days after John Kerry’s Christmas in Cambodia.
What Really Happened: Christmas in Vietnam
Despite the dramatic memories of his Christmas in Cambodia, Kerry’s
statements are complete lies. Kerry was never in Cambodia during Christmas
1968, or at all during the Vietnam War. In reality, during Christmas 1968,
he was more than fifty miles away from Cambodia. Kerry was never ordered
into Cambodia by anyone and would have been court-martialed had he gone
there. During Christmas 1968, Kerry was stationed at Coastal Division 13 in
Cat Lo. Coastal Division 13’s patrol areas extended to Sa Dec, about
fifty-five miles from the Cambodian border. Areas closer than fifty-five
miles to the Cambodian border in the area of the Mekong River were patrolled
by PBRs, a small river patrol craft, and not by Swift Boats. Preventing
border crossings was considered so important at the time that an LCU (a
large, mechanized landing craft) and several PBRs were stationed to ensure
that no one could cross the border. A large sign at the border prohibited
entry. Tom Anderson, Commander of River Division 531, who was in charge of
the PBRs, confirmed that there were no Swifts anywhere in the area and that
they would have been stopped had they appeared. All the living commanders in
Kerry’s chain of command—Joe Streuhli (Commander of CosDiv 13), George
Elliott (Commander of CosDiv 11), Adrian Lonsdale (Captain, USCG and
Commander, Coastal Surveillance Center at An Thoi), Rear Admiral Roy
Hoffmann (Commander, Coastal Surveillance Force Vietnam, CTF 115), and Rear
Admiral Art Price (Commander of River Patrol Force, CTF 116)—deny that Kerry
was ever ordered to Cambodia. They indicate that Kerry would have been
seriously disciplined or court-martialed had he gone there. At least three
of the five crewmen on Kerry’s PCF 44 boat—Bill Zaldonis, Steven Hatch, and
Steve Gardner—deny that they or their boat were ever in Cambodia. The
remaining two crewmen declined to be interviewed for this book. Gardner, in
particular, will never forget those days in late December when he was
wounded on PCF 44, not in Cambodia, but many miles away in Vietnam. The
Cambodia incursion story is not included in Tour of Duty. Instead, Kerry
replaces the story with a report about a mortar attack that occurred on
Christmas Eve 1968 “near the Cambodia border” in a town called Sa Dec, some
fifty-five miles from the Cambodian border. 23 Somehow, Kerry’s secret
illegal mission to Cambodia, which he recounted on the floor of the U.S.
Senate in 1986, is now a firefight at Sa Dec and a Christmas day spent back
at the base writing entries in his journal.
The truth is that Kerry made up his secret mission into Cambodia. Much like
Kerry’s many other lies relating to supposed “war crimes” committed by the
U.S. military in Vietnam, the lie about the illegal Cambodian incursion
painted his superiors up the chain of command— men such as Commander
Streuhli, Commander Elliott, Admiral Hoffmann, and Admiral Zumwalt, all
distinguished Naval heroes and men of integrity—as villains faced down by
John Kerry, a solitary hero in grave and exotic danger and forced illegally
and against his will into harm’s way.
The same sorts of lies were repeated over and over in Kerry’s antiwar book,
The New Soldier, a book filled with preposterous, false confessions of bogus
war crimes committed by the participants (who were often not even real
veterans) against their will and under orders from dishonest superiors.
Kerry’s Christmas in Cambodia typifies the sort of lie upon which Kerry has
built a false persona and a political career. The story of Christmas 1968
has one final chapter. When refueling his PCF near Dong Tam, Kerry and his
crew were told that the Bob Hope USO show was at the Dong Tam base. So Kerry
decided to leave his station on the river and go searching for the Bob Hope
Christmas show. Unable to find the show, he risked boat and crew by
unknowingly blundering into one of the most dangerous canals in Vietnam, a
canal that to those who knew the area was notorious for Viet Cong ambushes.
Given the easy navigation by radar and map of the rivers involved—not much
more difficult than driving a car—Kerry had just performed a feat of reverse
navigation worthy of Wrong Way Corrigan. There is, of course, no record that
Kerry ever informed anyone of what he did, where he was, or where he was
going—all required by regulations for the safety of the boat and crew. He
did, however, record the Bob Hope adventure in his journal so he could be
sure to share it in Tour of Duty.
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