John Kerry in Vietnam                                                     Back
 

  I keep hearing that John Kerry only served 4 months in Vietnam. This is another misleading statement by people who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals. It is true that John Kerry only spent 4 months on the Swift Boats but this was after he had already served a full term in the Navy off the coast of Viet Nam. After serving his time he would have been eligible for a honorable discharge and could have come home. That service would have been enough for any politician to have run on.

   Instead he reenlisted and asked for redeployment to a swift boat. One of the most dangerous assignments in the Navy. Why did he choose to risk life & limb? Maybe, just maybe he loved his country.
   He then served the four months we hear everybody talking about. During that time he received his 3 purple hearts and other medals. It’s the purple hearts that are important here, because they made him eligible for an early honorable discharge. So why did he decided to take it, after all he asked for the assignment?  Maybe he (After personally seeing the war was doing to the people of Vietnam & to his fellow servicemen.) felt the war was a mistake & that he could do more for his comrades by coming home and fighting to end a war we should never have been in.
   History has proven him right. Vietnam has never been a threat to any of it’s neighbors in Asia. We have just recently normalized relationship with Vietnam. We personally lost over fifty eight thousand of our finest. Boys who would never become men, girls who would never become mothers. Not to count the loss of Vietnam lives & the civilians & soldiers who's lives were changed forever by the lose of  one or more of their limbs, the victims of agent orange, The post thematic stress, and all the other horrors of war. Bombing of Viet Cong bases in Cambodia ended up by helping to put the Khmer Rouge in power, thereby causing the Killing Fields. Hundred of thousands Cambodians also lost their lives.
   We hear how he betrayed his fellow soldiers by testifying in congress about the atrocities that were done by American soldiers. They run ads showing his testimony & it sounds as if he is condemning his countrymen. What they leave out is his statement before his testimony that he was repeating testimony by other veterans that he had met at a (Vietnam veterans against the war.) gathering that he had attended weeks before. 
   There were atrocities committed in Vietnam, he wasn’t lying, Just check some old news articles. We tried & convicted Lt. William Calley for the orders he gave in My Lai. Anytime you base the progress of a war on body count your going to create these kinds of problems. John Kerry did the right thing. Oh! And by the way he wasn’t attacking the soldiers, he was attacking the policies & the government officials that were behind the war.
   Policies like: free fire zones, (Of which My Lai was one.) where you could fire on anything: Man, woman, child, animal, anything.
   As for the truth of the swift boat veterans. Most of the ones who were there either side with Kerry or have been proven to have changed their stories. One even won a medal for the same action he now claims never happened. Oh! He said it happened but that they weren’t under fire.  That’s not what his citation says, so he then says that Kerry wrote the after action report. Wrong! Military records show that some of the things in the report happened while Kerry was down stream & he couldn’t have known about them. Also if they weren’t under fire how could one of the boats come back from that action with 3 bullet holes in the hull as Military records show?
   Now I hear people asking how can he take credit for his actions in a war he ended up being against? Well I’ll tell those people why he can. He went into battle for a country he loved and showed courage, leadership & loyalty. He like many young men believed the leaders of our country. He fought & he fought bravely. He deserves to take credit for that.  Later he realized that our government had been misleading the American people & returned home determined to end that war. His first Flip Flop or did he just, as he still does, reevaluate his position after new facts arose? 
   He should be as proud of that later fight. (It wasn't against the soldiers.) It was against that war.
   He showed courage & decisiveness in both cases.
 
   CNN: Sept. 18th. WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Navy's chief investigator concluded Friday that procedures were followed properly in the approval of Sen. John Kerry's Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart medals, according to an internal Navy memo. 
   "Our examination found that existing documentation regarding the Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart medals indicates the awards approval process was properly followed," Route wrote in the memo sent Friday to Navy Secretary Gordon England.
   Some veterans have challenged Kerry's version of the circumstances surrounding the incident that led to his Silver Star award for battlefield heroism, as well as his three Purple Heart medals.
   The Silver Star was awarded for his actions in pursuit of enemy forces while commander of swift boat unit PCF-94 in Vietnam in February 1969.
I went through the case earlier. I wonder what these bitter people will say now?
   Oct. 15th. A funny thing happened on the way to Hanoi. On Nightline 10/14/04 Ted Koppel ran a film taken at the village in Viet Nam where Kerry won his Silver Star and some of the villagers remembered the battle. Their stories coincide with the after action report which lead to the accommodation. Afterwards John E. O'Neill the author of Unfit For Command & largest critic of John Kerry was asked by Koppel what he had to say about the report. He was arrogant and kept saying that the people of the village were lying. I'd like to know, as Ted Koppel mentioned. What reason they would have to fabricate a story that would make Kerry a hero & them look weak? They have no stake in the election. He (O'Neill) looked like some of the muskrats I caught in my traps when I was a kid. Hate is an evil thing that eats away at the human soul. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth can't stand the fact that their war wasn't as noble as they would like it to have been. They came back home to a country divided. Kerry wasn't the only one who was against the war, half of America was. We had all seen the photos of what was happening over there and we didn't like them. Today we are seeing the photos of children who have been caught in the crossfire or killed & maimed in bombing raids in Iraq and I hope we don't like that either.  War is Hell!