Debunking SBVFT

Edit: this post was originally addressed to Brand X's post re: Kerry's first Purple Heart, but I see I've mixed it up; the below is all about the assertion of the SVFT that there was no enemy fire the night Kerry earned his Bronze Star and third Purple Heart. That question, imho, should be considered put to rest now.

WaPo wrote:

[..] Line 'em up - not just Rassmann and all of Kerry's crewmates that day, not just the after-action reports, but also one Wayne D. Langhofer, who hadn't come out with his version of events yet and "who manned a machine gun aboard PCF-43, the boat that was directly behind Kerry's", asserts that yes, they were under fierce enemy fire when Kerry pulled Rassmann from the water with his wounded arm.

Quote:

The second explosion "blew me right off the boat," Rassmann recalled. Frightened that he might be struck by the propellers of one of the boats, he dived to the bottom of the river, where he dumped his weapons and rucksack. When he surfaced, he said, bullets were "snapping overhead," as well as hitting the water around him. [..]

The Kerry and anti-Kerry camps differ sharply on whether the flotilla came under enemy fire after the explosion that crippled the 3 boat. Everybody aboard Kerry's boat, including Rassmann, says there was fire from both riverbanks, and the official after-action report speaks of all boats receiving "heavy a/w [automatic weapons] and s/a [small arms] from both banks." The Bronze Star citations for Kerry and Thurlow also speak of prolonged enemy fire.

A report on "battle damage" to Thurlow's boat mentions "three 30 cal bullet holes about super structure." According to Thurlow, at least one of the bullet holes was the result of action the previous day, when he ran into another Vietcong ambush.

Thurlow, Chenoweth, Pees and several of their crew members who belong to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth say neither they nor Kerry came under fire. "If there was fire, I would have made some notation in my journal," Chenoweth said. "But it didn't happen that way. There wasn't any fire." Although he read his diary entry to a reporter over the phone, he declined to supply a copy.

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Rassmann said, "are not just questioning Kerry's account, they are questioning my account. I take that very personally. No one can tell me that we were not under fire. I saw it, I heard the splashes, and I was scared to death. For them to come back 35 years after the fact to tarnish not only Kerry's record, but my veracity, is unconscionable."

Up until now, eyewitness evidence supporting Kerry's version had come only from his own crewmen. But yesterday, The Post independently contacted a participant who has not spoken out so far in favor of either camp who remembers coming under enemy fire. "There was a lot of firing going on, and it came from both sides of the river," said Wayne D. Langhofer, who manned a machine gun aboard PCF-43, the boat that was directly behind Kerry's.

Langhofer said he distinctly remembered the "clack, clack, clack" of enemy AK-47s, as well as muzzle flashes from the riverbanks. Langhofer, who now works at a Kansas gunpowder plant , said he was approached several months ago by leaders of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth but declined their requests to speak out against Kerry.

Plus, a follow-up NY Times story notes that, in "a letter to the editor of his hometown newspaper, The Telluride Daily Planet, in Colorado",

Quote:

Jim Russell, said that he had served on the Bay Hap River with Mr. Kerry the day he won his Bronze Star and that they had come under significant enemy fire as Mr. Kerry rescued Jim Rassmann. His account contradicted that of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who have said there was not a major firefight. "Anyone who doesn't think that we were being fired upon must have been on a different river," Mr Russell wrote.

Meanwhile, MediaMatters notes that the dissident of Kerry's former crewmates, Steve Gardner, has

Quote:

claimed to know that Kerry fled the scene on the river that day while the other three boats stayed and that Kerry then "turned around and came all the way back to pick up Mr. Rassmann that he had thrown off his boat when he took off, when he fled down the canal." But later in the show, Gardner admitted to not being present that day. When Scarborough attempted to revisit the "March 13, 1969 incident," Gardner said, "I'm not going to deal with that. Because I wasn't there."

That enough to put this story to bed?

Now this is the stuff I found so far on that first Purple Heart:

* There's crewmate Pat Runyon vividly remembering fire, in the Plain Dealer Reporter:

Quote:

An Ohio factory worker who was with John Kerry on a dangerous night mission 36 years ago in Vietnam said he has no doubt Kerry was grazed in a firefight and deserves his first Purple Heart for a combat injury. [..]

Runyon said Kerry was wounded after one vessel tried to avoid an inspection.

"Lt. Kerry said, 'I'm going to pop a flare, and when I do, I want that engine started,' " Runyon said. But the outboard would not crank. Meanwhile, the sampan's crew steered it to the riverbank, and people started running on the shore. Runyon said shooting broke out.

Somehow, Kerry's weapon stopped firing. Runyon thinks he ran out of ammunition. He said Kerry bent down to pick up another gun and got hit in the arm.

"It wasn't a serious wound," Runyon said, and Kerry was able to start shooting again. When the firefight was over, Runyon said Kerry told him all he felt was a "burning sensation."

Runyon said he remembers the incident clearly because it was the first time he had been in combat. "I hadn't seen any kind of action or anything," he said.

Runyon also remembers being called by the anti-Kerry people, as noted in the long NYT article:

Quote:

Patrick Runyon, who served on a mission with Mr. Kerry, said he initially thought the caller was from a pro-Kerry group, and happily gave a statement about the night Mr. Kerry won his first Purple Heart. The investigator said he would send it to him by e-mail for his signature. Mr. Runyon said the edited version was stripped of all references to enemy combat, making it look like just another night in the Mekong Delta.

"It made it sound like I didn't believe we got any returned fire," he said. "He made it sound like it was a normal operation. It was the scariest night of my life."

* There's the account of William L. Schachte Jr., who claimed to be on the boat as well and that there was no fire - but who isn't actually remembered by anyone. The Plain Dealer article notes that Runyon "said Kerry, Zaledonis and himself were the only men aboard", and the NYT article describes:

Quote:

William L. Schachte Jr., a retired rear admiral who says in the book that he had been on the small skimmer on which Mr. Kerry was injured that night in December 1968. He contends that Mr. Kerry wounded himself while firing a grenade.

But the two other men who acknowledged that they had been with Mr. Kerry, Bill Zaladonis and Mr. Runyon, say they cannot recall a third crew member. "Me and Bill aren't the smartest, but we can count to three," Mr. Runyon said in an interview. And even Dr. Letson said he had not recalled Mr. Schachte until he had a conversation with another veteran earlier this year and received a subsequent phone call from Mr. Schachte himself.

* There's Steve Gardner, who claims that Kerry's first Purple Heart was bogus, but admits he wasn't actually present at the time, as MediaMatters points out:

Quote:

On the August 16 edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, Thurlow cited Gardner to substantiate his claim that Kerry's first Purple Heart "was fabricated and wasn't based on any factuality at all." According to Thurlow, Gardner said "that he [Kerry] received an injury due to a mistake he made when he fired an M-79 close aboard and was hit by his own shrapnel" and that "Kerry applied for a Purple Heart that he did not merit."

On the August 2 broadcast of Savage Nation, Gardner himself claimed that all of the wounds for which Kerry received Purple Hearts "were superficial wounds, and I mean very superficial, scratches. The very first one is the only one that I can actually attest to because I was there when that wound happened." But Gardner was not there when Kerry sustained that wound; as noted above, Gardner went on to admit: "I was not on the boat with him but I -- in the next three days following that, I was with him on the boat going to take our new position up down there on the seaward operations."

* And there's Dr. Letson, who claims to have treated Kerry for his wounds that day and that it was self-inflicted, but whose account appears to be contradicted by the records, as both USA Today and NYTimes have pointed out.

All in all this one seems less clear-cut, with Runyon, Zaledonis and Kerry himself counterweighed by Letson, Gardner and Schachte - but of each of the three latter, it is either not clear whether they were actually there - or clear that they weren't. Same can't be said about the former three, who were all indisputably there.

Quote:

Please show me some evidence that Senator Kerry was in Cambodia during Christmas 1968.

Please show me evidence that he wasn't. Remember, the burden of proof is upon you. The comments made by his campaign advisors are no more relevant to the case than any other accusations, and are hardly conclusive; his aides weren't there, they don't know whether he was in Cambodia or not. The fact is, you don't have any that conclusively proves it one way or the other.

Now, if you want to argue that he wasn't there till Janurary, you are splitting hairs and getting to the point of ridiculousness.

I ask again. Is it your contention that Kerry was NEVER in Cambodia? That U.S. soldiers were not in Cambodia?

And, once again, given the level of scrutiny that you are displaying towards Kerry's record, there should be an overwhelming amount of evidence that Bush completed his duty. There is NOT an even substantial amount of evidence that he did. Can you explain this discrepancy, given your critical and non-partisan eye for the truth?

Cycloptichorn

it was just reported on cnn that john ellis o'neill has apparently contradicted himself.

in a taped interview provided by his publicist, o'neill stated that he had never been in cambodia.

however, a tape recorded during a conversation with richard nixon in 1971, o'neill tells nixon that he did go to cambodia.

nixon then asked him if he went there on a swift boat.

o'neill answered in the affirmative.

nixon and his tape recorder... even though i met him once, i never wanted to kiss him before.

Thank you nimh & kelticwizard for confirming the legitimacy of Quinnipiac College and its polling. I admit my ignorance; I had never heard of that school before. I apologize to any friends/alum of that institution.
I remember quite a bit of the statistics classes I took. You explained it well, nimh.

Re the question you asked me, kelticwizard, here are some very quick thoughts re Kerry in VN. Short answers (as brief as rjb can be), trying to stay faithful to the topic of the thread:
1) I am a dyed-in-the wool liberal Dem;
2) I was graduated from college 6/68 and enlisted in the Army...I would have been drafted;
3) Many of my friends from college and high school avoided the draft. Most of my HS football team ended up with doctors' certificates citing bad knees (=4F) or they managed to find slots in the National Guard. Those positions didn't just go to rich, white guys like Mr Bush. They also went to the sons of influential people in every community in the US: politicians, businesspeople, journalists, union leaders.
Hang on, I'm getting to Kerry. Trust me.
4) So I was in VN from 4/69 - 6/70 with a combat engineer battalion; part of the 101st Airborne Div.
I was the company clerk. Not the most dangerous job compared to the other guys (who, because of para 3 above were disproportionately black, Hispanic or poor whites).

One day I was in a four-man chopper with the pilot, my boss (1st Sgt) and his boss (Sgt Major), watching some work being done on the ground by my friends. They started to take some sniper fire so we flew around for a bit shooting our M-16's into the general vicinity of the source of the activity until the Cobras could come in with big guns. And they were shooting back at us. Have you ever been shot at? It was very surreal.

5) The next day I typed up recommendations for medals for my boss and his boss and submitted them up through the paper channel. Medals in VN were handed out like candy. particularly to career soldiers or others who wanted something special on their resumes.

Did Kerry really deserve all of the medals he got? I doubt it given what I've said above. But he didn't give them to himself; they were all approved by someone higher up and the Swift Boat ad people probably got their share of the candy.

Does it matter? Probably not. As nimh noted, you get a group (veterans) and then a sub-group (VN era) and then a sub-sub-group (Hispanic VN vets)...

Sorry for the long post. Back to our regularly scheduled topic. Thanks for reading this -rjb

I'm voting for Bush. Never mind why. I have a few medals from Viet Nam. I was with an infantry platoon in the Marines and I consider them little more than souveigners or punctuation marks. I know they mean a great deal more to other people both military as well as civilians. I just don't put too much value upon them other than it was thoughtful of people to think enough of me to award them to me. I am thankful for this.

I am currently a volunteer supporting a Republican in his endeavors to become the new Mayor of this city in November. Wouldn't you know, up pops this neo-vet group all laden with heroes against John Kerry and what they have deemed his dubious medals and the action he saw. They want us to know they are the real, full-blown, gung-ho, bonafide medal wearing heroes unlike Kerry. No, they will have you believe that they REALLY rate their medals and as an extra benefit even though this is simply a non-partisan mayoral race they are going to do us a favor by blowing their horns in our action. Nice of them.

I am not about to fill out some stupid form that one of these guys created providing them with a brief SRB of what I did, where I was, what action I saw and what medals I have. It is simply none of their business.

If they are happy to be fodder for this nonsense let them. I wish they wouldn't though. I have some friends that feel more patriotic, evidentally, by challenging somebody elses medals.

This baloney will be over with on November 3rd.

timberlandko wrote:

1). A number of folks currently aligned with Kerry's opposition have stated quite publically their opinions have evolved with the emergence of details previously unknown to them. I find that perfectly unremarkable. I've been known from time to time to shift my own position regarding things about which I discovered I had been ill-informed.

Thats a red herring. At issue here is the conflicting accounts they gave then and now about Kerry's Vietnam record. The bulk of the attacks by the SVFT thus far has consisted of accounts of how, according to them, he behaved less than honorably in action - and they knew, cause they were there. How has their memory yielded new details? The only thing that changed was that Brinkley's Kerry book came out, which put some of them (like Hoffmann) in an extremely bad light and must have newly angered them no end - and that Kerry is now runing for President, of course. What these vets have to tell about what they saw of Kerry at the time shouldnt have changed. If anything, the records newly emerging now all support Kerry's take - the SVFT have been reduced to saying that the records are wrong and may have been manipulated by Kerry.

Interesting ...

Quote:

McCain, who led a seven-year fight to reform the nation's campaign finance laws, also said he's angry with the "corrupt" Federal Election Commission for not enforcing campaign finance laws against "527" groups, which are named for the section of the tax code that applies to them.

The independent, unregulated political action committees have produced ads against both Kerry and Bush this year. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is one such group.

"I never believed the Federal Election Commission - as corrupt as they are - would act in direct contravention to existing law and a U.S. Supreme Court decision that declared the constitutionality of (campaign finance laws)," McCain said.

He specifically criticized FEC Chairman Bradley Smith and Vice chair Ellen Weintraub, calling Smith a "right-wing ideologue" and Weintraub a "political apparatchik" who won't enforce the law.

Ian Stirton, a spokesman for the FEC, declined comment on McCain's remarks.

Notice that the nutjobs making all the absurd allegations against Kerry have judicioulsy avoided this thread.

Brand X wrote:
CNN's Newsnight played the O'Neill-Nixon tape, with text graphic on screen:

O'NEILL: I was in Cambodia, sir. worked along the border on the water.

NIXON: In a swift boat?

O'NEILL: Yes, sir.

They all worked along the border because the river runs along the border.


Just found a longer quote from that interview O'Neill did last weekend on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" ... interesting.

Quote:
O'NEILL: You asked about Cambodia. How do I know he's not in Cambodia? I was on the same river, George. I was there two months after him. Our patrol area ran to Sedek, it was 50 miles from Cambodia. There isn't any watery border. The Mekong River's like the Mississippi. There were gunboats stationed right up there to stop people from coming. And our boats didn't go north of, only slightly north of Sedek. So it was a made up story. He's told it over 50 times, George, that was on the floor of the Senate.

So ... O'Neill, in his own words, "worked along the border on the water", but err, he knows Kerry's been lying because, well, he "was on the same river [..] it was 50 miles from Cambodia [and] There isn't any watery border."

Right.

_________________
Sheep are living lawnmowers.

JustWonders wrote:

I think the reason it's getting so much scrutiny is Kerry's campaigning so much on his military service while not saying much about the real issues at the DNC. If he didn't or doesn't want the scrutiny, he shouldn't have made such a big deal about it. I'm sure I'm not the only one that questioned his reluctance to release all of his records. It would have never occured to me to even want to see them if he'd not made such an issue out of his service.

I hear this a lot and I honestly wonder if you or others who say this watched the convention or have heard any of his speeches where he 'runs' on his war record? From my recollection, the vets didn't come out until the last day -- right before Kerry's speech. He mentioned Vietnam twice in his hour long acceptance speech and one of those times was to show how he had worked with McCain to find out what happened to those still missing in action. If he were running and not talking about Vietnam -- a pivotal point in his life -- those who are attacking him would wonder what he was hiding.

I think the posters point about the 4 months is also kind of silly. He was in the Navy, not the Army or the Marines, so of course he spent most of his two tours on a ship. In fact, he might well have served both tours without firing a shot had he not volunteered for the swift boats.

This has come up a few times. [That Kerry "started it"]

Who put on his fighter pilot paraphernalia and played soldier?

Who keeps talking about strong and tough and war president?

Who keeps trying to portray Kerry as soft and wishy-washy?

I wish I had time to do a nimh job right now -- I don't -- but I don't think it would be too hard to come up with a whole lot of ways that Bush "started it", where an emphasis (but NOT to the exclusion of issues -- issues were very much a part of the Dem convention, and are very much part of the campaign) on Kerry's Vietnam stint served as a rebuttal to the many things Bush had already said and done.

CoastalRat wrote:

Oh, and about not being sure or proved that he lied, even his campaign is admitting that he was "mistaken" about this event that he has maintained was "seared - seared" into his memory. So I think the least you can do is admit he has lied. It may have no bearing on how you view him, but admit the obvious.

Being emphatically mistaken does not make one a liar. Are there not memories that are 'seared' into your brain that might have happened at a different time than the time you remember? My own memory is so flawed that I have vivid memories of incidents where I was not actually present, rather I had been told of it around the time that it happened. Over time, my brain stored these memories away as my own. Anyone who steps back and looks at these two 'lies' can see there is a world of difference between them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/20/politics/campaign/20swift.html?pagewanted=3&hp

Quote:

The group decided to hire a private investigator to investigate Mr. Brinkley's account of the war - to find "some neutral way of actually questioning people involved in these incidents,'' Mr. O'Neill said.

But the investigator's questions did not seem neutral to some.

Patrick Runyon, who served on a mission with Mr. Kerry, said he initially thought the caller was from a pro-Kerry group, and happily gave a statement about the night Mr. Kerry won his first Purple Heart. The investigator said he would send it to him by e-mail for his signature. Mr. Runyon said the edited version was stripped of all references to enemy combat, making it look like just another night in the Mekong Delta.

"It made it sound like I didn't believe we got any returned fire," he said. "He made it sound like it was a normal operation. It was the scariest night of my life."

So here is someone who was there the night Kerry got his first purple heart and says there was enemy fire. Is that enough?