Re: OT: Physicians for a National Health Program

["Robert L Bass" <RobertLBass@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Nathan W. Collier" wrote:
>
> _kerry_ discredited kerry.  the swift boat veterans that happened
> to actually be serving their country at a time when kerry was being
> a traitor before congress to promote his own political aspirations
> only told of their first hand experiences with kerry.

I have no idea how old you are or whether you were even around during
the Vietnam war.  Several friends and one member of my family died
over there.  A lot more came back with ruined lives.  When I was
called up by the draft board and reported for the pre-induction exam,
I was scared stiff (as were almost all the other guys there).  I was
lucky.  A minor medical problem let me off the hook so I didn't have
to go.  Many others weren't so lucky.  They got drafted and they had
no choice but to serve.  Kerry and Bush were exceptions.  Kerry
_volunteered_ for Vietnam.  Bush went AWOL and spent his time
drinking and snorting cocaine.

The following is quoted from snopes.com, one of the more reliable
online debunkers of myth and modern urban legend.  It tells the true
story of Kerry's service in Vietnam.  The story was told by those who
served with Kerry and by his superior officers, all of whom describe
Kerry as a hero:

-- Service Mettle --

Claim:   John Kerry's Vietnam War service medals (a Bronze Star, a
Silver Star and three Purple Hearts) were earned under "fishy"
circumstances.

Status:   False.

Origins:   In Vietnam, Lieutenant John Kerry served aboard 50-foot
aluminum boats known as PCFs (from "patrol craft fast") or "Swift
boats" (supposedly an acronym for "Shallow Water Inshore Fast
Tactical Craft"). Despite the implications contained in the piece
quoted above ("that duty wasn't the worst you could draw"), Swift
boat duty was plenty dangerous: ... two weeks after [Kerry] arrived
in Vietnam, the swift boat mission changed ? and Kerry went from
having one of the safest assignments in the escalating conflict to
one of the most dangerous. Under the newly launched Operation
SEALORD, swift boats were charged with patrolling the narrow
waterways of the Mekong Delta to draw fire and smoke out the enemy.
Cruising inlets and coves and canals, swift boats were especially
vulnerable targets.

Originally designed to ferry oil workers to ocean rigs, swift boats
offered flimsy protection. Because bullets could easily penetrate the
hull, sailors hung flak jackets over the sides. The boat's loud
engine invited ambushes. Speed was its saving grace ? but that wasn't
always an option in narrow, heavily mined canals.

The swift boat crew typically consisted of a college-educated
skipper, such as Kerry, and five blue-collar sailors averaging 19
years old. The most vulnerable sailor sat in the "tub" ? a squat nest
that rose above the pilot house ? and operated a pair of .50-caliber
machine guns. Another gunner was in the rear. Kerry's mission was to
wait until hidden Viet Cong guerrillas started shooting, then order
his men to return fire.  It  was not at all unusual that a Swift boat
crew member might be wounded more than once in a relatively short
period of time, or that injuries meriting the award of a Purple Heart
might not be serious enough to require time off from duty. According
to a Boston Globe overview of John Kerry's Vietnam experience:  Under
[Navy Admiral Elmo] Zumwalt's command, swift boats would aggressively
engage the enemy. Zumwalt, who died in 2000, calculated in his
autobiography that these men under his command had a 75 percent
chance of being killed or wounded during a typical year.

"There were an awful lot of Purple Hearts ? from shrapnel, some of
those might have been M-40 grenades," said George Elliott, Kerry's
commanding officer. "The Purple Hearts were coming down in boxes.
Kerry, he had three Purple Hearts. None of them took him off duty.
Not to belittle it, that was more the rule than the exception."  And
according to Douglas Brinkley's history of John Kerry and the Vietnam
War:  As generally understood, the Purple Heart is given to any U.S.
citizen wounded in wartime service to the nation. Giving out Purple
Hearts increased as the United States started sending Swifts up
rivers. Sailors ? no longer safe on aircraft carriers or battleships
in the Gulf of Tonkin ? were starting to bleed, a lot.  John Kerry
was wounded in his first significant combat action, when he
volunteered for a special mission on 2 December 1968:  "It was a
half-assed action that hardly qualfied as combat, but it was my
first, and that made it very exciting," [Kerry said]. "Three of us,
two enlisted men and myself, had stayed up all night in a Boston
Whaler [a foam-filled-fiberglass boat] patrolling the shore off a
Viet Cong-infested peninsula north of Cam Ranh . . . Most of the
night had been spent being scared shitless by fisherman whom we would
suddenly creep up on in the darkness. Once, one of the sailors was so
startled by two men who surprised us as we came around a corner ten
yards from the shore that he actually pulled the trigger on his
machine gun. Fortunately for the two men, he had forgotten to switch
off the safety . . ."

As it turned out, the two men really were just a pair of innocent
fisherman who didn't know where one zone began and the other ended.
Their papers were perfectly in order, if their night's fishing over.
The fear was that they were VC. Allowing them to continue might have
compromised the mission. For the next four hours Kerry's Boston
Whaler, using paddles, brought boatloads of fisherman they found in
sampans, all operating in a curfew zone, back to the Swift. It was
tiring work. "We deposited them with the Swift boat that remained out
in the deep water to give us cover," Kerry continued. "Then, very
early in the morning, around 2:00 or 3:00, while it was still dark,
we proceeded up the tiny inlet between the island and the peninsula
to the point designated as our objective. 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."

With its motor turned off, Kerry paddled the Boston Whaler out of the
inlet into the beginning of the bay. Simultaneously the Vietnamese
pulled their sampans up onto the beach and began to unload something;
he couldn't tell what, so he decided to illuminate the proceedings
with a flare. 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," he went on.
"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.

"We stayed quiet and low because we did not want to illuminate
ourselves at that point," Kerry explained. "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."
Then their cover boat warned of a possible VC ambush in the small
channel they had to exit through, and Kerry and company departed the
area.
The "stinging piece of heat" Kerry felt in his arm had been caused by
a piece of shrapnel, a wound for which he was awarded a Purple Heart.
The injury was not serious ? Brinkley notes that Kerry went on a
regular Swift boat patrol the next day with a bandage on his arm, and
the Boston Globe quoted William Schachte, who oversaw the mission and
went on to become a rear admiral, as recalling that "It was not a
very serious wound at all."

Kerry earned his second Purple Heart while returning from a PCF
mission up the Bo De River on 20 February 1969:
One of the mission's support helicopters had been hit by small-arms
fire during the trip up the Bo De and the rest had returned with it
to their base to refuel and get the damage inspected. While there the
pilots found that they wouldn't be able to return to the Swifts for
several more hours. "We therefore had a choice: to wait for what was
not a confirmed return by the helos [and] give any snipers more time
to set up an ambush for our exit or we could take a chance and exit
immediately without any cover," Kerry recorded in his notebook. "We
chose the latter."

Just as they moved out onto the Cua Lon, at a junction known for
unfriendliness in the past, kaboom! PCF-94 had taken a
rocket-propelled grenade round off the port side, fired at them from
the far left bank. Kerry felt a piece of hot shrapnel bore into his
left leg. With blood running down the deck, the Swift managed to make
an otherwise uneventful exit into the Gulf of Thailand, where they
rendezvoused with a Coast Guard cutter. The injury Kerry suffered in
that action earned him his second Purple Heart.  Brinkley noted that,
as in the previous case, "Kerry's wound was not serious enough to
require time off from duty."

Kerry earned his Silver Star on 28 February 1969, when he beached his
craft and jumped off it with an M-16 rifle in hand to chase and shoot
a guerrilla who was running into position to launch a B-40 rocket at
Kerry's boat. Contrary to the account quoted above, Kerry did not
shoot a "Charlie" who had "fired at the boat and missed," whose
"rocket launcher was empty," and who was "already dead or dying"
after being "knocked down with a .50 caliber round." Kerry's boat had
been hit by a rocket fired by someone else ? the guerrilla in
question was still armed with a live B-40 and had only been clipped
in the leg; when the guerrilla got up to run, Kerry assumed he was
getting into position to launch a rocket and shot him:  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.

An enemy was just feet away, holding a weapon with enough firepower
to blow up the boat. Kerry's forward gunner, [Tommy] Belodeau, shot
and clipped the Viet Cong in the leg. Then Belodeau's gun jammed,
according to other crewmates (Belodeau died in 1997). [Michael]
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."
Another member of the crew confirmed Kerry's account for the Boston
Globe and expressed no doubt that Kerry's action had saved both the
boat and its crew:  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."

Although Kerry's superiors were somewhat concerned about the issue of
his leaving his boat unattended, they nonetheless found his actions
courageous and worthy of commendation:  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."

Kerry was injured yet again on 13 March 1969, in an action for which
he was awarded both a Bronze Star and his third Purple Heart.
According to Kerry's Bronze Star citation (signed by Admiral Zumwalt
himself):

Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry was serving as an Officer-in-Charge
of Inshore Patrol Craft 94, one of five boats conducting a Sealords
operation in the Bay Hap River. While exiting the river, a mine
detonated under another Inshore Patrol Craft and almost
simultaneously, another mine detonated wounding Lieutenant (junior
grade) Kerry in the right arm. In addition, all units began receiving
small arms and automatic weapons fire from the river banks. When
Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry discovered he had a man overboard, he
returned upriver to assist. The man in the water was receiving sniper
fire from both banks. Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry directed his
gunners to provide suppressing fire, while from an exposed position
on the bow, his arm bleeding and in pain and with disregard for his
personal safety, he pulled the man aboard. Lieutenant (junior grade)
Kerry then directed his boat to return to and assist the other
damaged boat to safety. Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry's calmness,
professionalism and great personal courage under fire were in keeping
with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.

According to the Boston Globe, this was the only one of Kerry's three
Purple Heart injuries that caused him to miss any days of service:

Kerry had been wounded three times and received three Purple Hearts.
Asked about the severity of the wounds, Kerry said that one of them
cost him about two days of service, and that the other two did not
interrupt his duty. "Walking wounded," as Kerry put it. A shrapnel
wound in his left arm gave Kerry pain for years. Kerry declined a
request from the Globe to sign a waiver authorizing the release of
military documents that are covered under the Privacy Act and that
might shed more light on the extent of the treatment Kerry needed as
a result of the wounds.

Back in 1969, Navy regulations specified that any soldier wounded in
combat three times be automatically reassigned away from a combat
zone to an assignment of his choosing (unless the thrice-wounded
soldier specifically requested to stay). Four days after Kerry took
his third hit of shrapnel, Commodore Charles F. Horne, an
administrative official and commander of the coastal squadron in
which Kerry served, forwarded a request on Kerry's behalf to the Navy
Bureau of Personnel asking that Kerry be reassigned to "duty as a
personal aide in Boston, New York, or Washington, D.C." Soon
afterwards Kerry was transferred to Cam Ranh Bay to await further
orders, and within a month he had been reassigned as a personal aide
and flag lieutenant to Rear Admiral Walter F. Schlech, Jr. with the
Military Sea Transportation Service based in Brooklyn, New York.

Kerry served with Admiral Schlech until the end of 1969, when he
requested an early discharge from the Navy in order to run for a
Massachusetts congressional seat. Admiral Schlech approved the
request, and on 3 January 1970 Kerry received an honorable discharge,
six months early.

Last updated:   2 September 2007

The URL for this page is
http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/service.asp

Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2007
by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson
This material may not be reproduced without permission.

Sources:
Brinkley, Douglas.   Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War.
New York: HarperCollins, 2004.   ISBN 0-06-056523-3.
Klein, Joe.   "The Long War of John Kerry."
The New Yorker.   2 December 2002.
Kranish, Michael.   "John F. Kerry: Candidate in the Making ? Part 2:
Heroism, and Growing Concern About War."
The Boston Globe.   16 June 2003.

--

Regards,
Robert L Bass

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