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Today's
Stories
July 29, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
Hail,
the Conquering War Criminal: What Kerry Really Did in Vietnam
Frank Bardacke
What
Michael Moore Left Out of F9/11
Tom Barry
Shallow and Formulaic: Kerry's Latin America Plan
Ron Jacobs
Kerry
and Lennon: Hawking the CounterCulture
Robert Fisk
The Unreported War
Lichtman /
Kellis-Borok
What Kerry Must Do to Win (But Probably Won't)
William S. Lind
The 9/11 Commission Report: Cashing in on Failure
Website of
the Day
Jabbing JibJab: Copyright Madness
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
July 28, 2004
Robert Fisk
The
Occupation at 114 Degrees: Baghdad is Swamped in the Smell of
the Dead
Kevin Mink
Kerry's Misperception of Palestine
Ray McGovern
Israel and the Iraq War: How the 9/11 Report Soft-Pedals Root
Causes
United for
Peace & Justice
An
Open Letter to John Kerry: Winter Soldiers and Summer Patriots
Mike Ferner
Vets Demand End to Occupation: "Pull the Troops or Face
Impeachment Mvt."
Imraan Siddiqi
Turning Tricks with Ann Coulter
Alexander Cockburn
Candidate
Kerry
Website of
the Day
Iraq Vets Against the War
July 27, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Why
the Democrats Deserve Nader
Dave Lindorff
Back to the 19th Century: Globalization's Coming!
Mike Whitney
Control Room: Inside Al Jazeera
Ali, Anderson, Bello, et al.
If We Were Venezuelan, We'd Vote for Chavez
Stefan Wray
Texas Plan to Grab Los Alamos Takes Hold, as DOE Shuts Down Labs
Louis Proyect
Reflections on Nicaragua: First Came the Contra Butchers, Then
the Sweatshops
Rick Giombetti
Faith in Freedom: the Challenge of Thomas Szasz
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
The
9/11 Report and Its Weak-Kneed Consensus: Dogding Israel/Palestine;
Blinkered on Causes of Terrorism
July 26, 2004
Todd Chretien
Green
Resistance: a Reply to Normon Solomon & Medea Benjamin
Robert Fisk
Terror
by Video
Richard Forno
Security
Theater in Boston: Security Expert Harrassed by DHS for Exposing
Flaws at the Fleet Center
Mitchel Cohen
Report from a Boston Demo: Arresting the Curious
Richard Moreno
Rockers
for Justice: an Interview with Tom Morello and Serj Tankian
Alexander Cockburn
Boston
Awaits a Dead Party
July
24 / 25, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
The Democrats and Their Conventions:
Part One
Dennis
Hans
Those 16 Words Still Smell, Mr. Bush
Patrick
Cockburn
The Struggle for Iraq is Only Beginning
Josh
Frank
The War Path of Unity: Dems Reject
the Peace Movement
Justin
E.H. Smith
Christianity and the Left: the Latin
American Experience
Tariq
Ali
What's at Stake in Venezuela
Fred
Gardner
The Politics of Pot: Year of the
Antagonist
Mark
Scaramella
There's Dope and There's Dope
Ron
Jacobs
The Weather Underground's Prairie
Fire Statement...35 Years On
July
23, 2004
Lee
Sustar
Revolution in Nicaragua: 25 Years
On
Dave
Lindorff
Battle for NYC: Bush 1, Protesters
0
Saul
Landau
Zaniest President in US History: Bush
Beats Reagan
Mike
Whitney
The 9/11 Whitewash: Blaming No
One
Mickey
Z
Get On the Bus: 150 Years After Elizabeth
Jennings
Gary
Leupp
The 9/11 Commission and the Looming
War on Iran
July
22, 2004
M.
Junaid Alam
Ten Ways to Build a Better Democrat
Brian
McKinlay
Rusted On Down Under: Howard, Bush and Sharon
Jason
Leopold
Cheney Lobbied for Easing of Sanctions on Terrorist Regimes While
CEO of Halliburton
Chris
Floyd
Mob Rule: Ripping the Lid Off of America's Pious Myths
Uri
Avnery
Chirac v. Sharon
July
21, 2004
Paula
J. Caplan
The Emotional Casualities of War:
Psychologists Can't Heal All the Damage
Joshua
Frank
Nader Sleeping with the Enemy? Let's
be Fair
Ron
Jacobs
American Exceptionalism
Reza
Ghorashi
The Elections, Iran and al-Qaeda
Amy
Martin
Will Congress Rearm the Guatemalan Generals?
John
Ross
Bush May Lose, But His Wars Will Go
On and On
July
20, 2004
Stan
Cox
The Bush / Kerry War Ticket
Chris
Randolph
An Open Letter to Dr. Ehrenreich: It's Over, Barb!
Forrest
Hylton
The Ghosts of Gonismo: "Popular
Patricipation" and Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Mark
Scaramella
It's Official! Mendocino County is Crazier and Fatter Than the
Rest of California
Sam
Bahour
The World is Knocking on Israel's Door
George
Reiter
A Defense of David Cobb
John
Ross
Burying Iraq, Burying Bush
John
L. Hess
Girlie Stuff: Media Tolerance of Arnold & Co.
Website
of the Day
This Land is Your Land
July
19, 2004
Uri
Avnery
Marie and the Ghosts: the Hoax of
Paris
Col.
Dan Smith
What Has Been Accomplished?
Mike
Whitney
Allawi: Our Puppet with a Pistol
Karyn
Strickler
Just Marriage, Not Gay Marriage
Robert
Fisk
The Crisis of Information in Baghdad
David
Swanson
Media Blackout of US Labor Opposition
to Iraq War
Jennifer
van Bergen
The Death of the Great Writ of Liberty
July
17 / 18, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations
is Must Reading
Ghada
Karmi
Vanishing the Palestinians
Lenni
Brenner
When Cattle Unite, Lions Go Hungry: Notes for Ralph Nader
Ben
Tripp
Man on a Bridge: a Ghost Story
Brandy
Baker
What Would Elizabeth Cady Stanton Make of John Kerry?
M.
Shahid Alam
Israel Builds Another Wall
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Nuclear Hypocrisy: Israel, Iran and the IAEA
Patrick
Bond
The George Bush of Africa
Fred
Gardner
Politics of Marijuana: Cannabiniod Therapuetics
William
Blum
Bush and Thucydides
Ben
Terrall
Carter and the Indonesia Elections: "I Don't See Anything
Wrong with a General Running the Country"
Tom
Barry
John Lehman on the War Path
David
Vest
Dylan Without the Music
Phyllis
Pollack
Return to Sin City: Keith Richards Does Gram Parsons
Ron
Jacobs
Smearing Muhammad Ali: Bob Feller Strikes Out
Joshua
Frank
Kerry to Edwards: "Let's Lose!"
David
Nally
A Call for Sudan: Our Georgraphical Blindspot
Toni
Solo
Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Landau,
Hassan, Prashad & Lindorff
Three Reviews of Moore's F911
Poets's
Basement
Ford, Smith and Albert
July
16, 2004
Dave
Zirin
Adonal Foyle: Master of the Lefty Lay-Up
Shervan
Sardar
Dershowitz, the ICJ and Jim Crow Laws
Ron
Jacobs
The Lil' Engine That Couldn't: Kucinich Surrenders on Anti-War
Plank
Robert
Fisk
Iraq, According to Edgar Allen Poe:
Coffin Bombs in Baghdad
Greg
Moses
The Forts of Iraq
Mickey
Z.
Ad Infinitum?: Presidential Campaigns in the Age of TV
Dan
Bacher
A Landmark Win for Salmon and the Tribes
Dave
Lindorff
The Mumia Case: Support from NAACP,
But a Movement in Shambles
Paul
McGeough
Did Allawi Shoot Inmates in Cold Blood?
Website
of the Day
10 Reasons to Fire Bush (and 9 Reasons Kerry Won't Be Any Better)
July
15, 2004
Heather
Williams
McMissing
the Point: Supersize Me Crashes on Its Message
Werther
Iraq: Follow the Money
Tom
Crumpacker
The Birds of Guantanamo
Brian
Cloughley
What Does the Bush Regime Object To?
Bill
Christison
Reorganize the CIA? Of Course,
But...
July
14, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Chronicle of a Nomination Foretold:
the Green Deceivers
Neve
Gordon
Of Socrates and the Apartheid Wall
Diane
Christian
The Priesthood of Death
Stefan
Wray
Who Benefits from Missing Data at Los Alamos Nuclear Lab?
Josh
Frank
The Nader / Dean Debate
Conn
Hallinan
Divide and Conquer as Imperial Rules
Elizabeth
Weill-Greenberg
Bring My Brother Home!: Class, War
and Education
Website
of the Day
Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of US Empire
July
13, 2004
Ray
McGovern
The CIA and Iraq: an Intelligence
Debacle...and Worse
Mark
Donham
The Sierra Club's Inexplicable Treatment of Cynthia McKinney
Ben
Tripp
Politus Interruptis: With Friends Like
These, Who Needs Electorates?
Mark
Gaffney
Slipping Towards Armageddon: Israel
in Iraq
Dave
Lindorff
Osama Wins! Election Postponed!
Chris
White
Double Think: the Bedrock of Marine
Indoctrination
July
10 / 12, 2004
Kathleen
Christison
The Problem with Neutrality Between
Palestinians and Israel
Janine
Pommy Vega
Trail of the Comet: a Gathering of the World's Poets Against
War
Sherry
Wolf
From Maverick to Party Attack Dog: Howard Dean Gay-Bashes Nader
Saul
Landau and Farrah Hassen
A Transfer of Power, Sort Of
Michael
Donnelly
How to Steal an Election: the Green Version, 2004
Stanton
/ Madsen
Iraq Survey Group: Rumsfeld's al-Qaeda?
Richard
Lichtman
The End of Innocence: Reflections on American Pathology
Gila
Svirsky
Thank You, Your Honors: a Legal Blow to the Wall
Kurt
Nimmo
Clinton's Life
Toni
Solo
Empire-Speak: What Roger Noriega Really Means
Ron
Jacobs
The Black Panthers and the Rest
Camelo
Ruiz Marrero
Gene Warfare in Oaxaca: Genetic Mutation of Mexican Maize
Omar
Barghouti
Wither the Empire: Rise of a Global Resistance
Poets'
Basement
Curtis and Albert
July
9, 2004
Dave
Zirin
Carlos Delgado on Deck: Blue Jays Slugger
Stands Up Against War
Justin
Delacour
Wishing Kerry Would Shut Up About
Latin America
Robert
Fisk
Iraq in Reverse: Martial Laws Fuel Insurgency
Boris
Kagarlitsky
Two Congresses and a Funeral
William
S. Lind
The October Surprises
Sibel
Edmonds
Our Broken System: John Ashcroft's War on Truth
Ron
Jacobs
Reading Tea Leaves: What Vietnam Tells Us About Iraq's Future
Gary
Leupp
The Lie That Will Not Die: Cheney and
the Iraq/al-Qaeda Link
July
8, 2004
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The Inexplicable John McCain
Toufic
Haddad
Protesting Israel's Apartheid Wall:
a Letter from the Hunger Strikers' Tent
Dave
Lindorff
Liberation as Martial Law
Joshua
Frank
The Fall: How Beltway Dems Sank Howard
Dean
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush & Cheney Play the Hitler Card
James
Petras
The Truth About Jimmy Carter
July
7, 2004
John
Chuckman
Kerry's BBQ: a Deafening Silence
of Meaning
Virginia
Tilley
A Line in the Sand: Azmi Bishara's
Hunger Strike
Susan
Martinez
A Letter to Bill Cosby
Mickey
Z
Elie Wiesel's Strange Parade
Michael
Donnelly
Our Own Private Wilderness: Trusting the Land in the Inland Empire
Sean
Donahue
Boston Social Forum: the Dems aren't the Only Show in Beantown
Diane
Christian
Sovereignty and Freedom in Iraq
July
6, 2004
Lisa
Viscidi
Fleeing Guatemala: Central Americans
Risk Lives to Reach El Norte
Marc
Norton
The Felonious Five Ride Again: the
Supreme Court and Enemy Combatants
James
Brooks
Chemical Warfare on the West Bank?
Ray
McGovern
Porter Goss as CIA Director?
William
Cook
Legacy of Deceit: If Dante Knew of Bush and the Neo-Cons...
July
5, 2004
Forrest
Hylton
US Imperialism in Latin America: Sept.
11, July 4 and Systematic Torture
Chris
White
A Former Marine Sgt. on the Meaning
of Independence Day
Joe
Bageant
Cranky Reflections on the 4th of July
Robert
Jensen
Stupid White Movie: What Michael Moore
Misses About the Empire
Kathy
Kelly
"Two Days an' a Wake-Up"
July
3 / 4, 2004
Elaine
Cassel
Bush's Police State and Independence
Day
Stan
Goff
ABC of Opportunism: "Progressive"
Latin American Leaders Support the Coup in Haiti
Snehal
Shingavi
"We Want Real Justice for Bhopal": Two Survivors Speak
Out
Bruce
Anderson
The Cheney-Leahy Metaphor and the Greens
Sharon
Smith
Twilight of the Greens: the Chokehold of "Anybody But Bush"
Josh
Frank
Ralph Nader's Revolt: an Interview with Greg Bates
Robert
Fisk
Pentagon Tried to Censor Saddam's Hearing
Joe
Bageant
Sons of a Laboring God: Leftnecks Unite!
Brian
Cloughley
Fortress Bush and the One Law Doctrine
Justin
Delacour
The Anti-Chavez Echo Chamber: Venezuela's Media Tycoons
William
S. Lind
Saudi Spillover
Linda
S. Heard
A Joke Called "Justice"
Greg
Moses
"It's Illegal, But It's Our Right": Korean Labor Won't
Back Down
Ron
Jacobs
"Ain't You Proud to be White on Independence Day?"
Toni
Solo
Weary of Indigenous Resistances? Just Pretend They're Not There
Dan
Nagengast
Chicken Manure as Cattle Food: Safe, But Do We Want to Eat It?
Stew
Albert
Brando, a Personal Recollection
Dave
Zirin
From the Black Panthers to Sacheen Littlefeather: a Eulogy for
Our Brando
Patrick
W. Gavin
The Progressive Case for Dodgeball
Steven
Rosenthal / Junaid Ahmad
The Problem is Bigger Than the Bushes: a Review of F911
Poets'
Basement
Kearney, Ford and Davies
Website
of the Day
Global Peace Solution
July
2, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Suicide Right on the Stage: the Demise
of the Green Party
Douglas
Valentine
Fahrenheit 911: Mocking the Moral Crisis of Capitalism
Gary
Leupp
"Just Because I Could": On Obscenities and Opportunities
Lee
Ballinger
Illegal People: Kerry Opposes Immigrant Rights
Robert
Fisk
Saddam in the Dock: Confused? Hardly
CounterPunch
Wire
"What Law Formed This Court?": a Transcript of Saddam's
Arraignment
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush's Drug Card Lottery: the Price Ain't Right
Saul
Landau
Buzz Words and Venezuela
July 1, 2004
Katherine
van Wormer
Bush's Damaged Mind: the Madness in
His Method
Joe
Bageant
Is Our President a Whackjob? Does It Matter?
William
James Martin
The Dogma of Richard Perle
Dave
Lindorff
Bush's Evacuation Moment
Robert
Fisk
Bread and Circus Trials in Iraq
Alan
Maass
Green Party in Reverse
Website
of the Day
Michael Moore and Israel: Blind or a Coward?
June
30, 2004
Kurt Nimmo
Nicholson
Baker's Checkpoint: a New Kind of Anger About Bush
Tariq
Ali
Getting Away with Murder in Iraq
Jennifer
Van Bergen
Bush and the Detainees
Douglas
Valentine
Apotheosis of the Psychopaths: Instead of Fahrenheit 9/11, Rescreen
The Quiet American
David
Price
Fahrenheit 9/11 Through the McCain-Feingold Looking Glass
Roger
Normand
America's Criminal Occupation of Iraq
Stan
Cox
Sanitized for Your Protection: Ashcroft's
War on Art
Henry
David Thoreau
On the Futility of Bush v. Kerry: All Voting is a Kind of Gaming
Ben
Tripp
Who Dast Call Him Liar: a Rebuttal to Nicholas Kristof
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
July
29, 2004
Hail,
the Conquering War Criminal Comes!
What
Kerry Really Did in Vietnam
By
ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
In his senior year at Yale in 1966 John
Kerry enlisted in the US Navy, with his actual induction scheduled
for the summer, after his graduation. Already notorious among
his contemporaries for his political ambition, he'd maneuvered
himself into the top slot at the Yale political union, while
also winning admission to Skull and Bones.
While Bush, two years behind
Kerry, was seeking commercial opportunity at Yale by selling
ounce bags of cocaine, (so one contemporary has recalled) Kerry
was keeping a vigilant eye on the political temperature and duly
noted a contradiction between his personal commitment to go to
war and the growing antiwar sentiment among the masses, some
of whom he hoped would vote for him at a not too distant time.
It was a season for important
decisions and Kerry pondered his options amid the delights of
a Skull and Bones retreat on an island in the St Lawrence river.
He duly decided to junk his speech on the theme of "life
after graduation" and opted for a fiery denunciation of
the war and of an LBJ. The speech was well received by the students
and some professors. Most parents were aghast, though not Kerry's
own mother and father.
Unlike Bill Clinton and George
Bush, Kerry duly presented himself for military service. After
a year's training he was assigned to the USS Gridley, deployed
to the Pacific, probably carrying nuclear missiles. Beset by
boredom, Kerry received the news that once of his best friends,
Dickie Pershing, grandson of "Black Jack" Pershing
had been killed in Vietnam. Kerry seethed with rage and yearned,
as he put it years later to his biographer Douglas Brinkley,
for vengeance. (Brinkley's recently published and highly admiring
bio, A Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, offers many
telling vignettes to an assiduous reader. It's based almost entirely
on Kerry's diaries and letters of the time.)
Kerry engineered reassignment
to the Swift boat patrol. In Vietnam the Tet offensive had prompted
a terrible series of search and destroy missions by the US, plus
the assassination program known as Phoenix. As part of the US
Navy's slice of the action, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt and his sidekick
Captain Roy "Latch" Hoffman had devised "Operation
Sea Lords", in which the Swift boats would patrol the canals
and secondary streams of the Mekong Delta, with particular emphasis
on the areas near the Cambodian border. The basic plan, explicitly
acknowledged by many Swift boat veterans, was to terrorize the
peasants into turning against the National Liberation Front,
aka Viet Cong. The entire area, except for certain designated
"friendly villages", was a free fire zone, meaning
the Americans could shoot at will and count anyone they killed
as VC.
Arriving in Vietnam on November
17, 1968, Kerry chafed at patrols around Cam Ranh bay and pushed
successfully for assignment to the forward, killing patrols.
He was no Al Gore, peaceably smoking dope and shooting hoops
on his Army base in Vietnam and writing home fierce moral critiques
of the war. "I was more opposed to the war than ever",
Kerry told Brinkley in 2003, "yet more compelled by patriotism
to fight it. I guess until you're in it, you still want to try
it."
Day after day, night after
night, the Swift boats plied the waters, harassing and often
killing villagers, fishermen and farmers. In this program, aimed
at intimidating the peasants into submission, Kerry was notoriously
zealous. One of his fellow lieutenants, James R. Wasser, described
him admiringly in these words: "Kerry was an extremely aggressive
officer and so was I. I liked that he took the fight to the enemy,
that he was tough and gutsy--not afraid to spill blood for his
country."
On December 2, Kerry went on
his first patrol up one of the canals. It was near midnight when
the crew caught sight of a sampan. Rules of engagement required
no challenge, no effort to see who was on board the sampan. Kerry
sent up a flare, signal for his crew to start blazing away with
the boat's two machineguns and M16 rifles. Kerry described the
fishermen "running away like gazelles".
Kerry sustained a very minor
wound to his arm, probably caused by debris from his own boat's
salvoes. The scratch earned him his first Purple Heart, a medal
awarded for those wounded in combat. Actually there's no evidence
that anyone had fired back, or that Kerry had been in combat,
as becomes obvious when we read an entry from his diary about
a subsequent excursion, written on December 11, 1968, nine days
after the incident that got Kerry his medal. "A cocky air
of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel,
because we hadn't been shot at yet, and Americans at war who
haven't been shot at are allowed to be cocky."
He got two more Purple Hearts,
both for relatively minor wounds. Indeed Kerry never missed a
day of duty for any of the medal-earning wounds.
Craving more action, Kerry
got himself deployed to An Thoi, at Vietnam's southern tip, one
of the centers for the lethal Phoenix sweeps and the location
of a infamous interrogation camp which held as many as 30,000
prisoners.
Kerry's first mission as part
of the Phoenix program was to ferry a Provincial Reconnaissance
Unit of South Vietnamese soldiers, which would have been led
by either a Green Beret or CIA officer. After off-loading the
unit Kerry hid his Swift boat in a mangrove backwater. Two hours
later a red flare told them that the PRU wanted an emergency
"extraction". Kerry's boat picked up the PRU team,
plus two prisoners. The leader of the PRU team told Kerry that
while
they were kidnapping the two villagers (one of them a young woman)
from their hut, they'd seen four people in a sampan and promptly
killed them. The two prisoners were "body-snatched"
as part of a regular schedule of such seizures in the victims
would be taken to An Thoi for interrogation and torture.
Kerry's term to Brinkley for
such outings--and there were many in his brief--is "accidental
atrocities".
On daylight missions the Swift
boats were accompanied by Cobra Attack helicopters that would
strafe the river banks and the skeletal forest ravaged by napalm
and Agent Orange. "Helos upset the VC [sic, meaning anyone
on the ground] more than anything else that we had to offer",
Kerry tells Brinkley, "and any chance we had to have them
with us was more than welcome."
An example of these Cobras
in action. It's daylight, so the population is not under curfew.
Kerry's boat is working its way up a canal, with a Cobra above
it. They encounter a sampan with several people in it. The helicopter
hovers right above the sampan, then empties its machineguns into
it, killing everyone and sinking the sampan. Kerry, in his war
diary, doesn't lament the deaths but does deplore the senselessness
of the Cobra's crew in using all of its ammunition, since the
chopper pilot "requested permission to leave in order to
rearm, an operation that left us uncovered for more than 45 minutes
in an area where cover was essential".
Christmas Eve, 1968, finds
Kerry leading a patrol up a canal along the Cambodian border.
The Christmas ceasefire has just come into effect. So what the
boat was doing there is a question in and of itself. They spot
two sampans and chase them to a small fishing village. The boat
takes some sniper fire, (or at least Kerry says it did). Kerry
orders his machine-gunner, James Wasser, to open up a barrage.
At last a note of contrition, but not from Kerry. Wasser describes
to Brinkley how he saw that he'd killed an old man leading a
water buffalo. "I'm haunted by that old man's face. He was
just doing his daily farming, hurting nobody. He got hit in the
chest with an M-60 machinegun round. It may have been Christmas
Eve, but I was real somber after that... to see the old man blown
away sticks with you." It turned out that Kerry's boat had
shot up one of the few "friendly" villages, with a
garrison of South Vietnamese ARV soldiers, two of whom were wounded.
Contrast Wasser's sad reflections
with Kerry's self-righteous account in his diary of such salvoes,
often aimed into Cambodian territory. "On occasion we had
shot towards the border when provoked by sniper or ambush, but
without fail this led to a formal reprimand by the Cambodian
government and accusations of civilian slaughters and random
killings by American 'aggressors'. I have no doubt that on occasion
some innocents were hit by bullets that were aimed in self-defense
at the enemy, but of all the cases in Vietnam that could be labeled
massacres, this was certainly the most spurious."
It's very striking how we never
find, in any of Kerry's diaries or letters, the slightest expression
of contrition or remorse--and Brinkley would surely have cited
them had Kerry ever written such words. Nor did Kerry, in his
later career as a self-promoting star of the antiwar movement,
ever go beyond generalized verbiage about accidents of war, even
as many vets were baring their souls about the horrors they had
perpetrated.
It's not that he couldn't have
summoned up for his audiences back then some awful episodes.
For example, a few weeks after the incident on the Cambodian
border Kerry's boat was heading up the Cua Lon river toward Square
bay, when one of the crew yelled "sampan off port bow".
Kerry ordered the machineguns to fire on the fishing boat. The
sampan stopped and Kerry and his crew boarded it. They found
a woman holding an infant, and near her the body of her young
child riddled with machine gun bullets, lying face down among
bags of rice. Kerry tells Brinkley he refused to look at the
dead child, saying, "the face would stay with me for the
rest of my life and it was better not to know whether it was
a smile or grimace or whether it was a girl or boy". Kerry's
preferred mode is the usual one. "Our orders", he tells
Brinkley a few pages later, "were to destroy all the hooches
and sampans we could find."
As part of Operation Sea Lords
Kerry would ferry Nung tribesmen on assassination missions. The
Nung were paid by the kill, and Kerry contrasts them favorably
to the South Vietnamese PF guardsmen, derisively terming the
latter "Cream Puffs". On one occasion, Kerry tells
Brinkley, he ferried Nung to a village where they seized an old
man and forced him to act as a human mine detector, walking ahead
of them along the trail. There were no mines and the Nung encountered
no enemy. But for the old man it was a one way trip. The Nung
slit his throat, disembowelled him and left a warning note on
his body.
When Kerry was awarded his
Silver Star he had it pinned on by Admiral Elmo Zumwalt and at
the ceremony had the opportunity to meet Commander Adrian Lonsdale,
the operational commander of Seas Lords. Kerry seized the chance
to criticize the conduct of the war: "It's not that the
men are afraid or chicken to go into the rivers", he says
he told Lonsdale. "It's not that they're not willing to
risk their lives, or that they don't agree with the principle
of what's being done over here. It's just that they want to have
a fair chance to do something that brings results and what they're
doing now isn't bringing them anything. If we were to have some
support, something that would guarantee that we were gaining
something, but for a country with all the power that we have,
we're making men fight in a fashion that defies reason.... What
we need, Sir, are some troops to sweep through the areas and
secure them after we leave; otherwise we're just going to be
shot to hell after we go through, and there'll be nothing gained."
Yes, this is the same Kerry
who today is calling for 40,000 more US troops to deployed to
Iraq.
How He Won
His Silver And Bronze Stars
The incident that won US Navy
lieutenant John Kerry his Silver Star, thus lofting him to the
useful status of "war hero", occurred on February 28,
1969. His Swift boat was ferrying US "explosives experts"
and some South Vietnamese soldiers up the Dong Cung river. After
dropping them off, Kerry's boat came under small arms fire. Kerry
turned the boat toward the source of the shots, beached the boat
and opened up at the forest with the boat's .50 and .60 caliber
machine guns.
By beaching the boat Kerry
was disobeying standard orders forbidding this on the grounds
that it made the craft and its crew a sitting duck. Kerry's motive?
As crew member Michael "Duke" Medeiros explained it
to Kerry's biographer, Douglas Brinkley, it was a matter of verifying
kills. "We never knew whether we killed any VC or not. When
fired upon, he [Kerry] wanted to beach the boat and go get the
enemy."
The boat's machine-guns had
in fact killed a Vietnamese, described as "a VC guerilla",
and they took evidence [undescribed] from the body.
The boat continued downstream
and was fired on once more, by a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
Here's where accounts of the event diverge markedly, depending
on the interests of the various narrators. The citation for Kerry's
Silver Star describes the event this way: "With utter disregard
for his own safety and the enemy rockets, he again ordered a
charge on the enemy, beached his boat only ten feet from the
VC rocket position, and personally led a landing party ashore
in pursuit of the enemy. Upon sweeping the area an immediate
search uncovered an enemy rest and supply area which was destroyed.
The extraordinary daring and personal courage of Lieutenant (junior
grade) KERRY in attacking the n numerically superior force in
the face of intense fire were responsible for the highly successful
mission."
This citation, issued by Admiral
Elmo Zumwalt, was based on the incident report, written by John
Kerry. Missing from the Zumwalt version was a dramatic confrontation
described by Kerry 27 years later in 1996, in the heat of a nasty
relection fight against Republican William Weld, when Kerry was
seeking a third senate term. Kerry imparted to Jonathan Carroll,
writing for the New Yorker, a story going as follows: he had
faced down a Viet Cong standing a few feet from him with a B-40
rocket launcher; "It was either going to be him or it was
going to be us", Kerry told Carroll. "It was that simple.
I don't know why it wasn't us--I mean, to this day. He had a
rocket pointed right at our boat. He stood up out of that hole,
and none of us saw him until he was standing in front of us,
aiming a rocket right at us, and, for whatever reason, he didn't
pull the trigger--he turned and ran. He was shocked to see our
boat right in front him. If he'd pulled the trigger, we'd all
be dead. I just won't talk about all of it. I don't and I can't.
The things that probably really turn me I've never told anybody.
Nobody would understand."
(He may not have wanted to
talk but he certainly liked to screen. The first time Kerry took
Hollywood star Dana Delany to his home in the Eighties she says
his big move was showing her video clips taken of him in the
Navy when he was in Vietnam. She never went out with him again.
(As he prepared to make his grand entry to the Democratic convention
in Boston, stories circulqatyed that Kerry had reenacted his
skirmishes, filming them with an 8mm camera for later political
use.)
Two of Kerry's crew members,
Medeiros and machine-gunner Tommy Belodeau, found no mystery
in why the VC soldier didn't fire his B-40 RPG launcher. The
Vietnamese was effectively unarmed. He hadn't reloaded the RPGafter
the first shot at Kerry's boat as it headed down the river.
Later that year of 1996 Belodeau
described the full scope of the incident to the Boston Globe's
David Warsh. Belodeau told Warsh that he opened with his M-60
machine gun on the Vietnamese man at a range of ten feet after
they'd beached the boat. The machine gun bullets caught the Vietnamese
in the legs, and the wounded man crawled behind a nearby hooch.
At this point, Belodeau said, Kerry had seized an M-16 rifle,
jumped out of the boat, gone up to the man who Belodeau says
was near death, and finished him off.
When the Globe published Warsh's
account of Belodeau's recollection, essentially accusing Kerry
of a war crime, the Kerry campaign quickly led Madeiros to the
press and he described how the Vietnamese, felled by Belodeau's
machine-gun fire, got up, grabbed the rocket launcher and ran
off down a trail through the forest and a disappeared around
a bend. As Kerry set off after him, Medeiros followed. They came
round the corner to find the Vietnamese once again pointing the
RPG at them ten feet away. He didn't fire and Kerry shot him
dead with his rifle.
Circulating around veterans'
websites in early February of 2004 was an email written by Mike
Morrison who, like Kerry, won a bronze star won in Vietnam. Morrison
who later went on to write speeches for Lee Iacocca, was highly
suspicion of Kerry's claims to martial glory. In a letter to
his brother Ed he wrote as follows:
"I've long thought that
John Kerry's war record was phoney. We talked about it when you
were here. It's mainly been instinct because, as you know, nobody
who claims to have seen the action he does would so shamelessly
flaunt it for political gain.
"I was in the Delta shortly
after he left. I know that area well. I know the operations he
was involved in well. I know the tactics and the doctrine used.
I know the equipment. Although I was attached to CTF-116 (PBRs)
I spent a fair amount of time with CTF-115 (swift boats), Kerry's
command.
"Here are my problems
and suspicions:
"(1) Kerry was in-country
less than four months and collected, a Bronze Star, a Silver
Star and three purple hearts. I never heard of anybody with any
outfit I worked with (including SEAL One, the Sea Wolves, Riverines
and the River Patrol Force) collecting that much hardware so
fast, and for such pedestrian actions. The Swifts did a commendable
job. But that duty wasn't the worst you could draw. They operated
only along the coast and in the major rivers (Bassac and Mekong).
The rough stuff in the hot areas was mainly handled by the smaller,
faster PBRs. Fishy.
"(2) Three Purple Hearts
but no limp. All injuries so minor that no time lost from duty.
Amazing luck. Or he was putting himself in for medals every time
he bumped his head on the wheel house hatch? Combat on the boats
was almost always at close range. You didn't have minor wounds.
At least not often. Not three times in a row. Then he used the
three purple hearts to request a trip home eight months before
the end of his tour. Fishy.
"(3) The details of the
event for which he was given the Silver Star make no sense at
all. Supposedly, a B-40 (rocket propelled grenade) was fired
at the boat and missed. Charlie jumps up with the launcher in
his hand, the bow gunner knocks him down with the twin .50 (caliber
machine guns), Kerry beaches the boat, jumps off, shoots Charlie,
and retrieves the launcher. If true, he did everything wrong.
(a) Standard procedure when you took rocket fire was to put your
stern to the action and go (away) balls to the wall. A B-40 has
the ballistic integrity of a Frisbee after about 25 yards, so
you put 50 yards or so between you and the beach and begin raking
it with your .50's. ( Did you ever see anybody get knocked down
with a .50 caliber round and get up? The guy was dead or dying.
The rocket launcher was empty. There was no reason to go after
him (except if you knew he was no danger to you--just flopping
around in the dust during his last few seconds on earth, and
you wanted some derring-do in your after-action report). And
we didn't shoot wounded people. We had rules against that, too.
"Kerry got off the boat.
This was a major breach of standing procedures. Nobody on a boat
crew ever got off a boat in a hot area. EVER! The reason was
simple. If you had somebody on the beach your boat was defenseless.
It couldn't run and it couldn't return fire. It was stupid and
it put his crew in danger. He should have been relieved and reprimanded.
I never heard of any boat crewman ever leaving a boat during
or after a firefight.
"Something is very fishy."
The account that makes sense
to us is Belodeau's. There were three high-powered machine guns
on the boat and one Vietnamese at close range on the land and
Belodeau says his machinegun knocked him down. Even if the Vietnamese
fighter miraculously got up and started running away down that
trail, is it likely that the two would have pursued him down
an unknown path on foot. Wouldn't be more likely that the boat
would have used its machineguns again, blazing away as on Kerry's
own account they did, day and day and night after night?
Kerry's Bronze Star On March
13, 1969, two weeks after the episode that yielded the Silver
Star Kerry saw his last slice of action. It got him his bronze
star and his third purple heart, which meant he could file a
request to be transferred out of Vietnam.
Kerry earned the bronze star
by pulling another lieutenant out of the water after the latter's
Swift boat had hit a mine. That same mine's detonation caused
enough wake to throw Kerry against a bulkhead, bruising his arm.
This was classed as a wound, which meant the third purple heart.
Then, amid rifle fire, Kerry maneuvered his boat toward Lieutenant
Rassman and hoisted him onto the deck.
Both boats had been on yet
another mission ferrying Green Berets, US Navy SEALs and Nung
assassins to a village. Once again they had mistakenly targeted
a friendly village, where they opened fire on South Vietnamese
troops who were interrogating a group of women and children lined
up against a wall.
When the Green Berets and SEALs
opened fire, the South Vietnamese soldiers jumped the wall and
at least ten of the women and children were killed. Meanwhile,
against orders, Kerry had again left his boat and attached himself
to the Nung and was, by his own words, "shooting and blowing
things up". One of the Nung threwew a grenade into a hut
which turned out to be filled with sacks of rice. Kerry got grains
of rice and some bits of metal debris embedded in his ass, the
most severe wounds he sustained in Vetnam.
With three purple hearts, the
silver and bronze stars, Kerry now applied for reassignment as
a personal aide to a senior officer in either Boston, New York
or Washington DC. He ended up in New York working for Admiral
Walter F. Schlech in New York. In January 1970 he applied for
early discharge to run for office. As he put it, he'd decided
not to join the antiwar movement but work within the system and
try and win a seat in Congress from the Third District in Massachusetts.
Zumwalt:
"Kerry's Record Will Haunt Him"
A former assistant secretary
of defense and Fletcher School of Diplomacy professor,W. Scott
Thompson, recalled a conversation with the late Admiral Elmo
R. Zumwalt Jr. that clearly had a slightly different take on
Kerry's recollection of their discussions: "[T]he fabled
and distinguished chief of naval operations,Admiral Elmo Zumwalt,told
me --30 years ago when he was still CNO [chief naval officer
in Vietnam] that during his own command of U.S. naval forces
in Vietnam,just prior to his anointment as CNO, young Kerry had
created great problems for him and the other top brass,by killing
so many non-combatant civilians and going after other non-military
targets. "We had virtually to straitjacket him to keep him
under control", the admiral said. "Bud" Zumwalt
got it right when he assessed Kerry as having large ambitions
--but promised that his career in Vietnam would haunt him if
he were ever on the national stage."
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's new
book on the 2004 elections, Dime's
Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils, will
be published in August.
Weekend
Edition Features for July 10 / 12, 2004
Kathleen
Christison
The Problem with Neutrality Between
Palestinians and Israel
Janine
Pommy Vega
Trail of the Comet: a Gathering of the World's Poets Against
War
Sherry
Wolf
From Maverick to Party Attack Dog: Howard Dean Gay-Bashes Nader
Saul
Landau and Farrah Hassen
A Transfer of Power, Sort Of
Michael
Donnelly
How to Steal an Election: the Green Version, 2004
Stanton
/ Madsen
Iraq Survey Group: Rumsfeld's al-Qaeda?
Richard
Lichtman
The End of Innocence: Reflections on American Pathology
Gila
Svirsky
Thank You, Your Honors: a Legal Blow to the Wall
Kurt
Nimmo
Clinton's Life
Toni
Solo
Empire-Speak: What Roger Noriega Really Means
Ron
Jacobs
The Black Panthers and the Rest
Camelo
Ruiz Marrero
Gene Warfare in Oaxaca: Genetic Mutation of Mexican Maize
Omar
Barghouti
Wither the Empire: Rise of a Global Resistance
Poets'
Basement
Curtis and Albert
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