Kerry: war hero, or coward?

[sixtofive]

yawn..... not impressed with your edit. a typical response from someone who is paniced about the truth coming out. trying to discredit those men because of who helped to sponser the ad. their point is still valid, correct, and not any sort of dirty trick.

[surian]

Or do you trust 6 veterans who ACTUALLY served under Kerry on his baot and bore personall witness to the actions he took for his bronze star and his other medals? Every one of them supports him and says that he is telling the truth. The other 13 people were not serving under him and did not see everything that happened.

 

Also, I don't believe that Bush had a direct role in this ad. I did, but after doing some research I'm pretty convinced that he didn't have a direct hand in this, it was an independant group that made the ad. But that group is unscrupulous at best. And at least one of the leaders of the group has close ties to Bush's interests.

 

Me? I'd personally go with the 6 guys (5 since one is dead) who currently support Kerry and served under him during his time in Veitnam.

[Arrow_Diet]

sixtofive, did you NOT SEE MY POST?!

 

The CO responsible for most of the mess that involves the angry swift boat vets appoligized to him WITHIN THIS WEEK. His very own CO had "missread" the report and appoligized publicly saying that the attacks on Kerry (from him and other soldiers) were unfound.

 

yawn..... not impressed with your edit. a typical response from someone who is paniced about the truth coming out. trying to discredit those men because of who helped to sponser the ad. their point is still valid, correct, and not any sort of dirty trick.

 

Why the hell would I not want the truth come out? The truth is out, and the verdict says, "Bush is a traitor and a liar." Their point is NOT valid and most certainly NOT correct. It's a damn dirty trick and ment to pull peoples' attention away from other matters, like the way Bush messed up the Middle East, or his duty dodge.

This is not sarcastic, and I'm not attacking you six, but... Why do you always hold your ground on unfound, controversial (sp?) and upsetting opinions? I have YET to see you have a valid point for ANY of your arguements.

[sixtofive]

Yeah, well, Kerry's CO retracted his statements about him, saying that the accusations he made to Kerry were false and unfound. What I don't understand is... there are two types of soldiers when it comes to the general opinion of Kerry, one side hates his guts and wants him to die, the other side worships him like a freakin' god.

 

could it be from the times he went around flipping off veterans, i know if i was a vet that would sure piss me off. Or maybee it has something to do with the 20 years of voting to take as much away from the military as possible. These people in the SBVFT are very serious, and very honest. It really made me angry when the first take on the whole situation that I heard was that the rich texan probably bought them off. yeah right. yet it is taboo to even mention that kerry might of bought off his support. I'm not saying that is the case, but no one will even discuss that. the fact is that kerry commited numerous war crimes that should merit prison time, but he was given a pass on that. if you don't believe this there is audio of kerry himself admitting to doing some very terrible things.

 

What do you call it when some one transfers to a unit that they KNOW is not going into combat? What about when some one transfers to a unit that they KNOW is going to be under heavy fire 50% of the time?

 

the truth about this situation has been distorted. When kerry transfered to the swift boat squads they were seeing no combat. there are witnesses that will attest to the fact that this is why he went there. soon afterward they were called in. This shows the true nature of his character. he (like bush) tried to get a legal no combat dodge, but it backfired. Then when he is campaigning he heralds his choice to go swift boat saying that he wanted to sign up to go into combat situations. utter lies. the comment about knowing they would be under heavy fire %50 of the time, where did that statistic come from? that may be what it ended up being by the time everything was done and we could take a look at it afterward. but this was not a common fact to the people going in, truth is they had no idea what to expect.

 

Kerry put his ass on the line and Bush's daddy made sure his baby boy was gonna be ok. I don't like that.

 

just for the record i don't like that either, but from a fathers perspective. who wouldn't if they could?

 

as for your last statement, i could say the exact same thing about your argument from my perspective. these are people expressing their honest opinion, and they every right and freedom to do so. why is it that when a dem is critical of a rep it is free speach, but when a rep is critical of a dem it is a dirty trick? it is an ugly double standard that pisses me off

[surian]

IF you want my completely honest view on Kerry I'll tell you this: I don't like his policies as much as I would like. His voting records aside, I don't like his stance on the military or on homeland security issues. I think he's MUCH better than Bush on these issues, but I would personally have liked to see someone else as the Democratic candidate. I understand though that the reason he's the nominee is that he can pull votes away from Bush a lot better than most of the other candidates could because he is similiar in a lot of views with Bush.

 

As for his voting record, I again say that being a senator is a crippling thing for someone running for president. Your voting records are public knowledge and can be turned against you very easily. Bush, on the other hand, has records from while he was Governer of Texas that are closed to the public, no one knows what goes on behind closed doors a lot of the time and so he can hide things much easier. It angers me when people start spouting off that Kerry voted for this or against this because you really don't know how things work in the senate. A lot of the time things get voted for by people that really don't want the bill to pass just because of the nature of the beast.

 

Also, whether or not he tried to get into a unit that was going to see little combat is irrelivant, the fact that he's playing it up that he was trying to get into a unit that was in combat is relivant though. If what you are saying is true than it reflects poorly on him but changes nothing as far as what happened. He DID earn those medals and he DID actually save the lives of his men heroically while under fire. There is no real evidence that I have seen that supports the accusations of SBVFT or the GOP lines trying to discredit Kerry's war record.

 

As for saying that Kerry is guilty of war crimes...

 

The fact is, he was under orders by the CIA to kill the people of that villiage and his audio quotes that you are talking about are from him condemning the CIA and the US governement for the way that they conducted themselves and the orders that he was given during his time in Veitnam. He was under direct orders to attack those people and afterwards felt so terrible that he became one of the biggest anti-vietnam war figures of the time.

[Arrow_Diet]

Sense when didn't swift boats NOT see any action during 'nam? Why the hell would he buy them off? Where the hell are you getting all this slander?!

 

Kerry wouldn't flip off vets, it would kill his chances at being a president, IF he had, it might as well have said, "I don't feel like being your leader," but he didn't, so he's running for office.

 

kerry commited numerous war crimes that should merit prison time

 

As should Bush for going AWOL on his practically nonexistant duty.

 

just for the record i don't like that either, but from a fathers perspective. who wouldn't if they could?

 

Kerry's daddy didn't cover his ass, and if I was to go into the armed forces (can't now, I'm underage) my dad sure as hell wouldn't cover my ass either!

 

audio of kerry himself admitting to doing some very terrible things.

 

Oh yeah? Where? Is it anything like your article on WMD in Iraq?

 

it is an ugly double standard that pisses me off

 

I guess you're a believer in the old saying, "Some pigs are more equal then others."

 

EDIT: There is a difference between abusing your right and using your right. Abusing the right of free speech is VERY possible. If a rep disses a "dem" in a way that is false, he/she is abusing their right of speech.

Another way of putting it would be, if I told you that you were a mentally retarded person while you were running for president, you would be underfire (if you weren't retarded) to show proof that you were, in fact, normal and able to run a country. It's nasty, stupid and pointless. Kerry does it, too, but we don't need to repeat mistakes that other people make (I.E. Personal attacks, false and harmful statements and the like.)

 

edit: fixed your quote tags

-Peregrine

[sixtofive]

Sense when didn't swift boats NOT see any action during 'nam? Why the hell would he buy them off? Where the hell are you getting all this slander?!

 

You have missed the point once again. No one is saying that the swift boats did not see action. they did in fact see lots of action. this is obvious to all of us looking back on the past. at the time however this was thought to be an area that would not see much action, turns out that they did after all. btw, slander is spoken, liable is written acusations, but they are true anyway.

 

Kerry wouldn't flip off vets, it would kill his chances at being a president, IF he had, it might as well have said, "I don't feel like being your leader," but he didn't, so he's running for office.

 

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/5/...31/225546.shtml

here is one source for this incident. there are plenty more who reported on the show of affection if you feel like you need more than one source.

 

Kerry's daddy didn't cover his ass, and if I was to go into the armed forces (can't now, I'm underage) my dad sure as hell wouldn't cover my ass either!

 

since it seems you are not a father yourself, it would be difficult for you to speak from the perspective of a father. this would make it difficult to understand that your father would (assuming he isn't worthless as a parent) do anything in his power to help protect you. I have to admit i am curious as to how underage you are, because these kind of issues realling take on a whole new perspective when you are on your own supporting yourself and trying to provide for your family. You may think you understand what it's like, but until you are there for yourself, no one can really know what it is like.

[Peregrine]

btw, slander is spoken, liable is written acusations, but they are true anyway.

Nice try, but wrong.

 

1) The word you're looking for is "libel".

 

2) Both have to be FALSE accusations. To sue for either, you must prove that not only were the accusations damaging, but that they were known to be false when published/spoken.

 

here is one source for this incident. there are plenty more who reported on the show of affection if you feel like you need more than one source.

 

Oh, how horrible... he responded like a normal human to a rude idiot. Any reasonable person can see that the insult was for the man's rudeness not simply because he was a veteran, so why can't you?

 

 

And as for the war crimes thing, could you provide specific incidents? What exactly are you refering to?

[sixtofive]

sorry i mistyped, please excuse my spelling. the meaning however was not wrong.

 

as for Kerry's response, it is terrible. For someone who is in the middle of a presidential campaign to act like this is unacceptable. when he signed up to run, he knew the level of scrutiny that he would be under, and if he cannot act more accordingly then we all get a glimpse of his true character.

 

when kerry came back from vietnam he testified before the senate as a war protestor to the horrible things that he had both witnessed and participated in himself. Specific exmples: he slaughter the live stock of a village and then used his zippo lighter to start fires and burned down the houses. he got a medal for bravery by shooting a single wounded and fleeing soldier in the back, lied about what happened, and made himself out to be a hero for stopping an attack.

 

here is how he earned his first purple heart

 

The action that led to John Kerry's first Purple Heart occurred on December 2, 1968, during the month that he was undergoing training with Coastal Division 14 at Cam Ranh Bay. While waiting to receive his own Swift boat command, Kerry volunteered for a nighttime patrol mission commanding a small, foam-filled "skimmer" craft with two enlisted men. The purpose of the patrol, which Kerry later described as "a half-assed action that hardly qualified as combat," was to find Vietcong guerillas moving contraband around a peninsula north of the bay on sampans.

 

At the target location Kerry saw a group of sampans unloading something on the shore, and lit a flare to illuminate the area. The men from the sampans ran, and Kerry and his crew opened fire. At that point, according to Kerry, "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." (page 147, "Tour of Duty") Kerry and his men strafed the beach, shot up the sampans and returned to Cam Ranh Bay.

 

As an officer in command (OIC) in training, Kerry reported during this mission to William Schachte, who eventually retired as a Rear Admiral. Schachte flatly contradicts Kerry's claim to have been wounded by enemy fire, saying that after his M-16 jammed, Kerry picked up an M-79 grenade launcher and fired a grenade that exploded too close to the boat, causing a small piece of shrapnel to stick in the skin of his arm. Kerry himself did not report receiving hostile fire that night, which would have been required, and there is no record of hostile fire for the mission.

 

Kerry succeeded in keeping the small piece of shrapnel in his arm until the following day, when he was treated by Dr. Louis Letson, whose version of the event matches William Schachte's account rather than Kerry's:

 

I have a very clear memory of an incident which occurred while I was the Medical Officer at Naval Support Facility, Cam Ranh Bay. John Kerry was a (jg), the OinC or skipper of a Swift boat, newly arrived in Vietnam. On the night of December 2, he was on patrol north of Cam Ranh, up near Nha Trang area. The next day he came to sick bay, the medical facility, for treatment of a wound that had occurred that night.

 

The story he told was different from what his crewmen had to say about that night. According to Kerry, they had been engaged in a fire fight, receiving small arms fire from on shore. He said that his injury resulted from this enemy action.

 

Some of his crew confided that they did not receive any fire from shore, but that Kerry had fired a mortar round at close range to some rocks on shore. The crewman thought that the injury was caused by a fragment ricocheting from that mortar round when it struck the rocks.

 

That seemed to fit the injury which 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 1 cm. in length and was about 2 or 3 mm 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 3 or 4 mm. It did not require probing to find it, did not require any anesthesia to remove it, and did not require any sutures to close the wound.

 

The wound was covered with a bandaid.

 

Not [sic] other injuries were reported and I do not recall that there was any reported damage to the boat.

 

The following morning, John Kerry arrived at the office of Coastal Division 14 Commander Grant Hibbard to apply for a Purple Heart. Having already been informed by Schachte that Kerry's injury was self-inflicted rather than the result of hostile fire, Commander Hibbard told him to "forget it." Hibbard recently said of Kerry's minor scratch, "I’ve seen worse injuries from a rose thorn."

 

Nevertheless, John Kerry managed to obtain his coveted Purple Heart for this incident nearly three months later after being transferred to Coastal Division 11. The circumstances remain obscure, as there are no written records of this award on file at the Naval Historical Center. Various other documents that might shed light on this award remain unavailable due to Senator Kerry's refusal to release his complete military records.

 

Military regulations state that to qualify for a Purple Heart, an injury must come "from an outside force or agent," and treatment for the wound must "have been made a matter of official record." While John Kerry managed to satisfy the second criterion by insisting that an amused Dr. Letson provide an official Band-Aid, nicking himself with a fragment from his own poorly-aimed grenade fails to meet the first qualification.

-----

 

if you want more i've got them...

[surian]

I'm sorry to dig this thread up again but I've found some relevant material. Recently on thesmokinggun.com there was an article that I think you may find interesting.

 

link

 

here are some highlights.

 

Edit: For some reason I can't get quotes to work.... oh well, you can get the idea.

 

George Elliott, a key member of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who appears in the anti-Kerry group's virulent TV commercial, recommended Kerry for a Bronze Star in 1969. In the below Navy report, Elliott, a lieutenant commander, recounts how Kerry was "highly courageous in the face of enemy fire" during a fight on the Bay Hap river in March 1969. During that skirmish, Elliott noted, Kerry dodged sniper fire to save a colleague who was knocked overboard when a mine detonated. In a March 1969 evaluation, Elliott reported that Kerry was involved in "several enemy initiated fire fights" and "exhibited all of the traits desired of an officer in a combat environment." A December 1969 fitness report was equally laudatory, with Elliott giving Kerry the highest possible grade available ("Is not exceeded") in most categories, including loyalty and moral courage.

 

George Elliot appears in the SBVT commercial saying kerry wasn't a hero, however this report from the smoking gun contains a 5 award recocommendation filled out by George Elliot where he says that Kerry was a war hero deserving the bronze star. Look at it for yourself. This is not just "some one told me that... blah blah blah" This is the actual award recommendation filled out by George Elliot. Nowhere in the entire document does he say ANYTHING like what is not being said about Kerry by the SBVT group. Here are some highlights from the recommendation.

 

On March 1969, LTJG KERRY was serving as Officer-in-Charge of PCF-94 conducting a five boat Sea Lords operation in the Bay Hap river and Dong Cung canal together with ground forces.... a mine detonated under one of th eboats (PCF-3) lifting it two feet above the water and wounding every-one aboard. Almost simultaniously another mine detonated close aboard PCF-94, knocking 1st LT RASSMAN into the water and wounding LTJG KERRY in the right arm. PCF-51 immediately went to the aid of PCF-3 while PCF-94 provided cover fire. Shortly after LTJG KERRY was informed that he had a man overboard, he immediately turned his boat around to assist the man in the water, who by this time was receiving sniper fire from the river banks. LTJG KERRY, from his exposed position on the bow of the boat, managed to pull LT RASSMAN aboard despite the painful wound in his right arm.... Throughout the entire action, LTJG KERRY proved himself to be calm, professional and highly courageous in the face of enemy fire

 

 

and later on:

 

LTJG KERRY was assigned to this division for only a short time but during that time exhibited all of the traits desired of an officer in a combat environment. He frequently exhibited a high sense of imagination and judgement in planning operations against the enemy in the Mekong Delta... Though relatively new to the PCF he is thoroughly knowledgeable of all aspects of his boat and PCF operations. He was instrumental in planning of highly successful Sea Lords Operations. He was cited for his performance during action against the enemy by Commander Tank Force in his message 0808072 JAN 69.

 

and still later:

 

In a combat environment often requiring independent, decisive action LTJG KERRY was unserpassed. He constantly reviewed tactics and lessons learned in river operations and applied his experience at every opportunity... His bearing and appearance are above reproach. He has of his own volition learned the Vietnamese language and is instrumental in the successful Vietnamese training program.

 

Sounds like quite a different story than G. Elliot is trying to spread around now doesnt' it?