[LANMaster]

Officer at scene of Bronze Star event insists they didn't receive 'enemy fire'


Posted: August 19, 2004
1:51 p.m. Eastern
By Art Moore
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

Responding to a Washington Post article questioning his veracity, a critic of John Kerry's war record insists military records cited in the story are based on a fraudulent after-action report by Kerry himself.

The Post reported today that newly obtained military records of Larry Thurlow, who commanded a Navy swift boat alongside Kerry in Vietnam, contradict Thurlow's claim that Kerry was not under enemy fire when he pulled U.S. Army Special Forces officer James Rassman out of the water after a mine explosion on the Bay Hap River in Vietnam, March 13, 1969.

Kerry won a Bronze Star, as did Thurlow, for their efforts during that event, with citations that referred to heavy "enemy fire" from small arms and automatic weapons.

But Thurlow still maintains there was no enemy fire.

"The military records have always shown that, because they are John Kerry's report," he told WND from his home in Kansas.

Two other swift-boat commanders involved in the event, Jack Chenoweth and Richard Pees, also have said they do not remember coming under enemy fire.

Thurlow is a member of Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth, a group of more than 250 vets opposing his presidential candidacy who served in the Naval operation that patrolled the rivers and canals of the Mekong Delta area controlled by North Vietnam.

Kerry has contended in interviews and writings that he had left the scene of the March 13 explosion but returned under 5,000 meters of fire from both banks of the river and, while injured, pulled Rassman from the the water as bullets whistled by.

Thurlow said Commander George Elliott wrote up the citation for his Bronze Star and Kerry's on March 23, largely based on Kerry's after-action report.

Thurlow's citation included a witness from another boat, but only Kerry's report refers to enemy fire, he said.

It was the custom to file only one after-action report for an incident, Thurlow noted.

"So the one and only report, which George accepted at face value, was this ****-and-bull story about coming 5,000 meters under intense fire to get Rassman," he said.

Thurlow said he was unaware of his medal until two to three months after returning home to Kansas April 22, 1969.

On March 13, he said, his boat and several others went to the aid of swift-boat sailors after the mine explosion left three boats dead in the water.

Thurlow says Kerry's boat, which was on the opposite side of the river, fled the scene. Rassmann, who had been on Kerry's boat, fell into the water as Kerry sped away. But Kerry returned several minutes later to retrieve the officer from the river just seconds before another boat was preparing to pick him up, Thurlow contends.

Spokesmen for Kerry's campaign now have acknowledged that while Kerry’s boat left the scene, none of the other boats on the river ever left the damaged swift boat, Thurlow notes.

This is a direct contradiction to Rassman's previous accounts in published interviews, he says. It also contradicts the theme used during the Democratic National Convention of "No Man Left Behind," which highlighted Kerry's accounts of heroism.

"If no one ever left the scene of the Bay Hap River incident, how could anyone be left behind?" Thurlow asked

Link

[LANMaster]

Kerry's war journal contradicts medal claim?
At least 9 days after Purple Heart, wrote he had not 'been shot at yet'

Posted: August 17, 2004
8:00 p.m. Eastern
By Art Moore
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

A previously unnoticed passage in John Kerry's approved war biography, citing his own journals, appears to contradict the senator's claim he won his first Purple Heart as a result of an injury sustained under enemy fire.

Kerry, who served as commander of a Navy swift boat, has insisted he was wounded by enemy fire Dec. 2, 1968, when he and two other men took a smaller vessel, a Boston Whaler, on a patrol north of his base at Cam Ranh Bay.

But Douglas Brinkley's "Tour of Duty," for which Kerry supplied his journals and letters, indicates that as Kerry set out on a subsequent mission, he had not yet been under enemy fire.

While the date of the four-day excursion on PCF-44 [Patrol Craft Fast] is not specified, Brinkley notes it commenced when Kerry "had just turned 25, on Dec. 11, 1968," which was nine days after the incident in which he claimed he had been wounded by enemy fire.

Brinkley recounts the outset of that mid-December journey, which included a crew of radarman James Wasser, engineman William Zaladonis, gunner's mate Stephen Gardner and boatswain's mates Drew Whitlow and Stephen Hatch:

"They pulled away from the pier at Cat Lo with spirits high, feeling satisfied with the way things were going for them. They had no lust for battle, but they also were were not afraid. Kerry wrote in his notebook, 'A cocky feeling 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.'"

The diary entry apparently confirms assertions made by Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth, a group of more than 250 vets opposing his presidential candidacy who served in the Naval operation that patrolled the rivers and canals of the Mekong Delta area controlled by North Vietnam.

Kerry has made his four months of service in Vietnam a central theme in his campaign, arguing his purported war heroics help qualify him to be commander in chief.

In the swift-boat group's newly published book, "Unfit for Command," authors John O'Neill, who took over command of Kerry's boat, and Jerome Corsi assert the wound for which Kerry received his medal actually was caused by him firing an M-79 grenade launcher too close, "causing a tiny piece of shrapnel (one to two centimeters) to barely stick in his arm."

Could the "we" to which Kerry referred in his notebook entry have meant only that his crew, rather than Kerry in particular, had not encountered enemy fire?

At least one other PCF-44 crew member was with Kerry during the Boston Whaler incident, Zaldonis, according to the Boston Globe's account of the story.

Whatever the case, Corsi told WorldNetDaily he believes the apparent contradiction in Kerry's journal, as presented by Brinkley, deserves a response.

"We're not interested in charges that cannot be documented," he added.

The Kerry campaign's press staff has not answered WND's request for a response.

More at the link

[iltos]

your like a dog with a bone....
and this one must taste particularly good

i'm certain someone here who really cares about this is gonna take issue with it, but on the surface at least, it looks pretty "unspinnable"

i just hope that ALL of this questioning about the integrity of politicians in general sends a simple and understandable message to 'em, reaffirming the original intent of governement service.....you are not it to serve YOUR interests, OR your buddy's....but OURS...

[Stoner]

That' OK LAN
The correct version of the WashingtonPost story can be found here:

http://forums.techguy.org/showthread.php?p=1873002

[LANMaster]

Kerry's own journal states that he had not yet received enemy fire. This after being decorated for wounds received in combat under enemy fire.

spin that. It is his own words.

Did he tell the truth right before he lied?
Or did he lie right before telling the truth?

[Stoner]

Kerry's own journal states that he had not yet received enemy fire.

I've missed that.
Please give a link to Kerry's 'journal' and that claim.

[WarC]

Like I've said, for all the propping his military record has received it is one of the areas I am most unsure of!

You just cannot tell what kind of man Kerry is, or what he would do once he's in office. He is the Anti-Bush, and according to one of my liberal female friends "Anybody is better than Bush"...

Thats the sort of dangerous mentality that voted Hitler into power.

"Anybody is better than the Wehrmacht!"

[Stoner]

Originally Posted by WarC

Like I've said, for all the propping his military record has received it is one of the areas I am most unsure of!

You just cannot tell what kind of man Kerry is, or what he would do once he's in office. He is the Anti-Bush, and according to one of my liberal female friends "Anybody is better than Bush"...

Thats the sort of dangerous mentality that voted Hitler into power.

"Anybody is better than the Wehrmacht!"

Good spin ....you're learning quickly

[WarC]

I couldn't let the Bush-Hitler comparisons go on forever could I?!

[Stoner]

Everyone gets a turn

[Stoner]

Originally Posted by Stoner

I've missed that.
Please give a link to Kerry's 'journal' and that claim.

LAN, I'll bump this so you don't miss it while your on your 3 to 5 pm coffee break

[LANMaster]

Originally Posted by Stoner

I've missed that.
Please give a link to Kerry's 'journal' and that claim.

See post #2, this thread.

[eggplant43]

(August 19, 2004 -- 01:26 PM EDT)

Well, it seems there wasn't something in the air.

I didn't know the Kerry campaign was finally going to return fire today over this Swift Boat nonsense. But this morning, in a speech to the International Association of Fire Fighters in Boston, he responded squarely to the attacks. You can see complete text of the speech and the new response-ad they're running. But the key point is that he aimed his remarks at precisely the right target ...

Over the last week or so, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has been attacking me. Of course, this group isn’t interested in the truth – and they’re not telling the truth. They didn’t even exist until I won the nomination for president.

But here’s what you really need to know about them. They’re funded by hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Republican contributor out of Texas. They’re a front for the Bush campaign. And the fact that the President won’t denounce what they’re up to tells you everything you need to know—he wants them to do his dirty work.

Thirty years ago, official Navy reports documented my service in Vietnam and awarded me the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Thirty years ago, this was the plain truth. It still is. And I still carry the shrapnel in my leg from a wound in Vietnam.

As firefighters you risk your lives everyday. You know what it’s like to see the truth in the moment. You’re proud of what you’ve done—and so am I.

Of course, the President keeps telling people he would never question my service to our country. Instead, he watches as a Republican-funded attack group does just that. Well, if he wants to have a debate about our service in Vietnam, here is my answer: “Bring it on.”



This is a good thing -- and not simply because Kerry has to respond to the president's surrogates who are trying (and, to an extent, succeeding) in damaging his candidacy with scurrilous and discredited attacks.

There is a meta-debate going on here, one that I'm not sure even the practitioners fully articulate to themselves and one that I'm painfully aware the victims don't fully understand.

Let's call it the Republicans' bi***-Slap theory of electoral politics.

It goes something like this.

On one level, of course, the aim behind these attacks is to cast suspicion upon Kerry's military service record and label him a liar. But that's only part of what's going on.

Consider for a moment what the big game is here. This is a battle between two candidates to demonstrate toughness on national security. Toughness is a unitary quality, really -- a personal, characterological quality rather than one rooted in policy or divisible in any real way. So both sides are trying to prove to undecided voters either that they're tougher than the other guy or at least tough enough for the job.

In a post-9/11 environment, obviously, this question of strength, toughness or resolve is particularly salient. That, of course, is why so much of this debate is about war and military service in the first place.

One way -- perhaps the best way -- to demonstrate someone's lack or toughness or strength is to attack them and show they are either unwilling or unable to defend themselves -- thus the rough slang I used above. And that I think is a big part of what is happening here. Someone who can't or won't defend themselves certainly isn't someone you can depend upon to defend you.

Demonstrating Kerry's unwillingness to defend himself (if Bush can do that) is a far more tangible sign of what he's made of than wartime experiences of thirty years ago.

Hitting someone and not having them hit back hurts the morale of that person's supporters, buoys the confidence of your own backers (particularly if many tend toward an authoritarian mindset) and tends to make the person who's receiving the hits into an object of contempt (even if also possibly also one of sympathy) in the eyes of the uncommitted.

This is certainly what Bush's father did to Michael Dukakis and, sadly, it is what Bush himself did, to a great degree, to Al Gore.

In other ways, Bush's bully-boy campaign tactics play to the his strengths, albeit unstated and unlovely ones. Many of the polls of the president have shown that while people don't necessarily agree with the specific policies he's pursued abroad many also intuitively believe that there's no one who will hit back harder. There's some of that 'he may be a son-of-a-***** but he's our son-of-a-*****' quality to the president's support on national security issues.

This meta-message behind the president's attacks on Kerry's war record is more consequential than many believe. So hitting back hard was critical on many levels.

-- Josh Marshall

Copyright 2004 Joshua Micah Marshall

This document is available online at http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/arc..._15.php#003295

[Stoner]

Originally Posted by LANMaster

See post #2, this thread.

Post 1.
You address the issue of Kerry's Bronze medal.

This issue was addressed today. Thurlow has been shown a liar by his own words.

Post 2.
You inteject a different event and continued the arguement as if the two events are the same.

My post #4..
I verified that Thurlow lied about Kerry taking fire.

Post 5
You use a rebuttal from a 'Purple Heart' issue and imply that is an answer for the Bronze Star medal.

I can't explain the 'notebook' discrepency, But I know it doesn't apply to the Bronze Star, like the positioning of your posts implies'

So again, Thurlow lied about taking fire and was exposed today in a Washington Post article. Your implied rebuttal is irrelevant in this issue as it applies to the Purple Hart on a different date.

Interesting, I can find no other quotes from Kerry's notebook other than a supposed excerpt in WND.

It would be interesting to have a link to that notebook as I requested.

[LANMaster]

Originally Posted by Stoner

Post 1.
You address the issue of Kerry's Bronze medal.

This issue was addressed today. Thurlow has been shown a liar by his own words.

okay, fine, that's what debates are about.
There is plenty of credible negativity over Kerry. I didn't make it up.

Post 2.
You inteject a different event and continued the arguement as if the two events are the same.

I guess I should have started a separate thread.

My post #4..
I verified that Thurlow lied about Kerry taking fire.

Thanks for setting that straight. I read the link and it appears that Thurlow is not as credible as I had thought.

Post 5
You use a rebuttal from a 'Purple Heart' issue and imply that is an answer for the Bronze Star medal.

No, I even stated it was the decoration for wounds in post #5 not the Bronze Star.

I totally take the blame for confusing the two. I should have started a new thread. My bad.

I can't explain the 'notebook' discrepency, But I know it doesn't apply to the Bronze Star, like the positioning of your posts implies'

Mixed the stories unintentionally. But I don't see how Kerry lied any less than Thurlow did.

So again, Thurlow lied about taking fire and was exposed today in a Washington Post article. Your implied rebuttal is irrelevant in this issue as it applies to the Purple Hart on a different date.

understood. I muddied the water.

Interesting, I can find no other quotes from Kerry's notebook other than a supposed excerpt in WND.

It would be interesting to have a link to that notebook as I requested.

Ahh, okay, I will attempt to find another source. Funny, you've never had an issue with my sources before.