WorldNetDaily: Kerry's war journal<br>contradicts medal claim?This is a
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Tuesday, August 17, 2004
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.
John Kerry receving medal for Vietnam service.
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
****pping 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 pur****ted 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.
Corsi contends Kerry has a "pattern" of equivocation,
"distingui****ng
and
extending" his answers to charges, including responses to alleged
participation in a 1971 Kansas City meeting of Vietnam Veterans
Against
the War where a plot to assassinate seven U.S. senators was
considered.
"Finally, he said he was there, but he doesn't remember it," Corsi
said.
Last week, Kerry was forced to revise his decades-long contention he
was
on a secret mission in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968.
"Tour of Duty" author Brinkley is re****ted to be writing a piece for
the
New Yorker saying it actually was January 1969 when Kerry was sent
into
Cambodia, not December 1968.
As WorldNetDaily re****ted, the authors of "Unfit for Command" claim
that
despite the senator's many public references to spending Christmas
Eve
in
Cambodia - including a1986 speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate -
the
candidate was never in Vietnam's neighboring country. Rather, they
say
he
was more than 50 miles from the Cambodian border at Sa Dec.
'Dear diary moment'
Conservative commentator and attorney Chris Horner, a defender of
the
swift-boats group who alerted WND to the diary entry, called it a
"stunning" revelation.
On recent television and radio appearances, he said, claims made by
eyewitnesses to events surrounding the first Purple Heart have been
countered by "surrogates of Kerry" who do not address the substance
of
the
charges.
"So finally, you have an eyewitness in a dear diary moment, saying,
'Dear
diary, I still haven't been shot at,' confirming what the Swiftees
have
been saying," observed Horner, who has defended the group's claims
in
recent appearances on television news shows.
"Admittedly the source is questionable - John Kerry - but it at last
provides a witness from his camp to address the charges that his
first
Purple Heart resulted from a scratch borne of his own fire," Horner
said.
Swift boat veteran John O'Neill, co-author of "Unfit for
Command."
(Fox News Channel)
Kerry's journal entry indicating he had not yet been fired upon is
noted
in a soon-to-be released book by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St.
Clair,
editors of the left-leaning, alternative newsletter Counterpunch. In
an
excerpt of their book, they write regarding Kerry's first Purple
Heart,
"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."
Enemy fire?
According to "Unfit for Command," Kerry's initial requests to
receive
a
Purple Heart for the wound were flatly rejected.
In "Tour of Duty," Brinkley quotes Kerry as saying he and his
comrades
were "scared s---less" that night, thinking fishermen in sampans
might
be
Viet Cong.
When some of the sampan occupants began unloading something on the
beach,
Kerry lit a flare, causing the startled men on shore to run for
cover.
That's when Kerry says he and the other Americans began firing.
Said Kerry in "Tour of Duty":
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.
O'Neill and Corsi, however, claim there is no evidence whatsoever
Kerry
took any enemy fire that night.
Patrick Runyon was operating the engine on the Boston whaler during
the
incident.
"I can't say for sure that we got return fire or how [Kerry] got
nicked,"
Runyon is quoted as saying in "Unfit for Command." "I couldn't say
one
way
or the other. I know he did get nicked, a scrape on the arm."
Wrote O'Neill: "In a separate conversation, Runyon related that he
never
knew Kerry was wounded. So even in the [Boston] Globe biography
accounting, it was not clear that there was any enemy fire, just a
question about how Kerry might have been hit with shrapnel."
The book also asserts another one of Kerry's three Purple Hearts was
self-inflicted.
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