Picture this: five boats are traveling down a river in Vietnam, two on one side, the other three on the other side since the middle sometimes is suspect for safety. One of the boats hits an explosive device and is blown out of the water. Another of the boats, with Kerry at the helm, takes off, full speed, down the river, dumping one of the men aboard, Jim Rassman, into the water. There is no return fire from the banks, no enemy spotted. While the other undamaged boats approach to pick up the man in the water, the boat that fled returns to scoop him up just as the other boats are within meters of a rescue. John Kerry skippered the boat that took off when it hit the fan while the real men stayed and made sure all the men were safe or attended to and it was only as they were close to picking up Rassman, did Kerry return.
While it is not unheard of to take off when the shooting starts or when a bomb explodes, how common is it to claim heroism for doing that? I would have expected a man who ran to hang his head not puff out his chest for a medal pinning. Nor would I expect a man who is a warrior to recreate that battle scene, with all the necessary fireworks to make a film enthralling, after the fact, adding the spice of firefight danger, Hollywood style, with him, Kerry, playing John Wayne.
A report is written up by a young man who desperately wants to “punch his ticket” for medals (it takes three purple hearts to get out of service and sent stateside and home) and begin a political career, on track for the presidency, just like his friend, John F. Kennedy. From the men who I respect and who actually served a minimum of one tour (one year) I hear that a purple heart is significant of being wounded, something to be eschewed and taken as a possible malfeasance on the recipient’s part. Being wounded is not the goal of the warrior.
At another time, Kerry threw a grenade too closely and wound up getting a sliver of metal in his arm. The men who knew him then, who knew how that happened, had a joke among themselves that it was quite a feat to actually keep that sliver of tiny metal intact until he could get medical attention and the oh-so-critical paperwork to ensure another Purple Heart. Medical care involved removing a “rosebush thorn sized” bit of metal, applying some antibacterial ointment and a Band-Aid. Compare this to men lying abed in a hospital, missing a limb. Or compare this to the man who never returned and his family’s only comfort is the Purple Heart in a frame on the mantle. (And while I’m at it, the man who couldn’t throw a grenade safely is the same man who stole an opportunity for a returning real hero soldier to throw out the first pitch at a summer baseball game, and even then, Kerry threw it in the dirt. The man designated to catch that pitch was the very same soldier who was supposed to throw that game starting ball. All he got for his efforts was a face full of dirt and a quick run to capture the ball.)
The third and final ticket home injury was described as a “fingernail scratch” and then there was the ‘rice-as-shrapnel that hit him in the fanny as he took a hard landing on a bag of rice. Again, compare this to the men bleeding their lives out on a gurney, in a field hospital. There are acts of heroism, bravery and valour; there are wounds that earn those medals and acts above and beyond the call of duty. There are acts that put another man’s life before your own. But to hear Kerry tell it and to see the artfully staged film he brought home with him, you’d think Kerry was on the battlefield, wounded mortally while running back to lift a fatally wounded man out of the hot zone. Funny, but I always heard the shot-in-the-ass was an embarrassment and cause for laughter and chiding.
One can wonder if a story told at a convention is not the worst form of lie, for it is created and not reflective of actual events and the man who tells it is a liar and knows it. To tell a lie inadvertently is not the same as knowingly allowing people to believe a lie.
After arriving back in the USA, as the antiwar sentiment is growing, Kerry joins with Jane Fonda to trash this country, lie about the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines still fighting and dying in Vietnam and calls them rapists, torturers and murderers of the worst kind. Kerry is an instant hero among the unwashed cowards who are also funded by the enemy, the Communists, who are working within this country against the US and her allies. Sound familiar? Hell, Kerry even went to France to negotiate and interfere with the (so-called) Peace process.
There is a French saying: plus ca change, plus c’est la même chose; the more things change, the more they stay the same. Again, today, our enemy is the French, who stole from the American taxpayers’ generous hearts, via the UN and took food from the mouths of starving babies while giving shoulder fired missiles to the enemy and still Kerry is supported by them.
When John McCain came back from his imprisonment by the enemy Vietcong, he wrote in the May 14, 1973, issue of U.S. News & World Report, the POW-turned-senator charging that testimony by Kerry and others before J. William Fulbright’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee was “the most effective propaganda [my North Vietnamese captors] had to use against us.”
“They used Senator Fulbright a great deal,” (a reference to Kerry’s 1971 Senate testimony that U.S. soldiers were committing war crimes in Vietnam as a matter of course).
Mc Cain said that Kerry friend and rabid supporter Sen.Ted Kennedy was “quoted again and again” by his jailers at the Hanoi Hilton.
“All through this period,” McCain told U.S. News, his captors were “bombarding us with anti-war quotes from people in high places back in Washington. This was the most effective propaganda they had to use against us.” While McCain was a prisoner of war in the infamous Hanoi Hilton, Kerry was hard at work supplying the enemy with psychological warfare to be used by McCain’s captors and to eventually help the enemy send the US packing.
But now, McCain comes out and trashes the Swiftees who were actually there and observed Kerry’s disgusting and craven behaviour. So what’s the truth, Senator McCain? Is your hatred for Bush so great that you have joined the bandwagon of those who are not so much for the vapid Kerry as against the current Commander in Chief?
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”