Revealed: How 'War Hero' Kerry Tried To Put Off Vietnam Military Duty

The Telegraph (UK) ^ | 3-7-2004 | Charles Laurence

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[TonyM]

From what I know about Vietnam veterans who experienced combat, the vast majority have been diagnosed with a mental disorder, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I don’t have the exact figures but I would estimate that 80 to 90 percent of Vietnam veterans who received a Purple Heart have been diagnosed with PTSD. In fact, just one Purple Heart or one Silver Star alone is accepted as verifiable evidence to the VA that a veteran was exposed to a stressful event which is most likely the cause of PTSD. Since Kerry has not just one, but four of these conceded stressors I would think that would make him a prime candidate to develop PTSD. It seems to me that that would make it a risk to put him to most stressful and powerful job on the planet.

[britishtim]

I did not mean that the White House directly would ask to look at Kerry's records but that when some groups do, all the fuss about Bush's records (which apparently the White House could have quashed earlier by having numerous people say that they remember Bush at those meetings in Alabama)will be in the public's mind so that it is regarded as fair game. I think that the Bush team's "fumbling" of this issue may have been strategery. It may not, but it may have been.

[TonyM]

Sorry, I misunderstood. I hope your right

[SuziQ]

Drip, drip.............

Heh, by November, it could likely be a flood!

[Gothmog]

Just FYI - she's also a backstabbing b!tch. IMHO, the press should be quoting JimRob.

[Gothmog]

Great catch, I had not seen that. Thanks.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Lying, democrat nominee bump!

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Kerry's World: Father Knows Best***From the start, Richard Kerry turned his oldest son into his foreign policy protégé. As Newsweek's Evan Thomas has written, "The Kerry dinner table was a nightly foreign-policy seminar. While other boys were eating TV dinners in front of the tube, [John] Kerry was discussing George Kennan's doctrine of containment." His father introduced the adolescent boy to such luminaries as Monnet and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Later, when he was at Yale, John Kerry traded letters with Clementine Churchill, Winston's wife.

As early as prep school, John Kerry showed signs that he shared his father's suspicions about America's cold war foreign policy. In a debate at St. Paul's in the late '50s, he argued that the United States should establish relations with Red China. During his junior year at Yale, he won a speech prize for an oration warning, "It is the specter of Western Imperialism that causes more fear among Africans and Asians than communism, and thus it is self-defeating." And, when he was tapped to deliver a graduation speech in 1966, he used the occasion to condemn U.S. involvement in Vietnam, intoning, "What was an excess of isolationism has become an excess of interventionism."

If Richard and John Kerry were not in perfect political sync, it was because the father, in an inversion of the usual dynamic, was more radical than the son. John Kerry, for instance, had grown enthusiastic about John F. Kennedy and his robust, anti-communist foreign policy. Indeed, it was his fervor for Kennedy's "bear any burden" call to service that largely inspired Kerry to join the Navy. Richard Kerry, by contrast, was more skeptical about New Frontier idealism. In a 1996 interview with The Boston Globe, he groused, "[John's] attitude was gung ho: had to show the flag. He was quite immature in that direction." When John Kerry came back from Vietnam, his father pushed him to be more outspoken in his opposition to the war. "When Kerry refused to speak out against the government [while in uniform], suddenly his father felt like he was being a wimp," says Brinkley. "[So he] encouraged his son to take off the uniform and to become a critic."

John Kerry, of course, did exactly this, first in Vietnam Veterans Against the War and eventually in the U.S. Senate. From the moment he arrived in Washington, Kerry promised that "issues of war and peace" would remain his passion. And, from the start, this meant that he would criticize Ronald Reagan's war against communism, especially when it was fought through proxies in the jungles of Central America. In 1985, he traveled to Nicaragua to meet with the Sandanista government, telling The Washington Post, "I see an enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell [the Sandinistas] what to do." Soon after his return, he pressured Congress into investigating the administration's illegal funding of the Contra rebels, opening a trail that culminated in the exposure of the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. And, a few years later, in the late '80s, he repeated this success, launching an investigation that revealed that another of the administration's favorite anti-communists, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, had been deeply enmeshed in drug-trafficking. Kerry was also skeptical enough of U.S. power that he voted against authorizing a popular intervention -- the Gulf war -- and opposed a 1995 resolution that would have allowed the arming of Bosnians.

There are differences, to be sure, between Richard and John Kerry. Over the course of his political career, John Kerry has occasionally endorsed the use of force, as in the cases of Panama and Kosovo, and he has always found a rhetorical place for morality in his foreign policy pronouncements. But, more often than not, even as John Kerry stumps for president, the similarities shine through. Last month, for example, Kerry charged that the administration's "high-handed treatment of our European allies, on everything from Iraq to the Kyoto climate-change treaty, has strained relations nearly to the breaking point." It should be no surprise to hear John Kerry worry about European allies and to strike such liberal internationalist notes. These ideas aren't just deeply felt; they're in his blood.*** [The main text of the article (linked above) outlines John Kerry's fathers political sympathies - very informative.]

[hosepipe]

[ John Kerry was a the skipper of the boat. I am convinced he submitted the paperwork for this citations himself, including the silver star. I also believe his purple hearts are fraudulent and that Kerry knew full well of the "3 heart" loophole that would allow him to end his tour early. To this day--he will not release his medical or records or comment on the wounds. ]

Sky.. I suspected as much myself...
actually it was a rhetorical question...
GEE, I love this place...LoL.. thanks..

[DoorGunner]

"Sen Kerry won a gallantry medal for his service as a gunboat captain..."

 

"A Kerry Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich."

[With apologies to Alice Childress]

 

DG

 

 

[YaYa123]

This story has legs....frog legs!

Shows Kerry's true colors, but almost as good, it debunks Douglas Brinkley as a legitimate "historian". He's Doris Kearns Goodwin out of drag. Shame on Brinkley for selling his soul to Kerry, writing this puff piece biography.

[prairiebreeze]

Thanks for the ping!

Prairie

[cricket]

How long will it take to get the truth of Kerry. . .slowly, it seems; but I hope surely and in due time. Meanwhile, Hillary plans and denies.

[cricket]

Question: 'Kerry Quotes' would be a great FR resource. . .anyone know if Bush.com et al are doing this?

[cricket]

"OMG, this is so great...... and then he spent the rest of the time trying to get OUT of there.........LOL. "

Probably had help with that; four months total (not consecutive) served in Vietnam. Of course, there were the injuries. . .

[cricket]

Missed the link. . .great one; and there are the 'Kerry Quotes' I was asking about. Do think FR would be a great resource for KQ's as well. . .

Hope Bush.com follows all this.

[cricket]

Thanks. . .striking post for sure!

[jrlc]

JFG-lite to Ted Kennedy-grande: "How are we going to BRIDGE past the request to release my military records?" Response: "Yeah, then we have to BRIDGE past the request to release your FBI file on your 1971 VVAW activities."

[craig_eddy]

My father enlisted to serve

And John F* Kerry trampled on your father's service because (I'm convinced) he only enlisted to bolster his political career.

Pass my thanks along to your father.