Vietnam Vet Kerry Told Senate He Saw Military Action in Cambodia

Insight on the News ^ | May 16, 2004 | J. Michael Waller

[robomurph]

Did decorated Vietnam War veteran John F. Kerry see military action in Cambodia? He says nothing about it on the campaign trail, but he stated it as fact on the floor of the U.S. Senate on March 27, 1986. In that speech, Kerry accused President Ronald Reagan of leading the United States into another Vietnam in Central America, accusing the administration of Nixon-like duplicity and saying that he should recognize it because of his Vietnam experience.

[Conservative Infidel]

And then when he got back to 'the world', he helped Algore invent the Internet!

[abner]

Any insight on this?

[Cuttnhorse]

LOL!!

We were warned not to tangle with these guys...they had bigger guns and could run circles around the Swifts. When we were patroling in the northern zone, someone was ALWAYS monitoring the radar looking for a contact moving very fast.

[DBrow]

incredulous bump!

What next?

[NoClones]

kerry will say he did a portage before he didn't do a portage!

[Arkie2]

I thought I recognized that boat captain in the movie! It was Big John!

[Riley]

Do you happen to remember what class they were? Now I'm curious.

[WWTraveler]

LBJ was still prez in Dec 1968.

[Arkie2]

Yeah, I guess the Cambodians might have been using them as the Frogs never meant them to be used. In combat!

[Cuttnhorse]

There were Coast Guard PBRs in An Thoi; now that I recall, a PBR was the first boat I was on in Nam...flew in to the airbase in An Thoi, and was transported by PBR south to the base at the southern tip of Phu Quoc island.

Our boat went aground once and a PBR pulled us off a sand bar...OH the mortification, a Navy boat pulled free by the Coasties.

[Interesting Times]

I just mentioned this to John O'Neill. He said that the Swift boats did patrol one river that ran along the border, but there weren't any canals that went into Cambodia, and that Kerry's tales of incursions and battles with Cambodians are typical Kerry fiction. I'm sending John the article to add to his growing collection of Kerry's lies about Vietnam...

[bornintexas]

"LBJ was still president"

That's right! This guy is such a freakin liar. He learned from Kennedy and Clinton very well. I don't believe a word that comes out of his boring pompous mouth.

[highlander_UW]

By Kerry standards I would have innumerable purple hearts for all the hangovers I received at the O' Club bar on Friday nights all those years ago.

I wonder if I can submit for a purple heart. I hitched a ride from some other soldiers in Germany from a pub and just outside of my base the driver took too wide a turn because he was speeding and we did a head on with a German car. My leg was injured by the seat in front of me. It was more serious than a splinter of a piece of shrapnel from a self inflicted wound (if he didn't just shove it in his arm himself).

[Cuttnhorse]

I really don't recall...seems we had some silhouettes of them, but can't recall what we refered to them as...possibly corvetts?...maybe smaller?? I think they were powered with twin gasoline engines.

The swifts had twin Jimmy V-12s diesels and I always thought should go faster than 22-knots wide open.

[sergeantdave]

Maybe Kerry screwed wheels on his swift boat, cut a long pole and patrolled the Ho Chi Mihn trail.

[Riley]

22 knots?! That's all? They should have come up with another name for them...

I whipped out my handy-dandy copy of the ISSA's "Defense & Foreign Affairs Handbook, Fifteenth Edition". Everything that the Cambodes have nowadays (thirty years on, of course) is ex-Soviet-- except for some '21 meter patrol craft', with no further details.

I wonder if they're still 'sailoring' on.

[Nam Vet]

I was leaving An Thoi when John 'F-ing' Kerry arrived at that precise station. That was October of 1968. An Thoi is on Phu Quoc Island directly west of the Cambodian / Vietnam border.

Overview map (http://rectravel.com/kmt/)

Phu Quoc / An Thoi map (http://www.vngold.com/pq/map2.html)

In short, the patrol zones in that sector were VERY near and around Cambodia, but not IN Cambodia. Kerry exhibits nothing but mendacity and flip-flop.

Nam Vet

[abner]

Awesome awesome!

[pilgrim]

Heroism, and growing concern about war

 

By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff, 6/16/2003

(Snip)

The Christmas Eve truce of 1968 was three minutes old when mortar fire exploded around John Forbes Kerry and his five-man crew on a 50-foot aluminum boat near Cambodia. ''Where is the enemy?'' a crewmate shouted.

In the distance, an elderly man was tending his water buffalo -- and serving as human cover for a dozen Viet Cong manning a machine-gun nest.

"Open fire; let's take 'em," Kerry ordered, according to his second-in-command, James Wasser of Illinois. Wasser blasted away with his M-60, hitting the old man, who slumped into the water, presumably dead. With a clear path to the enemy, the fusillade from Kerry's Navy boat, backed by a pair of other small vessels, silenced the machine-gun nest.

When it was over, the Viet Cong were dead, wounded, or on the run. A civilian apparently was killed, and two South Vietnamese allies who had alerted Kerry's crew to the enemy were either wounded or killed.

On the same night, Kerry and his crew had come within a half-inch of being killed by "friendly fire," when some South Vietnamese allies launched several rounds into the river to celebrate the holiday.

To top it off, Kerry said, he had gone several miles inside Cambodia, which theoretically was off limits, prompting Kerry to send a sarcastic message to his superiors that he was writing from the Navy's "most inland" unit.

Back at his base, a weary, disconsolate Kerry sat at his typewriter, as he often did, and poured out his grief. "You hope that they'll courtmartial you or something because that would make sense," Kerry typed that night. He would later recall using court-martial as "a joke," because nothing made sense to him -- the war policy, the deaths, and his presence in the middle of it all.

To his crew, Kerry was one of the most daring skippers in the US Navy, relentlessly and courageously engaging the enemy. But the battles and moral dilemmas were in shades of gray, and Kerry to this day wrestles with the scenes of death he commanded.

In an intense three months of combat following that Christmas Eve battle, Kerry often would go beyond his Navy orders and beach his boat, in one case chasing and killing a teenage Viet Cong enemy who wore only a loin cloth and carried a rocket launcher. Kerry's aggressiveness in combat caused a commanding officer to wonder whether he should be given a medal or court-martialed. (End of snippet)

From the Boston Globe not Senate floor.

[Cuttnhorse]

Hey Nam Vet...I was in An Thoi in 1965 on PCFs 10 and 45...was on boat crew 17.