Hannity: ... served with John Kerry in Vietnam, and Scott Swett is with us, he's a webmaster for Swift Boat Vets and, uh, they came out with this ad. Now ... let me play the admission of Kerry, where he admits he committed atrocities and get your reaction to this, guys:
Kerry: ... yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities that thousands of other soldiers have committed, in that: I took part in shootings in free-fire zones; I conducted harassment and interdiction fire; I used 50-caliber machine guns which we were granted, ordered to use; I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages ...
Hannity: He also admits he violated the Geneva Convention. Uh, Admiral Hoffman, what do you think of what you just heard?
Adm. Hoffman: ... well, I think he's lying. He may have com... what he did himself, that's his business. But when he starts accusing his shipmates, we have in that division he was in, there were 23, uh, officers - there were 25, 2 are now deceased - of those 25, only one supports him to this day.
Hannity: Admiral, you mean one of the 25 Swift Boat guys
Adm. Hoffman: That's correct, his peer ONC's, the officers in charge, the same, uh, same position that he held
Hannity: Only one in twenty five?
Adm. Hoffman: One in 25 ... well, 2 are deceased, so we'll say one in 23.
Hannity: One in 23 ... Van, I mean ... I mean, is it possible - you were serving with him - you never saw him commit an atrocity, you never saw him burn a village.
Van: I never, I never saw a village, a friendly village burn. What I saw was, when we found VC hootches full of weapons or contraband, we burned those. But to go into a village or to fire in a village didn't happen. As a matter of fact, there were times that we withheld fire even though we were receiving fire because civilians were in the way. Ah, we weren't going about there willy-nilly; we had missions, specific missions, and we went and carried those out in the highest traditions of the Navy.
Hannity: Alright, let me ask you this, then, because this new book and we're going to have the first interview on this program next week, Unfit For Command, Swift Boat Vets speak about John Kerry with John O'Neill, in this book, in ah, it is claimed that Kerry earned his Silver Star by killing a lone, fleeing teenage VietCong in a loin cloth [garbled] that upon his command, numerous small animals were slaughtered by heavy caliber machine guns, and, uh, that he ran around with a Zippo lighter, burning up an entire innocent village. Is that, er, I mean he admits to doing that, is that the case; were you there for that?
Van: I was not there for any of those incidents. I do know that he, he shot the Vietnamese in the loin cloth, who had already been shot by his machine gunner ..
Hannity: Wait a minute, you saw this?
Van: No, I heard of it happening from his crew.
Hannity: Now explain what you heard had happened
Van: that, uh, that the young boy had already been, been aiming a rocket at them but the machine gunner had caught him in, in the legs and had shot him up pretty bad. And that Kerry went around and then fired and, and killed him at that point.
Adm. Hoffman[???]: Sean, that probably doesn't qualify as a war crime and I'm not sure anybody is claiming that ...
Hannity [talking over]: yeah, that doesn't sound like one to me ... I would openly admit that but, ah
Scott[?]: Sean, I was, I was involved in helping put the book together, and uh, one, one of the things that it focuses on is, Kerry is trying to blame the atrocities - he's not admitting to atrocities - he's saying that the entire US military structure was systematically committing atrocities ...
Hannity: No, no, no, that's a separate thing, he said, you just heard him in his own voice saying "I commited atrocities" ...
Scott[?]: Yes, "as did thousands of others"
Hannity: Yeah, but he says "I burn villages" so, I'm uh, you know I ...
Scott[?]: "that we were ordered to do"
Hannity: Ok, so
Scott[?]: Its the orders he wants to place the focus on
Hannity: Alright, so, but the point is if he did these things and he violated the Geneva Convention, and he committed atrocities, does he not have a responsibility to say no ... I mean, Admiral? I mean, do you know of any orders to burn villages? ... of innocent people?
Adm. Hoffman: No, of course there were no such orders. It's also worth noting that since Kerry was running around with a film crew all the time that, if he had atrocities to film its astounding that he didn't get any footage of that, instead of just him walking around with a gun.
Hannity: Alright, I got a lot more to get to with you guys, um, and I got to take a break ... we have a hard break coming up here ... and, uh, Van, by the way is a gunners mate, served with Kerry, you're gonna be on TV tonight ... and we got the other side of that debate ... and we're going to show you the latest poll numbers on Hannity & Colmes tonight [segue into break]
You're a lot better at this than I was! Well done!