"The truth really needs to be told about John Kerry's Purple Hearts. A case can be made that he's a coward."
--Neal Boortz, Feb. 17, 2004

Here is "the truth" about the war record of that "coward": After he graduated from Yale University in 1966, John Kerry joined the Navy. His classmates had selected him to give an early speech against the Vietnam War. But once in the military, he volunteered to command "Swift boats," the Apocalypse Now-style craft known for the ambushes they faced as they sped up and down South Vietnam's rivers.

On Feb. 28, 1969, while Lt. Kerry and his crew were running interference for a landing party downstream, a rocket blew out their boat's windows. He told the pilot to steer toward the spot from where the rocket had been launched.

As they approached the shore, Kerry's crew saw a Viet Cong soldier aiming his launcher at them. But before the boat hit the bank, the soldier ran away. The future senator leapt out to chase him about 30 yards through the mangroves. The enemy had just turned and was set again to fire a rocket when Kerry shot him dead.

Kerry was awarded a Silver Star for his role in that engagement and several others on the same day. In his citation, Vice Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. noted that "the extraordinary daring and personal courage of Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry in attacking a numerically superior force in the face of intense fire were responsible for the highly successful mission."

Two weeks later, mines damaged Kerry's boat and two other Swifts in the Bay Hap River. Kerry's arm was injured. The boats were drawing snipers' bullets. As Kerry steered the boat toward a more damaged vessel, a member of his crew noticed that a Green Beret from another boat had been thrown overboard. The soldier was being peppered with enemy fire a few hundred yards behind them. Kerry turned his craft toward him.

"The man in the water was receiving sniper fire from both banks," Zumwalt wrote in a separate citation for the Bronze Star with Combat V that Kerry earned that day. "Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry directed his gunners to provide suppressing fire, while from an exposed position on the bow, his arm bleeding and in pain and with disregard for his personal safety, he pulled the man aboard."

Back on the home front in Atlanta, Neal Boortz began his talk-radio show Tuesday, Feb. 17, by questioning Kerry's courage. He hinted that later on he'd substantiate his insinuations. I listened as Boortz strung the tease out for about 30 minutes. But he had no substance.

Boortz's point turned out to be that Purple Hearts are awarded for relatively minor wounds. Perhaps, he speculated, Kerry purposely got injured to take advantage of the practice that three-time Purple Heart winners got to go home.

"He received three wounds, and he was in and out of Vietnam in four months," Boortz noted. "They were all minor wounds."

A week later, Boortz's website made the same point, describing Kerry's Purple Hearts as "flesh wounds" for which he wrote his own commendations--while George W. Bush "earned exemplary ratings" as an Air Guard pilot.

Neither on the show (at least, while I listened) nor on his website did Boortz mention Kerry's rather "exemplary" Silver Star or the Bronze Star with Combat V. Then again, I didn't hear Boortz boast of his own stellar war record. Today, he's an avid skier and airline pilot. But during the Vietnam War, he skirted the draft on account of what he now says was asthma.

Boortz's hypocrisy reaches into the realm of absurdity. But the scary thing is that it's impossible to keep up with the malicious misstatements of the Boortzes, Limbaughs and Hannitys who have come to dominate AM "news" radio.

Beware if you listen to their poisonous propaganda. Such scoundrels deserve our contempt.

I have a theory about Boortz's critique of Kerry's war record.

Two weeks ago, I reported that he falsely claimed there were Communist ties to a liberal website called MoveOn.org.

Now, however, the Communist Party site (cpusa.org) is linking to Boortz's site. And, suddenly, his upside-down world makes sense. No wonder, he sat out the Vietnam War! No wonder, he's dissing the Purple Heart winners who went in his place!

After all these years of claiming to be a Libertarian, Boortz--by his own logic--is coming out as a Communist. That makes about as much sense as anything you'd hear on his show.

Reprinted with permission--from Creative Loafing's Feb. 26 issue. Ken Edelstein is editor of Creative Loafing in Atlanta, Boortz's home base.

Kerry's war record is negated by his traitorous lies against fellow soldiers upon returning to American soil. Far be it to expect integrity from a leftist (who vehemently denies being the other L-word).

now anybody who uses a TV actor as a name is a sorry dude.
Chuck Norris huh? He is slow.
Ed Parker was a martial artist in one of the styles I learned and that guy was liquid death. Chuckwas and is a wimp like you.

While most Americans, perhaps including that former Yale cheerleader and elusive National Guardsman George W. Bush and, I suspect, most Vietnam veterans, would like to forget the past, the Vietnam War is about to be relived this election season.

Senator John Kerry, a veteran of both the war and the antiwar movement, is causing this national Vietnam flashback. The right-wing attack dogs are on the hunt. Newt Gingrich calls Kerry an "antiwar Jane Fonda liberal," while Internet warriors post fabricated images of Kerry and Fonda at a 1971 antiwar rally. Welcome to dirty tricks in the age of Photoshop.

The attempted smearing of Kerry through the Fonda "connection" is a Republican attempt to suppress an honest reopening of our unfinished exploration of the Vietnam era.

Neoconservatives and the Pentagon have good reason to fear the return of the Vietnam Syndrome. The label intentionally suggests a disease, a weakening of the martial will, but the syndrome was actually a healthy American reaction to false White House promises of victory, the propping up of corrupt regimes, crony contracting and cover-ups of civilian casualties during the Vietnam War that are echoed today in the news from Baghdad.

Young John Kerry's 1971 question--"How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?"--is more relevant than ever. . . .

I was in the Delta shortly after he left. I know that area well. I know the operations he was involved in well. I know the tactics and the doctrine used. I know the equipment. Although I was attached to CTF-116 (PBRs) I spent a fair amount of time with CTF-115 (swift boats), Kerry's command.

Here are my problems and suspicions:

(1) Kerry was in-country less than four months and collected, a Bronze Star, a Silver Star and three purple hearts. I never heard of anybody with any outfit I worked with (including SEAL One, the Sea Wolves, Riverines and the River Patrol Force) collecting that much hardware so fast, and for such pedestrian actions. The Swifts did a commendable job. But that duty wasn't the worst you could draw. They operated only along the coast and in the major rivers (Bassac and Mekong). The rough stuff in the hot areas was mainly handled by the smaller, faster PBRs.

(2) Three Purple Hearts but no limp. All injuries so minor that no time lost from duty. Amazing luck. Or he was putting himself in for medals every time he bumped his head on the wheel house hatch? Combat on the boats was almost always at close range. You didn't have minor wounds. At least not often. Not three times in a row. Then he used the three purple hearts to request a trip home eight months before the end of his tour. Fishy.

(3) The details of the event for which he was given the Silver Star make no sense at all. Supposedly, a B-40 was fired at the boat and missed. Charlie jumps up with the launcher in his hand, the bow gunner knocks him down with the twin .50, Kerry beaches the boat, jumps off, shoots Charlie, and retreives the launcher. If true, he did everything wrong.

(a) Standard procedure when you took rocket fire was to put your stern to the action and go balls to the wall. A B-40 has the ballistic integrity of a frisbie after about 25 yards, so you put 50 yards or so between you and the beach and begin raking it with your .50's. (b) Did you ever see anybody get knocked down with a ..50 caliber round and get up? The guy was dead or dying. The rocket launcher was empty. There was no reason to go after him (except if you knew he was no danger to you just flopping around in the dust during his last few seconds on earth, and you wanted some derring do in your after-action report). And we didn't shoot wounded people. We had rules against that, too.

(c) Kerry got off the boat. This was a major breach of standing procedures. Nobody on a boat crew ever got off a boat in a hot area. EVER! The reason was simple. If you had somebody on the beach your boat was defenseless. It coudn't run and it couldn' t return fire. It was stupid and it put his crew in danger. He should have been relieved and reprimanded. I never heard of any boat crewman ever leaving a boat during or after a firefight.

Something is fishy.

Here we have a JFK wannabe (the guy Halsey wanted to court martial for carelessly losing his boat and getting a couple people killed by running across the bow of a Jap destroyer) who is hardly in Vietnam long enough to get good tan, collects medals faster than Audie Murphy in a job where lots of medals weren't common, gets sent home eight months early, requests separation from active duty a few months after that so he can run for Congress, finds out war heros don't sell well in Massachsetts in 1970 so reinvents himself as Jane Fonda, throws his ribbons in the dirt with the cameras running to jump start his political career, gets Stillborn Pell to invite him to address Congress and Bobby Kennedy's speechwriter to do the heavy lifting, winds up in the Senate himself a few years later, votes against every major defense bill, says the CIA is irrelevant after the Wall came down, votes against the Gulf War, a big mistake since that turned out well, decides not to make the same mistake twice so votes for invading Iraq, but oops, that didn't turn out so well so he now says he really didn't mean for Bush to go to war when he voted to allow him to go to war.

I'm real glad you or I never had this guy covering our flanks in Vietnam. I sure don't want him as Commander in Chief. I hope that somebody from CTF-115 shows up with some facts challenging Kerry's Vietnam record. I know in my gut it's wildy inflated. And fishy.

Keep smiling,

Mike

And you think Kerry's record is "fishy".

Well, thanks for the warning buddy. I was just about to volunteer to campaing for John Kerry. Now that I know how your gut is feeling, I've changed my mind.

And so the primary season ends. November is still eight months away, but no matter: The general election campaign is now under way. John Kerry is going to be the Democratic Party's presidential nominee. And that means that President Bush is one step closer to re-election.

Just as they did four years ago with Al Gore, in 1988 with Michael Dukakis, in 1984 with Walter Mondale, and in 1980 with Jimmy Carter, the Democrats are poised to nominate a tedious blister as their standard bearer. In the months ahead, the voters will be harangued and hectored by Kerry, who will lecture them about how Bush has been the worst president in modern times, the Bush economy the most desperate, the Bush foreign policy the most reckless.

As spring and summer give way to fall, it will gradually dawn on many of them that Kerry isn't actually saying anything. What was true of the first President Bush, they will discover, is true of Kerry: He has no "vision thing." He has a sonorous answer to every question, but the more he talks -- and he talks a lot; his default setting is "filibuster" -- the less voters will be able to put their finger on why he wants to be president or whether anything about him is more than an inch deep.

"Excited by his résumé, his panache as a war hero, Americans from coast to coast will be disappointed in the real man," writes Jack Beatty, an ardent liberal, in The Atlantic Online. "They will long for him to stop his answers at the one-minute mark and by Minute 2 will have tuned out, and by Minute 3 will pine for the terse nullity of George W. Bush."

Terse Bush certainly is, but unlike Beatty, I don't think he is a nullity. In 2000 I did think that and didn't vote for him. But Sept. 11 changed Bush. It focused his mind and his presidency on a single overarching challenge: defeating international terrorism and the Middle Eastern fascists who sustain it. Hard-line Democrats have spent the past three years telling themselves that Bush is a shallow idiot or a reckless cowboy, and all the while the object of their derision has been steadily advancing the most audacious foreign policy since Ronald Reagan decided to win the Cold War.

Democrats thought Reagan was an idiot and a cowboy as well, too simplistic and dangerous to be given the keys to the White House. "When the globe is a tinderbox, we need a president who knows what he's doing. We need a president who ... has been tested by experience, who has read and remembered history ... who sees force as a last and not as a first resort." That was Walter Mondale in 1984, sounding a lot like Kerry in 2004.

Unlike Reagan, Bush isn't going to win a 49-state landslide -- the nation is too divided now. Indeed, Bush may not win at all, especially if the war takes a sudden bad turn. But he is likelier to win with an opponent like Kerry, who looks great only at first -- only until voters realize how much less there is to him than meets the eye.