Was John Kerry In Cambodia On Christmas?

Presidential Candidate John Kerry has claimed several times that he spent Christmas Eve of 1968 not in Vietnam but in Cambodia. The reason this is significant is because he used that as a basis to impugn the integrity of those who waged the Vietnam War. The Wall Street Journal Writes,

This is how he[John Kerry] described it to the Boston Herald in 1979: "I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies. . . . The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real."

In 1986 Mr. Kerry argued on the Senate floor against U.S. support for the Nicaraguan contras, again citing the 1968 Christmas in Cambodia and "the president of the United States telling the American people I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared--seared--in me." In a 1992 interview with the Associated Press the story came back: "By Christmas 1968, part of Kerry's patrol extended across the border of South Vietnam into Cambodia."

Trouble is, the person who appears to have been wrong here about Mr. Kerry's location was not the president--who was Lyndon Johnson, not Nixon, by the way--but Mr. Kerry himself. His commanding officers all testify to this fact, as do men who were on his boat at the time.


And what does Kerry say about this now? The Wall Street Journal continues,

Last Wednesday Kerry spokesman Michael Meehan sent me a statement saying that "During John Kerry's service in Vietnam, many times he was on or near the Cambodian border and on one occasion crossed into Cambodia. . . . On December 24, 1968 Lieutenant John Kerry and his crew were on patrol in the watery borders between Vietnam and Cambodia deep in enemy territory." I asked for clarification as to whether the "one occasion" was Christmas Eve 1968. "No," was the reply.

"Watery borders" is something of an evasion, intended to imply that Mr. Kerry's "seared" memory might have been easily confused. But according to both the maps and the testimony of swift vets, the Mekong doesn't run along the Cambodian border but bisects it, such that the coincidence between the two is obvious. In any case, Mr. Kerry's own journal, as cited in Douglas Brinkley's biography, records him being 50-some miles from the border at Sa Dec on that day contemplating visions of "sugar plums."


So John Kerry is back tracking on one of the central arguments he used to destroy the reputations of the soldiers he served with. And if it were not for the new book just released, Unfit For Command, we would have never known. Unfit For Command, written by the men who served with him, answers several other questions as well, questions like,

  • How all three of John Kerry's Purple Hearts were for minor injuries, easily treated with band-aids, not requiring a single hour of hospitalization

  • How captured Americans were tortured in North Vietnamese prisons for not endorsing John Kerry's false testimony-before the United States Senate-about alleged American war crimes

  • How John Kerry carried a typewriter and an 8-mm home movie camera with him to Vietnam so he could record his own exaggerated version of his war exploits and film staged reenactments of his "combat actions" to advance his political career

  • How two of John Kerry's three Purple Heart decorations resulted from self-inflicted wounds, not suffered under enemy fire

  • How John Kerry's reckless behavior convinced his colleagues that he had to go-becoming the only swift boat veteran to serve only four-months in Vietnam

  • How Kerry met secretly with communist delegates at the Paris Peace Conference during the Vietnam War, and why some believe he violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice and federal law

  • Why John Kerry's photograph hangs in a place of honor in the Vietnamese communist "War Remnants Museum" in Saigon


    • The book also details why most of the soldiers that served with Kerry do not endorse him.

    Unfit For Command was written by soldiers close to Kerry, soldiers who served with Kerry, and, as Amazon's review writes, "based on detailed interviews with Swift Boat veterans who served in Vietnam with John Kerry and on recently released FBI surveillance reports of John Kerry's anti-war activities, Unfit for Command is a shocking indictment of a politician who slandered his fellow veterans, danced on the edge of treason, and has shamelessly exaggerated his own war service for political ends".

    Say what you will about the book but when a Presidential candidate makes their four and a half month tour in war their defining moment to be elected President, the book is at least worth looking into. Afterall, we have one example on record where the book was correct and John Kerry lied.

    Comments

    Post a Comment

    Popular posts from this blog

    John Kerry And Gay Marriage

    With the recent resignation of Democrat New Jersey governor, announcing his homosexual affair , and the recent California Supreme Court decision voiding homosexual certificates I thought it a good time to discuss Presidential Candidate John Kerry's view on homosexual marriage. A few months ago there was a bill going through the senate that would have created a constitutional ammendment defining marriage as only between a man and a women. Kerry used the states right argument to argue against it. Arguing that we should let the states decide instead of forcing at the federal level. That's odd he would use that argument because when a bill came through the senate pushed through by Bill Clinton, called the Defense of Marriage Act, arguing for the exact same thing, Kerry voted against it . A bill that was passed with 85% of the senate voting in favor of it, with both Democrats and Republicans voting for it. However Kerry, being the extreme liberal that he is, voted against it. In c...
    Read more

    The Importance Of Kerry's Cambodia Claim

    Image
    As I have posted on this blog before , The Swift Boat Vets against Kerry have already caught Kerry in at least one lie; the claim that he was in Cambodia on Christmas of 1968. Joshua Muravchik, writing in the Washington Post explains why that lie is so significant, he writes , After his discharge, Kerry became the leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Once, he presented to Congress the accounts by his VVAW comrades of having "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires . . . to human genitals . . . razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan . . . poisoned foodstocks." Later it was shown that many of the stories on which Kerry based this testimony were false, some told by impostors who had stolen the identities of real GIs, but Kerry himself was not implicated in the fraud. And his own over-the-top generalization that such "crimes [were] committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command...
    Read more

    Vietnam Boomerang

    The issue here, as I have heard it raised, is was he present and active on duty in Alabama at the times he was supposed to be. . . . Just because you get an honorable discharge does not in fact answer that question. ----John Kerry, questioning President Bush's military-service record, February 8, 2004. So begins an article by the Wall Street Journal demonstrating how John Kerry brought the recent criticism by swift boat vets upon himself. The article states, A good rule in politics is that anyone who picks a fight ought to be prepared to finish it. But having first questioned Mr. Bush's war service, and then made Vietnam the core of his own campaign for President, Mr. Kerry now cries No mas ! because other Vietnam vets are assailing his behavior before and after that war. And, by the way, Mr. Bush is supposedly honor bound to repudiate them. What did Mr. Kerry expect, anyway? That claiming to be a hero himself while accusing other veterans of "war crimes"--as he did...
    Read more