Quoth Telamon in

ws.prodigy.com:

There are only 2 people that served with Kerry that support
him.

What bodily orifice do you pull this crap out of? You Bush
cultists slay me.

Are you trying to convince me that there were only two people
standing on stage with him at the Democratic convention? Who
should I believe, you or my own eyes?

Another Swift Boat commander just came out publicly for Kerry
today, sick of seeing the Smear Vets' lies.

Fellow officer steps up to defend Kerry

BY WILLIAM B. ROOD
CHICAGO TRIBUNE

August 21, 2004, 8:21 PM EDT

There were three swift boats on the river that day in
Vietnam more than 35 years ago -- three officers and 15
crew members. Only two of those three officers remain to
talk about what happened on Feb. 28, 1969.

One is John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate
who won a Silver Star for what happened on that date. I
am the other.

For years, no one asked about those events. But now they
are the focus of skirmishing in a presidential election
with a group of swift boat veterans and others contending
that Kerry didn't deserve the Silver Star for what he did
on that day, or the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts
he was awarded for other actions.

Many of us wanted to put it all behind us -- the rivers,
the ambushes, the killing. Ever since that time, I have
refused all requests for interviews about Kerry's service
-- even those from reporters at the Chicago Tribune,
where I work.

But Kerry's critics, armed with stories I know to be
untrue, have charged that the accounts of what happened
were overblown. The critics have taken pains to say
they're not trying to cast doubts on the merit of what
others did, but their version of events has splashed
doubt on all of us. It's gotten harder and harder for
those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know
to be untrue, especially when they come from people who
were not there.

Calls for backup

Even though Kerry's own crew members have backed him,
the attacks have continued, and in recent days Kerry has
called me and others who were with him in those days,
asking that we go public with our accounts.

I can't pretend those calls had no effect on me, but
that is not why I am writing this. What matters most to
me is that this is hurting crewmen who are not public
figures and who deserved to be honored for what they did.
My intent is to tell the story here and to never again
talk publicly about it.

I was part of the operation that led to Kerry's Silver
Star. I have no firsthand knowledge of the events that
resulted in his winning the Purple Hearts or the Bronze
Star. But on Feb. 28, 1969, I was officer in charge of
PCF-23, one of three swift boats -- including Kerry's
PCF-94 and Lt. j.g. Donald Droz's PCF-43 -- that carried
Vietnamese regional and Popular Force troops and a Navy
demolition team up the Dong Cung, a narrow tributary of
the Bay Hap River, to conduct a sweep in the area.

The approach of the noisy 50-foot aluminum boats, each
driven by two huge 12-cylinder diesels and loaded down
with six crew members, troops and gear, was no secret.

Ambushes were a virtual certainty, and that day was no
exception. The difference was that Kerry, who had
tactical command of that particular operation, had talked
to Droz and me beforehand about not responding the way
the boats usually did to an ambush.

We agreed that if we were not crippled by the initial
volley and had a clear fix on the location of the ambush,
we would turn directly into it, focusing the boats' twin
.50-caliber machine guns on the attackers and beaching
the boats.
The Viet Cong in the area had come to expect that the
heavily loaded boats would lumber on past an ambush,
firing at the entrenched attackers, beaching upstream and
putting troops ashore to sweep back down on the ambush
site. Often, they were long gone by the time the troops
got there.

Under fire

The first time we took fire -- the usual rockets and
automatic weapons -- Kerry ordered a "turn 90" and the
three boats roared in on the ambush. It worked. We routed
the ambush, killing three of the attackers. The troops,
led by an Army adviser, jumped off the boats and began a
sweep, which killed another half-dozen VC, wounded or
captured others and found weapons, blast masks and other
supplies used to stage ambushes.

Meanwhile, Kerry ordered our boat to head upstream with
his, leaving Droz's boat at the first site.

It happened again, another ambush. And again, Kerry
ordered the turn maneuver, and again it worked. As we
headed for the riverbank, I remember seeing a loaded B-40
launcher pointed at the boats. It wasn't fired as two men
jumped up from their spider holes.

We called Droz's boat up to assist us, and Kerry,
followed by one member of his crew, jumped ashore and
chased a VC behind a hooch -- a thatched hut -- maybe 15
yards inland from the ambush site. Some who were there
that day recall the man being wounded as he ran. Neither
I nor Jerry Leeds, our boat's leading petty officer with
whom I've checked my recollection of all these events,
recalls that, which is no surprise. Recollections of
those who go through experiences like that frequently
differ. With our troops involved in the sweep of the
first ambush site, Richard Lamberson, a member of my
crew, and I also went ashore to search the area. I was
checking the inside of the hooch when I heard gunfire
nearby.

Questionable encounter

Not long after that, Kerry returned, reporting that he
had killed the man he chased behind the hooch. He also
had picked up a loaded B-40 rocket launcher, which we
took back to our base in An Thoi after the operation.

John O'Neill, author of a highly critical account of
Kerry's Vietnam service, describes the man Kerry chased
as a "teenager" in a "loincloth." I have no idea how old
the gunner Kerry chased that day was, but both Leeds and
I recall that he was a grown man, dressed in the kind of
garb the VC usually wore.

The man Kerry chased was not the "lone" attacker at that
site, as O'Neill suggests. There were others who fled.
There was also firing from the tree line well behind the
spider holes and at one point, from the opposite
riverbank as well. It was not the work of just one
attacker.

Our initial reports of the day's action caused an
immediate response from our task force headquarters in
Cam Ranh Bay.

Known over radio circuits by the call sign "Latch,"
then-Captain and now retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffmann, the
task force commander, fired off a message congratulating
the three swift boats, saying at one point that charging
the ambushes was a "shining example of completely
overwhelming the enemy" and that it "may be the most
efficacious method of dealing with small numbers of
ambushers." Hoffmann has become a leading critic of
Kerry's and now says that what the boats did on that day
demonstrated Kerry's inclination to be impulsive to a
fault.

Our decision to use that tactic under the right
circumstances was not impulsive, but was the result of
discussions well beforehand and a mutual agreement of all
three boat officers.

It was also well within the aggressive tradition that
was embraced by the late Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, then
commander of U.S. Naval Forces, Vietnam. Months before
that day in February, a fellow boat officer, Michael
Bernique, was summoned to Saigon to explain to top Navy
commanders why he had made an unauthorized run up the
Giang Thanh River, which runs along the Vietnam-Cambodia
border. Bernique, who speaks French fluently, had been
told by a source in Ha Tien at the mouth of the river
that a VC tax collector was operating upstream.

Ignoring the prohibition against it, Bernique and his
crew went upstream and routed the VC, pursuing and
killing several.

Instead of facing disciplinary action as he had
expected, Bernique was given the Silver Star, and Zumwalt
ordered other swifts, which had largely patrolled coastal
waters, into the rivers.

The decision sent a clear message, underscored
repeatedly by Hoffmann's congratulatory messages, that
aggressive patrolling was expected and that well-timed,
if unconventional, tactics like Bernique's were
encouraged.

In line with command

What we did on Feb. 28, 1969, was well in line with the
tone set by our top commanders.

Zumwalt made that clear when he flew down to our base at
An Thoi off the southern tip of Vietnam to pin the Silver
Star on Kerry and assorted Bronze Stars and commendation
medals on the rest of us.

My Bronze Star citation, signed by Zumwalt, praised the
charge tactic we used that day, saying the VC were
"caught completely off guard." There's at least one
mistake in that citation. It incorrectly identifies the
river where the main action occurred, a reminder that
such documents were often done in haste and sometimes
written for their signers by staffers. It's a cautionary
note for those trying to piece it all together. There's
no final authority on something that happened so long ago
-- not the documents and not even the strained
recollections of those of us who were there.

But I know that what some people are saying now is
wrong. While they mean to hurt Kerry, what they're saying
impugns others who are not in the public eye.

Men like Larry Lee, who was on our bow with an M-60
machine gun as we charged the riverbank, Kenneth Martin,
who was in the .50-caliber gun tub atop our boat, and
Benjamin Cueva, our engineman, who was at our aft gun
mount suppressing the fire from the opposite bank.

Wayne Langhoffer and the other crewmen on Droz's boat
went through even worse on April 12, 1969, when they saw
Droz killed in a brutal ambush that left PCF-43 an
abandoned pile of wreckage on the banks of the Duong Keo
River. That was just a few months after the birth of his
only child, Tracy.

The survivors of all these events are scattered across
the country now. Jerry Leeds lives in a tiny Kansas town
where he built and sold a successful printing business.
He owns a beautiful home with a lawn that sweeps to the
edge of a small lake, which he also owns.

Cueva, recently retired, has raised three daughters and
is beloved by his neighbors for all the years he spent
keeping their cars running. Lee is a senior computer
programmer in Kentucky, and Lamberson finished a second
military career in the Army.

With the debate over that long-ago day in February,
they're all living that war another time.




--
Where was AWOL George W. Bush?

http://www.glcq.com/bush_at_arpc1.htm