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Unfit for Command

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published August 23, 2004

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( 5 votes, average: 3.9 out of 5)
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<<There are three possible reactions to watching the rival presidential campaigns and "527 organizations" lob trebuchets of pig excrement at one another for the next 60-odd days. The first is to feel indignation at the precipitous decline in civility of American political discourse; in the span of a single lifetime, politics has deteriorated from a gentlemanly game of tennis into a no-holds-barred bloodsport. The second is to feel indifference, of which nothing more need be said. And the third is to settle back in a La-Z-Boy with a large box of buttered popcorn and a supersize Coke to critique the spectacle. Your humble reviewer has reluctantly accepted this last option as a professional necessity. In any case, say what you like about "positive" [sic] campaigning: it's positively dull to watch.

Since the Kerry camp has elected to make the Senator's decorated service in Vietnam a central plank of his campaign for President, one would think that, like Brer Rabbit, they would be more than happy to be thrown into this particular briar patch. Controversy is the oxygen that keeps an issue burning before the media's camera lenses. Just ask Michael Moore and others of his ilk on both sides of the ideological spectrum who have elevated the milking of controversy into a lucrative art form; not only does controversy guarantee good box office returns, it also makes for good political theater. One wonders whether this book qua polemic is not an "own goal" for that reason - the voting public is reminded throughout the controversy that Kerry was, after all, in Vietnam. But the continuing furor over whether his career as the skipper of a swift boat was brilliant or brilliantine suggests otherwise.


Unfit for Command is a short, swift read, co-authored by the man (John O'Neill) who took over command of Kerry's swift boat after he left Vietnam. "The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" is a large group of former servicemen that has banded together to frag his bid for the presidency. They believe Kerry fragged their reputations while he was an antiwar organizer (calling them "war criminals," guilty of "genocide," and redolent of "Genghis Khan"). On Meet the Press, Kerry recently retracted the genocide claim.

Whatever ulterior political motives are behind this campaign (and the group as a whole claims none, describing a number of its members as Democrats and independents), their loathing seems deeply felt and altogether genuine. In fact, the temperature here is far higher than mere partisan rancor. Their hatred of John Kerry burns from these pages as hotly and as brightly as a phosphorous grenade.

Judging by the continuing uproar about their allegations and Senator Kerry's collapsing poll numbers among veterans, this salvo appears to have scored a direct hit below the water line and, some would say (to mix a metaphor), below the belt. The first roughly 60% of the book attempts to debunk the medals Kerry won in Vietnam. The remainder details Kerry's antiwar agitation while still allegedly serving in the Naval Reserve.

Trying to strip a man of his medals in a totally unofficial capacity appears absurd, even deplorable, on its face. What the authors have done is essentially recreated Kerry's chain of command, and now, following a sort of informal court martial that resembles nothing so much as a star chamber, these vets would like to rip the medals off his chest in the public's eye and declare him "unfit for command."

Most of the claims and counter-claims made regarding Kerry's medals are nearly impossible to verify. The reason has to do with the process by which these and other medals were awarded. As per procedure at the time, Kerry filed his own after-action reports, and, in most if not all cases, his peers did not ever see these reports, or even become aware of them, until recently. O'Neill and Corsi use eyewitness testimony, Senator Kerry's own somewhat conflicting accounts over the years, and some of the service records that have been released to challenge (and indeed, ridicule) the medal awards.

Here are the book's charges in a nutshell: the Purple Hearts were awarded for "self-inflicted" (through hapless use of grenades) "tweezers-and-band-aid-type" wounds that did not constitute serious injuries, and the Silver and Bronze stars were awarded for run-of-the-mill incidents that Kerry twisted into major combat encounters with himself in the starring role. To take one example, the Green Beret featured in Kerry's campaign, John Rassman, whom everyone agrees Kerry fished out of the water, was in fact one of many people in the water that were rescued that day. The controversy revolves around whether they were under fire at the time of the rescue (which is necessary for a medal to be awarded), and why Kerry's boat went downriver after another swift boat was mined instead of staying to provide covering fire for the stricken craft. Rassman and Kerry say they were under fire, and one set of official records agrees with them. The anti-Kerry "Swiftees" deny that bullets were flying from the riverbanks, and they cite the lack of bullet damage to the boats to support their claim.

Like most of the people who will read this book, I wasn't there. In my defense, I wasn't born at the time, but given the level of vitriol about the Vietnam War, some would say that hardly constitutes a defense. Nevertheless, that is the real problem in sorting out truth from falsehood in a controversy of this nature: the only men who truly know what happened, notwithstanding the fog of war and three intervening decades, are the men who lived through it. They are at sixes and sevens about what happened in '69, to put it mildly.

The anti-Kerry veterans have succeeded in casting doubt on some of Kerry's claims, such as his memorable "Christmas in Cambodia" in 1968. This was his "searing" memory of American governmental hypocrisy. While others were opening their stockings, Kerry and his men were under fire in a place they were — according to the Nixon Administration (which was not actually in power at the time) — not. This claim has sort of been retracted. The timing of the alleged Cambodia incursion has been moved until after Christmas.

The third problem with this campaign against Kerry's medals, after verifiability and its lack of official sanction, is that it may be based on a variation of a fallacy: post hoc ergo propter hoc. The fallacy is falsely positing causality to something because it happened afterwards. In this case, the order is reversed: Kerry lied about Swiftees (and all other combat veterans) being war criminals for his own political advancement, the group says; as a result, their perception of his conduct in Vietnam may have been colored by their subsequent loathing of the man. In other words, the veterans only went after Kerry after he had (according to them) slandered them following his return home in his extraordinary 'J'accuse!' speech before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he fingered himself and his erstwhile comrades as rampaging Genghis Khans. So after Kerry's explosive testimony, they may have looked back over their preceding experiences with him and seen something different: medal-hunting fuelled by political ambition. Had Kerry not attacked their honor, it is doubtful whether they would have raised any issue with his medals. The authors would undoubtedly deny this charge. They claim that Kerry's fellow officers disliked and distrusted him during the war for professional reasons and that one of them even asked him to go home early after receiving a third Purple Heart (because of an obscure policy). Kerry did.

There are explosive allegations in the book above and beyond what has been reported in the media. For instance, the authors allege that earlier this year, John Kerry contacted Admiral Hoffman, one of the key organizers of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and offered to revise his biography, Tour of Duty, so that the retired Admiral would not be treated as harshly in forthcoming editions of the book. There was a quid pro quo: Hoffman should back off. If true - and the authors have invited Kerry to sue them for libel - this is potent stuff. The portrait that emerges from these and other incidents is not so much of a blow-dried blowhard, but of a towering villain. Say what you like about its accuracy and however serious the subject matter, it is undeniably entertaining.

It's a shame that the Vietnam War, as Faulkner once said of the past, is never really past, and that these aging veterans, Senator Kerry included, can not finally lay down their arms and enjoy the peace of their advancing years. But that seems impossible for them to do. Perhaps a round of apologies would help heal this grievous wound in the nation's psyche, which still, decades later, suppurates.
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published August 23, 2004

( 5 votes, average: 3.9 out of 5)
What do you think about this article? Rate it using the stars above and let us know what you think in the comments below.

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