Some questions about Kerry's service

[Ranger12 53]

Revealed: how 'war hero' Kerry tried to put off Vietnam military duty

By Charles Laurence in New York

(Filed: 03/07/2004)

Senator John Kerry, the presumed Democratic presidential candidate who is trading on his Vietnam war record to campaign against President George W Bush, tried to defer his military service for a year, according to a newly rediscovered article in a Harvard University newspaper.

Senator Kerry on the campaign trail in Iowa

He wrote to his local recruitment board seeking permission to spend a further 12 months studying in Paris, after completing his degree course at Yale University in the mid-1960s.

The revelation appears to undercut Sen Kerry's carefully-cultivated image as a man who willingly served his country in a dangerous war - in supposed contrast to President Bush, who served in the Texas National Guard and thus avoided being sent to Vietnam.

The Harvard Crimson newspaper followed a youthful Mr Kerry in Boston as he campaigned for Congress for the first time in 1970. In the course of a lengthy article, "John Kerry: A Navy Dove Runs for Congress", published on February 18, the paper reported: "When he approached his draft board for permission to study for a year in Paris, the draft board refused and Kerry decided to enlist in the Navy."

Samuel Goldhaber, the article's author who is now a cardiologist attached to the Harvard School of Medicine, spent 11 hours trailing Mr Kerry and still remembers that the subject of the Paris deferment came up during long conversations about Vietnam.

"I stand by my story," he told The Telegraph. "It was a long time ago, and I was 19 at the time, so it is hard to remember every detail. But I do know this: at no point did Kerry contact either me or the Crimson to dispute anything I had written."

Sen Kerry's campaign headquarters in Washington refused an opportunity to deny the report. Despite repeated telephone calls from The Telegraph, a spokesman refused to comment. Another Democrat official said merely: "In Vietnam, John Kerry proved his patriotism beyond question. Everyone knows that."

A senior Republican strategist, who asked not to be named, said: "I've not heard this before. This undercuts Kerry's complaints about Bush and it continues to pose questions as to his credibility among ordinary Vietnam veterans."

He said it would fuel concerns over the way Sen Kerry made a name for himself by leading anti-war protests in Washington and Boston in the late 1960s and early 1970s after he had completed his service in the US Navy, even while his former comrades continued to fight and die.

A newly-published biography of Sen Kerry by Douglas Brinkley, A Tour of Duty, makes no mention of the requested deferment or planned year in Paris. At the time, it was still unclear just how long America would remain in Vietnam, and it might have seemed that a year's deferral of service could render enlistment unnecessary.

According to the Democratic Party's version of Sen Kerry's military history, he joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps at Harvard through eagerness to do his duty, and sailed with the Navy for combat as soon as he graduated in 1966.

Sen Kerry won a gallantry medal for his service as a gunboat captain on the Mekong Delta, and was honorably discharged with three "purple heart" medals after sustaining three wounds. He has consistently presented himself as a leader who argued against the war only after fulfilling his duty in the field. Supporters argue that his war record makes him a more trustworthy leader than President Bush, who served sporadically in the National Guard at home.

"This means that Kerry didn't jump into all that heroic service until he was pushed, and it is a very nice piece of information," said Lucianne Goldberg, a prominent Republican campaigner.

Republican strategists for President Bush were already investigating Sen Kerry's record of three wounds sustained in Vietnam. "We find that he had only one day off sick - with three wounds? What exactly were these wounds?" she asked.

Mr Goldhaber recalled that, during a day spent with Sen Kerry and one assistant during his congressional campaign, he had described his involvement, service and decision to oppose the war in great detail.

"I am not at all surprised that he wants to be president, because he exuded ambition from the word go," said Dr Goldhaber. "At the time, the idea that he tried to persuade the draft board to let him spend a year in Paris was just a detail."

A spokesman for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign declined to comment.

[TexasTiger 14,289]

Revealed: how 'war hero' Kerry tried to put off Vietnam military duty

By Charles Laurence in New York

(Filed: 03/07/2004)

Senator John Kerry, the presumed Democratic presidential candidate who is trading on his Vietnam war record to campaign against President George W Bush, tried to defer his military service for a year, according to a newly rediscovered article in a Harvard University newspaper.

 

Senator Kerry on the campaign trail in Iowa

He wrote to his local recruitment board seeking permission to spend a further 12 months studying in Paris, after completing his degree course at Yale University in the mid-1960s.

The revelation appears to undercut Sen Kerry's carefully-cultivated image as a man who willingly served his country in a dangerous war - in supposed contrast to President Bush, who served in the Texas National Guard and thus avoided being sent to Vietnam.

The Harvard Crimson newspaper followed a youthful Mr Kerry in Boston as he campaigned for Congress for the first time in 1970. In the course of a lengthy article, "John Kerry: A Navy Dove Runs for Congress", published on February 18, the paper reported: "When he approached his draft board for permission to study for a year in Paris, the draft board refused and Kerry decided to enlist in the Navy."

Samuel Goldhaber, the article's author who is now a cardiologist attached to the Harvard School of Medicine, spent 11 hours trailing Mr Kerry and still remembers that the subject of the Paris deferment came up during long conversations about Vietnam.

"I stand by my story," he told The Telegraph. "It was a long time ago, and I was 19 at the time, so it is hard to remember every detail. But I do know this: at no point did Kerry contact either me or the Crimson to dispute anything I had written."

Sen Kerry's campaign headquarters in Washington refused an opportunity to deny the report. Despite repeated telephone calls from The Telegraph, a spokesman refused to comment. Another Democrat official said merely: "In Vietnam, John Kerry proved his patriotism beyond question. Everyone knows that."

A senior Republican strategist, who asked not to be named, said: "I've not heard this before. This undercuts Kerry's complaints about Bush and it continues to pose questions as to his credibility among ordinary Vietnam veterans."

He said it would fuel concerns over the way Sen Kerry made a name for himself by leading anti-war protests in Washington and Boston in the late 1960s and early 1970s after he had completed his service in the US Navy, even while his former comrades continued to fight and die.

A newly-published biography of Sen Kerry by Douglas Brinkley, A Tour of Duty, makes no mention of the requested deferment or planned year in Paris. At the time, it was still unclear just how long America would remain in Vietnam, and it might have seemed that a year's deferral of service could render enlistment unnecessary.

According to the Democratic Party's version of Sen Kerry's military history, he joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps at Harvard through eagerness to do his duty, and sailed with the Navy for combat as soon as he graduated in 1966.

Sen Kerry won a gallantry medal for his service as a gunboat captain on the Mekong Delta, and was honorably discharged with three "purple heart" medals after sustaining three wounds. He has consistently presented himself as a leader who argued against the war only after fulfilling his duty in the field. Supporters argue that his war record makes him a more trustworthy leader than President Bush, who served sporadically in the National Guard at home.

"This means that Kerry didn't jump into all that heroic service until he was pushed, and it is a very nice piece of information," said Lucianne Goldberg, a prominent Republican campaigner.

Republican strategists for President Bush were already investigating Sen Kerry's record of three wounds sustained in Vietnam. "We find that he had only one day off sick - with three wounds? What exactly were these wounds?" she asked.

Mr Goldhaber recalled that, during a day spent with Sen Kerry and one assistant during his congressional campaign, he had described his involvement, service and decision to oppose the war in great detail.

"I am not at all surprised that he wants to be president, because he exuded ambition from the word go," said Dr Goldhaber. "At the time, the idea that he tried to persuade the draft board to let him spend a year in Paris was just a detail."

A spokesman for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign declined to comment.

The short version is that Kerry apparently asked for a 12 month student deferrment, was turned down and promptly signed up for duty. If you actually find this interesting, then you should really want to learn more about how Dick Cheney, who had flunked out twice and had two drunk driving convictions while in school, managed to get 4 such deferrments, allowing him to get through graduate school. Once those ran out, a well-timed pregnancy kept him out all together. This from the most pro-war guy in the administration.

And this week, he chose a running mate, Dick Cheney, whose extended student life - and the fortuitous conception of his first child - insulated him from any military service during the Vietnam War.

link

[Ranger12 53]

You totally missed the meat of the article didn't you? He attacked Bush for his military service while he tried to do the same thing that he accused Bush of doing. Have you read all the other articles that questions Kerry's four month service in Vietnam? Three purple hearts in four months time, plus his other "herioc" awards. Yet he refuses to release his military records like Bush did. Here is another interesting article about Kerry's service:

Setting Straight Kerry’s War Record

By Thomas Lipscomb

The New York Sun | March 1, 2004

Senator Kerry recently wrote a letter to President Bush complaining, “You and your campaign have initiated a widespread attack on my service in Vietnam, my decision to speak out to end that war,” and warning, “I will not sit back and allow my patriotism to be challenged.”

In the absence of any evidence from Mr. Kerry of an attack from the Bush campaign, Mr. Kerry seems to have originated his own doctrine of “pre-emption.” How valid are his concerns?

No one denies Mr. Kerry’s four bemedaled months in “Swiftboats” or his seven-months’ service as an electrical officer on board the USS Gridley, during its cruises back and forth to California, or even his months as an admiral’s aide in Brooklyn, before he was able get out of the Navy six months early to run for office.

Taking a look at Mr. Kerry’s much-promoted Vietnam service, his military record was, indeed, remarkable in many ways. Last week, the former assistant secretary of defense and Fletcher School of Diplomacy professor, W. Scott Thompson, recalled a conversation with the late Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. that clearly had a slightly different take on Mr. Kerry’s recollection of their discussions:

“[T]he fabled and distinguished chief of naval operations,Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, told me — 30 years ago when he was still CNO —that during his own command of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam, just prior to his anointment as CNO, young Kerry had created great problems for him and the other top brass,by killing so many non-combatant civilians and going after other non-military targets.‘We had virtually to straitjacket him to keep him under control,’ the admiral said. ‘Bud’ Zumwalt got it right when he assessed Kerry as having large ambitions — but promised that his career in Vietnam would haunt him if he were ever on the national stage.” And this statement was made despite the fact Zumwalt had personally pinned a Silver Star on Mr. Kerry.

Mr. Kerry was assigned to Swiftboat 44 on December 1, 1968. Within 24 hours, he had his first Purple Heart. Mr. Kerry accumulated three Purple Hearts in four months with not even a day of duty lost from wounds, according to his training officer. It’s a pity one cannot read his Purple Heart medical treatment reports which have been withheld from the public. The only person preventing their release is Mr. Kerry.

By his own admission during those four months, Mr. Kerry continually kept ramming his Swiftboat onto an enemy-held shore on assorted occasions alone and with a few men, killing civilians and even a wounded enemy soldier. One can begin to appreciate Zumwalt’s problem with Mr. Kerry as commander of an unarmored craft dependent upon speed of maneuver to keep it and its crew from being shot to pieces.

Mr. Kerry now refers to those civilian deaths as “accidents of war.”And within four days of his third Purple Heart, Mr. Kerry applied to take advantage of a technicality which allowed him to request immediate transfer to a stateside post.

Once back in the States, Mr. Kerry joined “the struggle for our veterans,” as he called it last week in Atlanta, by joining a scruffy organization called the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The VVAW’s executive director, Al Hubbard, supposedly a former Air Force captain wounded in Vietnam, quickly appointed Mr. Kerry to the executive committee.

Mr. Kerry participated with the VVAW at agitprop rallies such as Valley Forge and the “Winter Soldier” guerrilla theater atrocity trials in Detroit, finally testifying in April 1971 before the Senate as an authority on the war crimes his fellow American servicemen had committed in Vietnam.

Outside of his own “accidents of war,” there is no evidence that Mr. Kerry had then or has now the least idea what may or may not have been the realities of ground combat. However, he had no problem reeling off for the Senate a series of unproven, secondhand allegations that would have been perfectly at home at the Nuremberg trials indicting his fellow veterans.

Mr. Kerry stated there were “war crimes committed in Southeast Asia...not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-today basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.” Then Mr. Kerry got specific:

“They had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam...we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free-fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search-and-destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam.”

In other words, My Lai was just another day in the life of the Vietnam War.

This wasn’t a one-time occasion. The VVAW had been peddling this line from the day Mr. Kerry joined them and had been publishing charges like this for the previous two years. Mr. Kerry repeated them on “Meet the Press” with Al Hubbard, who was found to be a total fraud and who never served in Vietnam, much less was wounded. However, Mr. Kerry has never renounced the charges he made.

Recently, his fellow VVAW supporter, Jane Fonda, has tried to minimize a potentially damaging picture of him a few rows behind her at the three-day VVAW Valley Forge rally in September 1970. And many members of the press fell for the line that it was accidental or coincidental, including Fox’s Chris Wallace and ABC’s Tim Russert.

However, there were only eight or nine speakers that day, including Donald Sutherland, Mark Lane, Bella Abzug, and Ms. Fonda. And far from being a casual audience member, Mr. Kerry, an executive committee member, not Ms. Fonda, was the lead speaker.

Ms. Fonda had been funding VVAW events since before Mr. Kerry joined its executive committee. At Valley Forge, Ms. Fonda said: “My Lai was not an isolated incident but rather a way of life for many of our military.”

Their appearance together in that picture may be a lot of things, but it was not a coincidence.

Mr. Kerry has already confessed his complicity in killing civilians as “accidents of war.” However, he has offered a classic Nuremberg defense that this was not only a commonplace occurrence throughout the Vietnam War, but he was carrying out a policy “with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”

His commander of naval operations in Vietnam, who specifically designed the mission that Mr. Kerry and the other Swiftboat commanders executed, Admiral Zumwalt, clearly disagreed. An examination of the truth behind this disagreement is not an attack on Mr. Kerry. It is a matter of vital historical interest.

[TexasTiger 14,289]

You totally missed the meat of the article didn't you? He attacked Bush for his military service while he tried to do the same thing that he accused Bush of doing. Have you read all the other articles that questions Kerry's four month service in Vietnam? Three purple hearts in four months time, plus his other "herioc" awards. Yet he refuses to release his military records like Bush did. Here is another interesting article about Kerry's service:

Setting Straight Kerry’s War Record

By Thomas Lipscomb

The New York Sun | March 1, 2004

Senator Kerry recently wrote a letter to President Bush complaining, “You and your campaign have initiated a widespread attack on my service in Vietnam, my decision to speak out to end that war,” and warning, “I will not sit back and allow my patriotism to be challenged.”

In the absence of any evidence from Mr. Kerry of an attack from the Bush campaign, Mr. Kerry seems to have originated his own doctrine of “pre-emption.” How valid are his concerns?

No one denies Mr. Kerry’s four bemedaled months in “Swiftboats” or his seven-months’ service as an electrical officer on board the USS Gridley, during its cruises back and forth to California, or even his months as an admiral’s aide in Brooklyn, before he was able get out of the Navy six months early to run for office.

Taking a look at Mr. Kerry’s much-promoted Vietnam service, his military record was, indeed, remarkable in many ways. Last week, the former assistant secretary of defense and Fletcher School of Diplomacy professor, W. Scott Thompson, recalled a conversation with the late Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. that clearly had a slightly different take on Mr. Kerry’s recollection of their discussions:

“[T]he fabled and distinguished chief of naval operations,Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, told me — 30 years ago when he was still CNO —that during his own command of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam, just prior to his anointment as CNO, young Kerry had created great problems for him and the other top brass,by killing so many non-combatant civilians and going after other non-military targets.‘We had virtually to straitjacket him to keep him under control,’ the admiral said. ‘Bud’ Zumwalt got it right when he assessed Kerry as having large ambitions — but promised that his career in Vietnam would haunt him if he were ever on the national stage.” And this statement was made despite the fact Zumwalt had personally pinned a Silver Star on Mr. Kerry.

Mr. Kerry was assigned to Swiftboat 44 on December 1, 1968. Within 24 hours, he had his first Purple Heart. Mr. Kerry accumulated three Purple Hearts in four months with not even a day of duty lost from wounds, according to his training officer. It’s a pity one cannot read his Purple Heart medical treatment reports which have been withheld from the public. The only person preventing their release is Mr. Kerry.

By his own admission during those four months, Mr. Kerry continually kept ramming his Swiftboat onto an enemy-held shore on assorted occasions alone and with a few men, killing civilians and even a wounded enemy soldier. One can begin to appreciate Zumwalt’s problem with Mr. Kerry as commander of an unarmored craft dependent upon speed of maneuver to keep it and its crew from being shot to pieces.

Mr. Kerry now refers to those civilian deaths as “accidents of war.”And within four days of his third Purple Heart, Mr. Kerry applied to take advantage of a technicality which allowed him to request immediate transfer to a stateside post.

Once back in the States, Mr. Kerry joined “the struggle for our veterans,” as he called it last week in Atlanta, by joining a scruffy organization called the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The VVAW’s executive director, Al Hubbard, supposedly a former Air Force captain wounded in Vietnam, quickly appointed Mr. Kerry to the executive committee.

Mr. Kerry participated with the VVAW at agitprop rallies such as Valley Forge and the “Winter Soldier” guerrilla theater atrocity trials in Detroit, finally testifying in April 1971 before the Senate as an authority on the war crimes his fellow American servicemen had committed in Vietnam.

Outside of his own “accidents of war,” there is no evidence that Mr. Kerry had then or has now the least idea what may or may not have been the realities of ground combat. However, he had no problem reeling off for the Senate a series of unproven, secondhand allegations that would have been perfectly at home at the Nuremberg trials indicting his fellow veterans.

Mr. Kerry stated there were “war crimes committed in Southeast Asia...not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-today basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.” Then Mr. Kerry got specific:

“They had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam...we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free-fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search-and-destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam.”

In other words, My Lai was just another day in the life of the Vietnam War.

This wasn’t a one-time occasion. The VVAW had been peddling this line from the day Mr. Kerry joined them and had been publishing charges like this for the previous two years. Mr. Kerry repeated them on “Meet the Press” with Al Hubbard, who was found to be a total fraud and who never served in Vietnam, much less was wounded. However, Mr. Kerry has never renounced the charges he made.

Recently, his fellow VVAW supporter, Jane Fonda, has tried to minimize a potentially damaging picture of him a few rows behind her at the three-day VVAW Valley Forge rally in September 1970. And many members of the press fell for the line that it was accidental or coincidental, including Fox’s Chris Wallace and ABC’s Tim Russert.

However, there were only eight or nine speakers that day, including Donald Sutherland, Mark Lane, Bella Abzug, and Ms. Fonda. And far from being a casual audience member, Mr. Kerry, an executive committee member, not Ms. Fonda, was the lead speaker.

Ms. Fonda had been funding VVAW events since before Mr. Kerry joined its executive committee. At Valley Forge, Ms. Fonda said: “My Lai was not an isolated incident but rather a way of life for many of our military.”

Their appearance together in that picture may be a lot of things, but it was not a coincidence.

Mr. Kerry has already confessed his complicity in killing civilians as “accidents of war.” However, he has offered a classic Nuremberg defense that this was not only a commonplace occurrence throughout the Vietnam War, but he was carrying out a policy “with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”

His commander of naval operations in Vietnam, who specifically designed the mission that Mr. Kerry and the other Swiftboat commanders executed, Admiral Zumwalt, clearly disagreed. An examination of the truth behind this disagreement is not an attack on Mr. Kerry. It is a matter of vital historical interest.

Republicans tell us we are supposed to accept something as routine as an honorable discharge as evidence that Bush must have done everything he was supposed to do in the Guard. But Purple Hearts we must question?

I don't believe Bush has released his medical records. And what did Kerry actually say that was an attack on Bush's military service?

This is a typical Right Wing smear piece. The phrasing gives the impression that Kerry actually testified to these things:

Mr. Kerry stated there were “war crimes committed in Southeast Asia...not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-today basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.” Then Mr. Kerry got specific:

“They had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam...we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free-fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search-and-destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam.”

You might suprised to find out this little three dot elipse actually means that the author cut out over 25 paragraphs to connect these clauses:

and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam...we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions;

(Think about that next time you read this publication.)

If you read or listen to his testimony he is referring to the testimony of what actual veterans at an earlier event had said happened. I've heard part of their previous testimony that he references. Still, it is a relatively small part of his total testimony. I'll provide a link for his actual testimony for those interested. I suspect someone will cherry pick it and find things that support the view they already have of the guy. That is always easy to do. Perhaps someone, though, might actually read the whole thing with an open mind and try to place themselves in the shoes of a young man who had been in Viet Nam during one of our nation's most tumultous and divisive times and actually try to develop a greater understanding of matters that are far more complex than simplistic smears allow.

He has been criticized by the Right Wing for supposedly demeaning American troops by claiming they committed "atrocities." He only referenced the testimony of other soldiers in this regard and clearly stated it as such.

He actually spent more time advocating for the needs of veterans:

But the problem with veterans goes beyond this personal problem, because you think about a poster in this country with a picture of Uncle Sam and the picture says: I WANT YOU. And a young man comes out of high school and says: "That is fine, I am going to serve my country," and he goes to Vietnam and he shoots and he kills and he does his job or maybe he doesn't kill, maybe he just goes and he comes back, and when he gets back to this country he finds that he isn't really wanted because the largest unemployment figure in this country - it varies depending on who you get it from, the V.A. 15 per cent, various other sources 22 per cent - but the largest corps of unemployed in this country are veterans of this war, and of those veterans 33 per cent of the unemployed are black. That means one out of every ten of the nation's unemployed is a veteran of Vietnam.

The hospitals across the country won't or can't meet their demands. It is not a question of not trying; they haven't got the appropriations. A man recently died after he had a tracheotomy in California, not because of the operation but because there weren't enough personnel to clean the mucus out of his tube and he suffocated to death.

Another young man just died in a New York V.A. hospital that other day. A friend of mine was lying in a bed two beds away and tried to help him but couldn't. He rang a bell and there was nobody there to service that man and so he died of convulsions.

Fifty-seven per cent, I understand 57 per cent of all those entering the V.A. hospitals talk about suicide. Some 27 per cent have tried, and they try because they come back to this country and they have to face what they did in Vietnam, and then they come back and find the indifference of a country that doesn't really care.

This may be one reason so many veterans are by his side on the campaign trail.

He also stated his reason for being there:

We are asking here in Washington for some action, action from the Congress of the United States of America, which has the power to raise and maintain armies, and which by the Constitution also has the power to declare war.

We have come here, not to the President, because we believe that this body can be responsive to the will of the people, and we believe that the will of the people says that we should be out of Vietnam now.

Kerry came to believe the war was a mistake. My father served two years there. He also believed that the administration (Johnston and Nixon) were doing a grave disservice to the men who there by the way they were executing the war. When you see friends die and lose limbs in an war directed badly by politicians, Democrat and Republican, that can create strong opinions.

Kerry's testimony in 1971

[rexbo 104]

The short version is that Kerry apparently asked for a 12 month student deferrment, was turned down and promptly signed up for duty.

Signed up with the Navy, one of the ways at the time to avoid ground combat duty in Vietnam. Only after having served safely aboard ship a few years did he decide he needed some few months of 'combat duty' and command of a Swift boat (unfortunately for him, not a PT Boat as he would have wished) to score the requisite political points. And he didn't hang around long once he got there, 4 months. I don't think Kerry has ever made a move in his life that wasn't politically motivated...

[CarolinaTiger 0]

so what all this boils down to is that bush's "family connections" came through when kerry's didn't? if only kerry had been married to Ms. Heinz at the time....

can we move on from this point now?

ct

[Tigermike 3,717]

so what all this boils down to is that bush's "family connections" came through when kerry's didn't? if only kerry had been married to Ms. Heinz at the time....

can we move on from this point now?

ct

But John Kerry is a war hero, didn't you know?