More kerry "war hero" facts

[Merlin1047]

http://www.scaryjohnkerry.com/vietnam.htm

Click on the image at the top of the screen. The link near the bottom takes you to the Swift Boat Vets ad which you have probably already seen. The linked image at the top starts a narrated slide show (whose images you can advance manually).

This may cause kerry to hire a couple dozen more lawyers.

 

[Tom E]

Interesting too bad they didn't use a swift boat for the picture!

 

[ScreamingEagle]

http://www.scaryjohnkerry.com/vietnam.htm

Click on the image at the top of the screen. The link near the bottom takes you to the Swift Boat Vets ad which you have probably already seen. The linked image at the top starts a narrated slide show (whose images you can advance manually).

This may cause kerry to hire a couple dozen more lawyers.

Excellent! That really highlights the big picture and what Kerry is all about. Of course the left will denigrate the ad as they are the ones who supported shutting down the Vietnam war. Besides, the Dems include communists of all sorts in their party, don't they?

It's going to be interesting to watch how the media handles the march in September and the book coming out tomorrow.

 

[fubar]

Dems may have supported leaving Vietnam. But they started it ( our involvement) and they escalated it. And they sabatoged Nixons Peace treaty. then the media gave all of the younger Americans the sense that it was "Nixons War"

if the mainstream media picks up on this , or the internet is as big a factor for bush as it was for McCain & Dean, the election may be over already.

 

[Annie]

There's some interesting fact checking round up by Glenn and others at Instapundit. Have to go there to see the paper and get the links:

INSTAPUNDIT

August 11, 2004
KERRY/CAMBODIA UPDATE: I promised a while back to see if I could get a look at the October 14, 1979 Boston Herald story -- where Kerry says he remembers spending Christmas, 1968 in Cambodia and hearing President Nixon deny that troops were there -- in original form. The quote's genuine, and here's an image. Sorry it's a bit hard to read: it's a scan of a fax of a photocopy of a microfilm, sent to me by a helpful reader who works at the Herald.

But what's really interesting is the context -- see the full scan here -- which is all about Kerry's Vietnam experiences as they relate to Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Unlike Al Gore and Love Story, Kerry doesn't claim that the movie is about him -- but he sure draws parallels. In fact, the passage that everyone has been quoting actually reads like this, when you include the prior sentence that people haven't been including:

On more than one occasion, I, like Martin Sheen in "Apocalypse Now," took my patrol boat into Cambodia

In fact, I remember spending Christmas Day of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese Allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. 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. But nowhere in "Apocalypse Now" did I sense that kind of absurdity.

So Kerry's Vietnam experience was like Apocalypse Now, only it was more so.

How much this adds to the debate isn't clear to me -- but in case anyone was doubting the provenance of this particular quotation, well, I'm satisfied now that its authenticity, if not its veracity, is pretty clear.

Presumably, some big-time journalists are even now interviewing people and combing the records to see if this version of Kerry's 1968 Christmas was correct. (For other, inconsistent, versions, click here.) And for those -- apparently unclear on my age and suspecting me of draft-dodging -- who want to know where I was spending my Christmas in 1968, it was in Heidelberg, Germany. I got a train, and an SST model kit.

UPDATE: Reader Garnet Girl emails:

If Kerry really wants to avoid talking about Cambodia, he probably ought to take the word out of the meta tag on his service page.

And sure enough, if you go here and click "view source" you'll see this:

meta name=target content="military record, cambodia, vietnam, military service"

Bizarre.

posted at 02:29 PM by Glenn Reynolds