May 04, 2004

Unfit for Office

I was on Mr. Kerry's boat in Vietnam. He doesn't deserve to be commander in chief.

In 1971, I debated John Kerry, then a national spokesman for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, for 90 minutes on "The Dick Cavett Show." The key issue in that debate was Mr. Kerry's claim that American troops were committing war crimes in Vietnam "on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." Now, as Sen. Kerry emerges as the presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency, I've chosen to re-enter the fray.

Like John Kerry, I served in Vietnam as a Swift Boat commander. Ironically, John Kerry and I served much of our time, a full 12 months in my case and a controversial four months in his, commanding the exact same six-man boat, PCF-94, which I took over after he requested early departure. Despite our shared experience, I still believe what I believed 33 years ago--that John Kerry slandered America's military by inventing or repeating grossly exaggerated claims of atrocities and war crimes in order to advance his own political career as an antiwar activist. His misrepresentations played a significant role in creating the negative and false image of Vietnam vets that has persisted for over three decades.
[Isn't this piece timely given today's headlines?
John Kerry's party and his supporters are attempting to portray our military in the same horrible light today with their many stories about allegations that U.S. military prison guards abused, humiliated and "tortured" their Iraqi prisoners.--Jen]

Neither I, nor any man I served with, ever committed any atrocity or war crime in Vietnam. The opposite was the truth. Rather than use excessive force, we suffered casualty after casualty because we chose to refrain from firing rather than risk injuring civilians. More than once, I saw friends die in areas we entered with loudspeakers rather than guns. John Kerry's accusations then and now were an injustice that struck at the soul of anyone who served there.

During my 1971 televised debate with John Kerry, I accused him of lying. I urged him to come forth with affidavits from the soldiers who had claimed to have committed or witnessed atrocities. To date no such affidavits have been filed. Recently, Sen. Kerry has attempted to reframe his comments as youthful or "over the top." Yet always there has been a calculated coolness to the way he has sought to destroy the record of our honorable service in the interest of promoting his political ambitions of the moment.
[...]
Vietnam was a long time ago. Why does it matter today? Since the days of the Roman Empire, the concept of military loyalty up and down the chain of command has been indispensable. The commander's loyalty to the troops is the price a commander pays for the loyalty of the troops in return. How can a man be commander in chief who for over 30 years has accused his "Band of Brothers," as well as himself, of being war criminals? On a practical basis, John Kerry's breach of loyalty is a prescription of disaster for our armed forces.

John Kerry's recent admissions caused me to realize that I was most likely in Vietnam dodging enemy rockets on the very day he met in Paris with Madame Binh, the representative of the Viet Cong to the Paris Peace Conference. John Kerry returned to the U.S. to become a national spokesperson for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a radical fringe of the antiwar movement, an organization set upon propagating the myth of war crimes through demonstrably false assertions. Who was the last American POW to die languishing in a North Vietnamese prison forced to listen to the recorded voice of John Kerry disgracing their service by his dishonest testimony before the Senate?

Since 1971, I have refused many offers from John Kerry's political opponents to speak out against him. My reluctance to become involved once again in politics is outweighed now by my profound conviction that John Kerry is simply not fit to be America's commander in chief. Nobody has recruited me to come forward. My decision is the inevitable result of my own personal beliefs and life experience.

Today, America is engaged in a new war, against the militant Islamist terrorists who attacked us on our own soil. Reasonable people may differ about how best to proceed, but I'm sure of one thing--John Kerry is the wrong man to put in charge.

Thank you for coming forward and speaking out, Mr. O' Neil and at such at time as this, too.
The Left in America is being led by sKerry and his rich wife and a Dimocrat Party primarily made up of hippies and Baby Boomers who began their political careers protesting the Vietnam War.
Not only do they want to relive those days, but there is nothing more ugly to them than to see an America (and an American military) that is strong, proud and united.
Therefore, no matter how justified we are to fight back after the horrendous slaughter of 3,000 of our citizens on our own soil on 9/11/01 in an hour and a half, they must stop our fight because, like the Islamist terrorists, they want to see America lose.
So we have the Left's enablers in the media giving this story about allegations of Iraqi prisoner abuse by our military constant and increasingly ramped-up emotional coverage.
As I said a few days ago, they're trying to make the bad behavior of a handful of American soldiers to their Iraqi captives into a My Lai "massacre."
The President has spoken out and declared this abuse to be "disgusting" and "shameful" and has expressed his order that the abuse be investigated and if it occurred, that the soldiers in the wrong be disciplined.
The Pentagon has already launched no less than 5 investigations into the matter.
Now, almost as I was posting this, SecDef Donald Rumsfeld has given a press conference on this matter also and has called the alleged abuse "totally unacceptable and un-American".
It should be clear--even on the hateful Al-Jazeera--that most Americans, from the President on down, are outraged that a few bad GIs' misdeeds threaten to give all of us a bad name, but especially our troops in theatre in Iraq.
I'm satisfied that the abusers are going to be punished and disciplined and I know that these bad eggs don't represent the entire military in any way.
In fact, I'm sure that 99% of our soldiers are good, decent and fair human beings who treat their fellow men and women with respect and dignity and kindness, even if they're enemy prisoners.
What truly concerns me about this whole story and the to-do being made over it is that it was "news" at all.
This abuse should have and would have been a classified military problem that should have been confined to channels in the Department of Defense...until someone leaked the story and the inflammatory pictures to the media.
Worse still, this was leaked at a crucial time in the war, when we are fighting 2 sieges in Iraq and there are pockets of IslamoNazi guerrillas who are trying to stir up a native "revolt" who are killing our guys and gals every day, while we all are a little less than 2 months from handing over political power to the Iraqis for a democratic system.
The 2 groups who don't want us to succeed in Iraq, the Dimocrats and the Islamists, are working this story for everything that it's worth and then some.
Don't let them.
The person who leaked this needs to step forward and take their licks.
One of the things that good journalism is supposed to do is to "right wrongs" that otherwise wouldn't be, by exposing situations of corrupt behavior that would go unpunished to the light of day.
That isn't the case here.
Not only is the Pentagon seeminly over-investigating the situation now, but the first investigation into the incidents at Abu Ghraib prison was done in the fall of last year!
The media and the Left aren't doing the American people a "service" here; on the contrary, they're getting our soldiers killed and ensuring that the war in Iraq, particularly that of "hearts and minds," will be that much longer and tougher.

Our military is made up of good American people, like you and me.
Our cause in the WOT and in Iraq is moral and justified.
The United States and her citizens are a force for good in the world and have been for all of our history.
Repeat those three phrases above as often as necessary, because they're true and because we must and will prevail.