Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Spinsanity has my back
The emperically non-partisan Spinsanity backs up my post yesterday about what swift boats were doing in Vietnam at the time Kerry volunteered for them.
The myth that Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry volunteered for swift boat duty in Vietnam knowing it was particularly dangerous continues to spread despite clear evidence to the contrary.Spinsanity links to this article from May 2003 in the Boston Globe, with some telling quotes from Kerry himself:
As we have written before, Kerry actually volunteered at a time when swift boats were engaged in relatively safe coastal patrols. They were redeployed to the rivers of Vietnam -- a far more risky mission -- after Kerry's decision. Kerry himself has admitted as much, writing in 1986 that "When I signed up for the swift boats, they had very little to do with the war. They were engaged in coastal patrolling and that's what I thought I was going to be doing."
Kerry served two tours. For a relatively uneventful six months, from December 1967 to June 1968, he served in the electrical department aboard the USS Gridley, a guided-missile frigate that supported aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin and was far removed from combat.
"I didn't have any real feel for what the heck was going on [in the war]," Kerry has recalled. His ship returned to its Long Beach, Calif., port on June 6, 1968, the day that Robert F. Kennedy died from a gunshot wound he received on the previous night at a Los Angeles hotel. The antiwar protests were growing. But within five months Kerry was heading back to Vietnam, seeking to fulfill his officer commitment despite his growing misgivings about the war.
Kerry initially hoped to continue his service at a relatively safe distance from most fighting, securing an assignment as "swift boat" skipper. While the 50-foot swift boats cruised the Vietnamese coast a little closer to the action than the Gridley had come, they were still considered relatively safe.
"I didn't really want to get involved in the war," Kerry said in a little-noticed contribution to a book of Vietnam reminiscences published in 1986. "When I signed up for the swift boats, they had very little to do with the war. They were engaged in coastal patrolling and that's what I thought I was going to be doing."
But two weeks after he arrived in Vietnam, the swift boat mission changed -- and Kerry went from having one of the safest assignments in the escalating conflict to one of the most dangerous. Under the newly launched Operation SEALORD, swift boats were charged with patrolling the narrow waterways of the Mekong Delta to draw fire and smoke out the enemy. Cruising inlets and coves and canals, swift boats were especially vulnerable targets.
Pretty clear, right? Then this quote from John Kerry's own website is more than a little misleading.
John Kerry enlisted in the Navy in 1966. After completing Naval Officer Candidates School, he began his first tour of duty on the USS Gridley, a guided-missile frigate in the waters adjacent to Vietnam. In 1968, John Kerry began his second tour of duty, and volunteered to serve on a Swift Boat, one of the most dangerous assignments of the war.
A new slogan for Kerry? John Kerry: Stretching the Truth into the 21st Century
