Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out
Against John Kerry
by John E. O’Neill and Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D.
(Regnery Publishing, 256 pages, $27.95)
During the better part of the last three years we have endured an
endless series of offerings from the Bush-Haters-Book-of-the-Month
Club. These volumes have overexerted titles and overly verbose
subtitles like Big Lies: The Rightwing Propaganda Machine and
How It Distorts the Truth or Worse than Watergate: The
Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. They contain very little
unique information from one to the next. Most are petty; some are
demonstrably fraudulent, such as Joe Wilson’s The Politics of
Truth. They are mostly written by people who are
professionally distasteful of President Bush. All of them have been
written by people who don’t know him personally.
Unfit for Command by Vietnam veteran John O’Neill and
Jerome Corsi, an expert on antiwar movements, shares none of those
characteristics. It is a book unlike other campaign cycle books in
that it injects new information into the public dialogue, avoids
redundant circular arguments about issues, and, well, it has a
point. That point is summed up with Thomistic bravado by John
O’Neill in the book’s first chapter: “I resolved that I would
refute Kerry’s lies.”
The chapters in Unfit for Command are testimonies by
swift boat captains and crew who knew current Democratic hopeful
John Kerry personally. These men offer no insinuations. Their
vignettes are not the paranoid ramblings of obese, low-budget
filmmakers. The accusations are laid out in black-and-white for
Sen. Kerry to read and respond to. That is, if anyone in the gaggle
of reporters he travels with daily would bother to ask him about
them.
O’Neill clearly loathes Kerry. He launches the book with a
chapter highlighting their semi-famous debate on The Dick
Cavett Show in 1971, a debate in which a friendly audience
slowly turned on Kerry, finally booing him by the end. O’Neill
attributes Kerry’s lies about Vietnam to a hyperactive political
libido. Indeed, during the debate, O’Neill predicted Kerry would
use his newfound fame to launch a Congressional campaign in
Massachusetts, which Kerry denied. A few months later Kerry
announced his campaign for Congress in Lowell, MA.
THE SUBSEQUENT CHAPTERS contain the meat of the book. The authors
present two broad categories of concern. The first are legitimate
issues of debate, such as: Did John Kerry’s anti-Vietnam War
activities provide aid and comfort to the enemy? Reasonable people
can disagree about these. But the second category — his conduct
during the war — places Kerry on perilous ground. For if the swift
boat operators are correct — and it’s vital to note John Kerry has
never refuted these charges — then John Kerry is a liar, an
incompetent, a slanderer, and guilty of war crimes.
One officer shares his testimony of Kerry’s bellyaching in
Vietnam: “He objected to the various operations, complaining that
they were poorly thought out.” He is still doing so today, only the
war in question is in Iraq. Kerry’s Vietnam journal is bursting
with fabrications, not unlike the fantastic story he lately tells
about a New Hampshire woman who was forced to work through her
chemotherapy just to keep her health insurance. And Kerry concocted
elaborate, hero-villain conversations with his superiors that never
occurred, reminding us this man claims to have met with the United
Nations Security Council before his vote to authorize the use of
force to remove Saddam Hussein.
The authors provide a disappointing analysis of John Kerry’s
anti-war star turn in 1971. Indeed, everyone has given us too
little analysis of this period of Kerry’s public career. The only
person to come close to grilling him is Tim Russert from NBC’s
Meet the Press who broadcast footage from a 1971 interview
in which Kerry charged the United States with genocide.
“Thirty years later, you stand by that?” Russert asked him.
“I don’t stand by the genocide, I think those were the words of
an angry young man,” Kerry responded. And the issue was
dropped.
BUT THERE IS NO applicable synonym for genocide. If Kerry is
permitted to write it off as a poor choice of words, then his whole
testimony before the Fulbright Committee, his every anti-war
speech, becomes a lie. And yet, the section concludes limply that
“Kerry should list the specifics of what he saw,” so that it can be
investigated. “If John Kerry did not commit war crimes in Vietnam,
then why is he lying?” the authors ask.
This is an insufficient condemnation if one of the more gruesome
passages in the book turns out to be true. That is, one night in
January 1969, Kerry and crew were patrolling the banks of the Cua
Lon River when all hell descended. Kerry told quasi-official
biographer Douglas Brinkley that many minutes of silent patrol had
gone by when someone yelled, “Sampan off the port bow!”:
“Everybody froze and we slowed the engines quickly. But
the sampan was already by us and wasn’t stopping. It was past
curfew and nothing was allowed in the river. I told the gunner to
fire a few warning shots and in the confusion all guns opened up.
We moved in on the sampan, and taking one of the battle lanterns
off the bulkhead shone it on the silhouette of the craft that was
now dead in the water.”
But the presence of eyewitnesses betrays Kerry’s self-serving
remake of the incident. According to gunner Steve Gardner, who “sat
above Kerry on the double .50-caliber mount that night,” Kerry
stayed in the pilothouse during the incident. Kerry failed to spot
the sampan on radar and give warning; he didn’t join the crew when
they heard an engine noise and saw the boat; he wasn’t there when
they threw the PFC lights on; he did not order them to fire warning
shots; and he wasn’t there when Gardner ordered the craft to
stop.
What happened was that Gardner, spooked and in the absence of a
commanding officer, believed that one of the occupants of the boat
was reaching for a weapon. He opened up, as did others, killing a
man and, unintentionally, his child. The gunshots finally roused
Kerry who “ordered the crew to cease fire and then threatened
them.”
The authors state this Kerry’s failure to spot the boat on radar
is “hard to understand.” Harder still to comprehend is Kerry’s
“absence as the officer in charge during the critical part of the
episode.” This absence, one is compelled to repeat, resulted in the
death of a two-year old child. But, as O’Neill and Corsi explain,
that’s not all:
Kerry avoided any problem by filing an after action
report in which the dead child simply disappeared from the record
and was replaced by a fleeing squad of Viet Cong, some likely
killed by Kerry. A terrible human tragedy was converted by another
Kerry lie into another sterling triumph by the young war
hero.
It’s hard to believe this could be the man the Democrats have
nominated for as their candidate for President of the United
States.
