The third Swift boat officer speaks up - in Kerry’s favour
Heard all the junk from people suggesting John Kerry didn’t deserve his Silver Star? Now, the only other surviving officer from the day says what happened, in `This is what I saw that day’ (free registration required - doesn’t take long).
So happens he’s an editor at the Chicago Tribune, who has never wanted to talk more about it, but feels goaded by the flat-out lies being told. The skinny: Kerry carried out a tactic that worked, got congratulated, and by the way, war is hell.
The tactic was to attack the VietCong who would launch ambushes on the (noisy) Swift boats as they came upriver. Rather than carrying on, Kerry pre-agreed a tactic of attacking the ambushers.
Interesting extracts: John O’Neill, author of a highly critical account of Kerry’s Vietnam service, describes the man Kerry chased as a “teenager” in a “loincloth.” I have no idea how old the gunner Kerry chased that day was, but both Leeds and I recall that he was a grown man, dressed in the kind of garb the VC usually wore.
The man Kerry chased was not the “lone” attacker at that site, as O’Neill suggests. There were others who fled. There was also firing from the tree line well behind the spider holes and at one point, from the opposite riverbank as well. It was not the work of just one attacker.
And: Known over radio circuits by the call sign “Latch,” then-Capt. and now retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffmann, the task force commander, fired off a message congratulating the three swift boats, saying at one point that the tactic of charging the ambushes was a “shining example of completely overwhelming the enemy” and that it “may be the most efficacious method of dealing with small numbers of ambushers.”
Hoffmann has become a leading critic of Kerry’s and now says that what the boats did on that day demonstrated Kerry’s inclination to be impulsive to a fault. (How unfortunate for Hoffmann that he can now be shown to be two-faced.)
It’s the coda to the feature which makes the strongest points though: The survivors of all these events are scattered across the country now. Jerry Leeds lives in a tiny Kansas town where he built and sold a successful printing business. He owns a beautiful home with a lawn that sweeps to the edge of a small lake, which he also owns. Every year, flights of purple martins return to the stately birdhouses on the tall poles in his back yard. Cueva, recently retired, has raised three daughters and is beloved by his neighbors for all the years he spent keeping their cars running. Lee is a senior computer programmer in Kentucky, and Lamberson finished a second military career in the Army.
In other words - sent to fight in a stupid war that wasted lives. In all the rows over peoples’ military records, it’s worth recalling that it wasn’t the soldiers who decided to go to war.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- On being a Slashdottee (9 September 2004; score: 29.13%)
- Lying with graphs: it's so easy when you know how (24 March 2005; score: 27.88%)
- Eddie Izzard vs US Customs, Pete Townshend enblogged, and Harry Potter vs the bureaucrats (17 November 2005; score: 27.19%)
![[Valid RSS]](wp-includes/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed"){kind=small}