EMINENTOES: It's the War, Stupid
Babbln, Ied
EMINENTOES JED BABBIN It's the War Stupid It's hard to imagine a Commander in Chief who doesn't love the country he's with. I 1 HE NEXT PRESIDENCY will be a war presidency whether we like it...
...Kerry told me that `I'm starting this thing called Vietnam Veterans Against the War...
...As the Boston Globe reported, Hibbard said Kerry came to him to ask for the Purple Heart...
...When he made his early departure from Vietnam, Kerry was assigned as aide to Adm...
...George Butler (Pumping Iron) has filmed a multi-million production, moving heaven, earth, and a lot of little boats to make Kerry look like the second coming of John F. Kennedy...
...Very few people knew about an obscure Navy regulation that allowed someone who had been wounded and received three Purple Hearts to be relieved from combat duty...
...That claim is anti-historical...
...Because each saw the uniqueness of the nation they led, they saw their duty not just to lead America to victory, but to do so without allowing either friend or foe to alter America's nature...
...In his junior year at Yale, Kerry—by then head of the Yale Political Union—said in a speech, "It is the specter of Western Imperialism that causes more fear among Africans and Asians than communism...
...While Saddam's forces brutalized Kuwait and threatened the Saudi oil fields, Kerry said economic sanctions were preferable to using force...
...Jed Babbin is the author of Inside the Asylum: Why the U.N...
...Unconditionally Withdrawn N IMPORTANT biographical fact about Kerry is that his father worked in the State Department...
...Two weeks after he arrived in Vietnam, Kerry received a wound to his arm on one patrol...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2004The Outsider ERRY WAS RAISED OUTSIDE the American mainstream...
...Kerry—through Brinkley—describes the --- Swifts' war as pointless, with Kerry challenging the stupidity of his superiors while doing the best he could in a failed cause...
...Unlike Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, John Kerry doesn't champion America's uniqueness, or see that it is worth fighting for...
...In the culmination of the protest march, Kerry testified before a Senate committee on April 23, 1971...
...At the age of 11, when Kerry's father was serving in Europe, young John was tossed into a Swiss boarding school with only the briefest farewell...
...A movie based on the book will premiere to serve as Kerry's cinematic "October surprise...
...He had a little scratch on his forearm, and he was holding a piece of shrapnel...
...But that's not the way it was...
...ED BABBIN Kerry's Vietnam ERRY'S VIETNAM is recounted in Brinkley's Tour ERRY' f Duty, which is based primarily on the war iary Kerry kept...
...For example, Ehud Barak led Israel disastrously, chasing one ephemeral peace deal after another having first achieved fame as a tough combat soldier...
...Yet Kerry, as he later would have to admit, saw no atrocities...
...We haven't faced an election like this since 1944...
...When I left, I could probably [travel] free [ly] over 75 percent of all the territory without fear of being ambushed...
...Grant Hibbard was Kerry's commanding officer at the time...
...Precisely what did Kerry, Binh, and the Hanoi government reps talk about...
...All he saw was what was happening to his boat at the time, and what was happening in the rivers...
...Kerry makes no promise to shoulder any burden to defend freedom orAmerican values...
...TAShas obtained a copy of a message dated March 17, 1969, from Kerry's commander (COMCOSRON ONE) to the Navy Bureau of Personnel in which Kerry requested reassignment from Vietnam to "duty as a personal aide in Boston, New York or Wash DC area...
...There is only doubt of America's motives, disdain for its actions, and derisiveness toward its leaders...
...Combat service does not a great wartime leader make...
...Kerry complained about the stupidity of Operation Sealords and that he told the senior commanders including myself, Admiral Zumwalt and other subordinate commanders...
...John Kerry has said repeatedly that his brief combat service in Vietnam would necessarily make him a better wartime president than George Bush, who never saw combat...
...Kerry's atrocity allegations were repeated, even Kerry told the world that war crimes were "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-today basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command...
...Hoffmann said, "I think that anyone who casually looks through the biography by Douglas Brinkley—which I often refer to as a political diatribe—you will find that there are many distortions of fact, gross exaggerations, and some outright and slanderous lies...
...We question the very roots of what we are serving...
...Suddenly we just left Washington, DC, went over to Europe and boom, I was in a Swiss boarding school...
...At Yale, according to one of Kerry's classmates who knew him well, Kerry was a preppie wannabe...
...was in agreement with American action, Kerry disagreed...
...Just what did Kerry ask of them, and they of him...
...the only time he was comfortable with people [it was with people] who were, for whatever reason, on that fringe left...
...This election is not about spotted owls, healthcare, or outsourcing jobs to India...
...Although I wanted to see for myself what was going on over there, I didn't really want to get involved in the war...
...Adrian Lonsdale was Hoffmann's operational commander in the Cau Mau peninsula area...
...I met him in an Upper East Side tavern...
...John Kerry never has...
...And I want you to join and help us end this war.' And I said to him, 'Kerry, you just don't get it, do you?' I said, 'We still have friends over there,and I'm not going out protesting what they are doing.'" This incident contradicts one of the central points in the Brinkley book...
...It suggests Kerry was calculating, planning, and working actively to protest the war while he still was in uniform...
...How did Kerry—then an unknown—even get a meeting with the principal representatives of America's enemies...
...Finally, I acquiesced...
...That comfort was a counterpoint to the discomfort he felt with his nation...
...Second, it's a melodrama: a little corner of a war seen through the eyes of an angry young man...
...he elder Kerry wrote The Star-Spangled Mirror, a book which severely criticized America for many of the things his son now criticizes President Bush: arrogance toward Europe and insufficient respect for the counsels of European leaders...
...Tour of Duty—Douglas Brinkley's adulatory biography—quotes Kerry as saying, "I remember arriving in Europe and my mom and dad just dropped me off...
...Kerry says now that he wishes he had made his statements in a "less abrasive" way, but he's never backed away from them...
...Aloof and above the fray, Kerry went not to fight, but to observe...
...On The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, Kerry said, "...after I received my third wound, I was told that I could return to the United States...
...Speaking for his class at graduation, Kerry said, "We have not really lost the desire to serve...
...Kerry was a rebellious officer who often disregarded orders and went off on his own...
...Adm...
...He used the third Purple Heart to leave as quickly as he could...
...Both Mr...
...Kerry's conduct caused Hoffmann to visit the unit and warn all the PCF skippers to play by the rules, or else...
...Later, back in the U.S., as Franklin Foer of the New Republic reported, Kerry's high school years at the exclusive St...
...He called President Reagan's intervention in Grenada a "bully's show of force...
...Protester in Uniform T HE BRINKLEY BOOK says that Kerry had some sort of epiphany in October 1969...
...Grant Hibbard—who was Kerry's commander for a time—said the same...
...Hoffmann told me, "I really didn't have any direct negative reports on [Kerry] until somewhere in December or early January about his escapades in which he would pretty much go off on his own instead of sticking to what his orders were...
...Leaving his fellow sailors behind didn't bother Kerry...
...Hoffmann said there was only one allegation of abuse in his command, and that it was properly investigated...
...According to the classmate (who asked not to be identified), "The only people he showed leadership qualities with were people who really were almost social misfits...
...I just didn't know where the hell I was and it was strange as hell...
...Kerry's predisposition didn't allow him to see what his commanders saw: an enemy being defeated...
...Lonsdale saw something very different...
...I thought he was a jerk," Peck told me...
...Tedd Peck commanded PCF-94 before Kerry did, and only left Vietnam after being severely wounded in action...
...For that reason, above all others, he cannot be trusted to lead this nation in time of war...
...Who arranged it, and how...
...In fact, Kerry didn't deliberate...
...I 1 HE NEXT PRESIDENCY will be a war presidency whether we like it or not...
...In his 1971 book, The New Soldier, Kerry wrote, "We were sent to Vietnam to kill Communism...
...That lobbying campaign rankled many of those who served with him...
...Kerry, in the words of his Yale classmate, sees the world through European eyes, and doesn't have "a sense of the United States...
...One of his most infamous Senate votes came in 1991 when he voted against military action to rescue Kuwait from Iraqi conquest...
...He was now persona non grata with me...
...According to Brinkley, Kerry said, "The Moratorium convinced me that I had to speak out...
...Kerry's third wound was received on March 13, 1969...
...But we found instead that we were killing women and children...
...Useful Idiot RINKLEY OMITS one of the most B important episodes in Kerry's life: his visit to Paris to talk with the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese before his famous Senate testimony...
...What he did there, in his highly-abbreviated four-month tour, has been the only basis for his claim to the presidency...
...John Kerry achieved notoriety in 1971 when, as a leader of the radical Vietnam Veterans Against the War, he helped organize and participated in the "Dewey Canyon III" demonstration in Washington...
...Sometime between his wedding to Julia Thorne and the Senate testimony in April 1971, Kerry and his new wife traveled to Paris...
...Soon after, Kerry was in the Navy and volunteered for duty in Vietnam...
...From the beginning of his tour to this day, Kerry has mischaracterized what he did there...
...Each of our greatest wartime presidents saw America to be different from both its allies and enemies and saw the difference to be worth fighting for...
...Kerry met with both halves of the enemy side: the representatives of the DRV (i.e., North Vietnam) and the PRG (i.e., the Viet Cong...
...He told me, "There are numerous places in the book when Mr...
...On October 15, 1969—"Moratorium Day"—he listened to antiwar speeches by Allard Lowenstein, Ted Kennedy, and Eugene McCarthy...
...By then Tedd Peck was recuperating from his wounds in a New York naval hospital...
...He said, "We won the battle there...
...If you seek that view of America in the writings and speeches of John Kerry, you will be disappointed...
...First—according to many of the men who served with Kerry in Vietnam—it is revisionist history of the most egregious sort...
...But rejected by the preppies, Kerry sought acceptance among the most radical lefties at Yale...
...In "Operation Sealords," the other Swift boats were sent into the Mekong Delta to interdict Viet Cong insurgents...
...From the beginning of his political career, JohnKerry has been an opponent of American military action...
...John Kerry, under his father's influence, grew to admire Europe's delicate, refined, and feckless diplomacy...
...But there is one special characteristic that all our great wartime presidents have had and that Kerry does not...
...Even on the rare occasions that the U.N...
...When Peck found out about Kerry's lobbying for the OCTOBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 35 ^ EMINE OES medal, he gave up on Kerry...
...And what did John Kerry tell them he would do...
...Both sides...
...about the problems with Sealords...
...I don't think he appreciates the distinction of this country being different from any other country in the world...
...Roy Hoffmann—then a Navy captain—was commander of Kerry's unit, Task Force 115...
...OCTOBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 37...
...in Brooklyn, New York...
...It's not true...
...But Kerry had made that decision long before...
...It appears that John Kerry had a very good tutor in his war protest plans—Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Vietnam, the political arm of the Viet Cong...
...and Old Europe Are Worse Than You Think (Regnery Publishing...
...Did Kerry and Binh or the DRV representative talk about any plans to protest against the war...
...Kerry knew...
...When I got there] the VC controlled most of [the Mekong Delta] and your movements were very restricted...
...Walter Schlech, Jr...
...Peck said, "Kerry kept coming up to me asking to get together and talk...
...Lonsdale said the Brinkley book is "riddled with exaggerations...
...People in the office were saying, 'I don't think we got any fire,' and there is a guy holding a piece of shrapnel in his palm...
...When Schlech himself was hospitalized there, Peck and Kerry met again...
...Our greatest wartime presidents—Lincoln and FDRnever served in combat...
...It's about choosing a president to lead us through the next four years of war...
...He had another agenda...
...In 1968 Kerry sought command of a "PCF"patrol craft, fast—also known as a "swift boat...
...I met Kerry on the 4th of May 1969, on Sunday...
...I deliberated for about two weeks because there was a very difficult decision in whether or not you leave your friends because you have an opportunity to go, but I finally made the decision to go back and did leave of my own volition because I felt that I could do more against the war back here...
...At Yale, in Vietnam, and in almost 20 years in the Senate, Kerry has been reluctant to trust America, its people, its values, its goals...
...Kerry promise to win the war, but which is better equipped to do so...
...There, according to Kerry's Senate testimony, he "talked with both delegations at the peace talks, that is to say the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government...
...Bush and Mr...
...Kerry's vision of America is not a shining city on a hill...
...There, Kerry told the world that war crimes were "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command...
...American history is not unique in this regard...
...Paul's School in New Hampshire were a very difficult time because Kerry was an outsider among the WASP elite...
...as a nation unique in the world...
...The Brinkley book suffers from two flaws...
...Our worst—Lyndon Johnson—served briefly in the Navy during World War II...
...In an essay for a 1986 collection entitled The Vietnam Experience: A War Remembered, Kerry wrote, "They [the Swift boats] were engaged in coastal patrolling and that's what I thought I was going to be doing...
...Even Jane Fonda apologized to the Vietnam veterans for slandering them...
...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2004 JED BABBIN expanded...
...Kerry persisted in lobbying for the Purple Heart and eventually got it...
Vol. 37 • October 2004 • No. 8
