Former Kerry commander disputes Purple Heart

[marlowe]

Maybe Kerry shouldn't wear it on his sleeve (http://www.pensacolanewsjournal.com/news/html/5DFF3A46-31C3-48B4-9EB8-BFF13921FA71.shtml)

Excerpt:

Kerry spent his first three and half weeks in Vietnam assigned to
the Swift Boat Coastal Division 14 under Hibbard's command, patrollng
coastal areas in 50-foot attack boats. And no one disputes that Kerry
was on night patrol Dec. 2, 1968, when the crew encountered Viet Cong.
Accounts of what happened that night vary.

"Kerry said he was wearing night goggles, that he had his weapon, that
they threw up a flare, saw enemy movement and opened fire," Meehan said.
"He said he was wounded in the confrontation but it was impossible to
tell which direction the enemy fire came from because it was totally
dark."

Hibbard questioned descriptions of the encounter as a firefight.

"The reports I got back the next morning from crew members was that they
received no enemy fire," Hibbard said.

Hibbard, who was 34 at the time, said crew members reported they had
spotted the Viet Cong fleeing on the beach and that Kerry fired a M-79,
a small grenade launcher that struck some nearby rocks. Hibbard said
Kerry was likely struck by a piece of shrapnel from the grenade.

The next day, Hibbard said Kerry approached him and said he had been
wounded in combat and showed him a piece of shrapnel the thickness of a
pencil lead that was less than a half-inch long.

"I described it as a fingernail scratch," Hibbard said. "He later
received a Purple Heart for that scratch, but I have no information of
how or from whom."

Scottsboro, Ala., resident Louis Letson, a retired general practitioner,
was the physician at Cam Rahn Bay who treated Kerry's wound. Letson
backed up Hibbard's account of what happened.

Home link (http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe/kerry.html#20040709)

[ninjalooter1701]

Do you have any idea how a soldier was assigned the Purple Heart in the Vietnam Era?

Again, like with your other post, what's the real relevance of this post? What's the main point, if any?

[kramsret]

HIbbard is a traitor and a disgrace to the uniform. He's putting partisanship ahead of honor, by questioning a PURPLE HEART for God's sake!

I hope he dies soon, and gets sent straight to traitor hell.

[toolman846]

"Again, like with your other post, what's the real relevance of this post? What's the main point, if any?"

I think the title might be "Nits, and How to Pick Them", ninja. :lol

Good call. :cheers

[lily]

LMAO............coming in on the same day as the story of Bush's records being lost.

http://www.saabclub.co.uk/forums/graphics/emoticons/rotate.gif spin those stories, spinhttp://www.saabclub.co.uk/forums/graphics/emoticons/rotate.gif

[Silver]

Another man who served with Kerry in Vietnam who thinks that he is unfit to be president:


by Capt. Scott Campbell
APR 7, 2004


In September of 1970 I was on my way to Viet Nam. Previously, I was commissioned in the United States Army, Military Intelligence Corps and assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division in Fayetteville, North Carolina. My duty station was the FBI office in Fayetteville.

On various occasions during 1970 the questionable and harmful behavior of a former junior navy officer came to the attention of our FBI office. I soon learned that the person was John F. Kerry. Kerry’s conduct certainly was unbecoming of a former officer or anyone who cared about his fellow countrymen committed to battle against an enemy. I watched Kerry’s activities with great interest, trying to determine what could cause such a major change in conduct. How could he profess to be a leader responsible for the welfare and morale of those he led and a few months later seriously undermine the welfare and morale of the entire military in Viet Nam?

In my duties, I had become aware of a few other Viet Nam veterans who had disagreements with some of our government officials but generally would not wrongfully disparage people they served with. Kerry differed from these other malcontents; he focused on the imaginary continual atrocities of his fellow countrymen. Kerry was very interested in joining the Congress of the United States. Certainly, he did not want to address the supposed failings of that body (as others of his group did) in an effort to join it. Instead he chose to maliciously malign, without cause, the servicemen who were ordered by congress to military service. These servicemen were not in a position to respond because they were fulfilling their military commitment in a foreign war. Kerry petitioned congress to end the war because we (all of us) who were fighting it were criminal. This tactic gained him recognition. Truly, it was an interesting ploy to build fear of the war and fear of those who fought it. Massachusetts's voters, who now had heightened fear and an irrational unfounded abhorrence of the call to serve, fell prey to his deception. Hopefully, he was ignorant of the massive contribution he was providing the enemy which eventually helped reverse a war we had already won. Kerry now is similarly undermining a just military cause he voted for but also voted to deny the resources necessary to win. This time Kerry can have no ignorance excuse. Neither can the American voters.

Did Kerry crack under the stress of combat? Most of us served twelve months in our combat stations, some served 13-48 months. Kerry served only 4 months, and then abandoned his leadership responsibilities to “go home” through a series of his own administrative manipulations. Many endured far more combat stress than Kerry.

What of the people he defamed? It was my experience that all of the Viet Nam veterans who took part in my training and preparation, prior to entering the combat zone, did so with admirable professionalism. Upon arriving in Viet Nam, I was assigned as the Interrogation Advisor for half of Viet Nam. Then I became Aide de Camp for a Brigadier General. The last half of my tour was spent in various combat advisory positions to the Vietnamese and liaison roles to the Koreans and Australians. At the end of my fifth month in-country, an administrative error allowed me to end my tour of duty early and return home. However, I could not take the “early out” because the people who I had leadership responsibility for had 12 month tours. I could not walk away from them. I completed my 12 month tour. Others in my position would have done the same.

Contrary to Kerry’s assertions, the hundreds of servicemen I met in Viet Nam from Sep 70 to Sep 71 were some of the finest people this nation has. Viet Nam veterans, now, can and will respond. John Kerry failed to be a commander of a few and is unqualified to be Commander-in-Chief.

Scott Campbell
CPT, MACV, II Corps, Pleiku, Vietnam
Mendon, Utah

[Zan de Man]

I would like to talk on behalf of all those veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit - the emotions in the room and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

We call this investigation the Winter Soldier Investigation. The term Winter Soldier is a play on words of Thomas Paine's in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriots and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.

We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out....

In our opinion and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.

We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.

We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American.

We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search and destroy missions, as well as by Viet Cong terrorism - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.

We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.

We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.

We watched the United States falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings." We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater. We watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese. We watched pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point, and so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 81s and Fire Base 6s, and so many others.

Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.

Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?....We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country - the question of racism which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions such as the use of weapons; the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything.

An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation of Alcatraz put it to me very succinctly. He told me how as a boy on an Indian reservation he had watched television and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped in Vietnam and he said, "my God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people," and he stopped. And that is what we are trying to say, that we think this thing has to end.

We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country....

We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission - to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so when thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

[Zan de Man]

Sounds humane, patriotic and courageous to me.

[Fredfredson]

Silver

It is probably not a good idea to start worrying about whether Kerry is "unfit to be president".

Bush and Cheney set the bar so low that there are homeless people (many Vietnam Vets in fact) who would be much more "fit" to be President than Dubya.

The only thing Kerry has going for him is that the Democratic Money Bags like him, same thing for Dubya only it's the Republican Money Bags.

Republicrat or Demopublican makes no difference.

F
:pooter

[Silver]

Silver



Republicrat or Demopublican makes no difference.

F
:pooter

Are you advocating a general boycott of the polls in November?

[marlowe]

Do you have any idea how a soldier was assigned the Purple Heart in the Vietnam Era?

Again, like with your other post, what's the real relevance of this post? What's the main point, if any?

[marlowe]

Goodness, can't have that. Better vote against Kerry, in that case.

Oh, and here's a picture of the Viet Cong thanking Kerry for helping them win the war.

http://www.therant.us/images/democrats/vietnam_kerry_pics/kerry_vietnamese_thank_you.jpg

Now what was that about traitor hell?


HIbbard is a traitor and a disgrace to the uniform. He's putting partisanship ahead of honor, by questioning a PURPLE HEART for God's sake!

I hope he dies soon, and gets sent straight to traitor hell.

[ninjalooter1701]

Goodness, can't have that. Better vote against Kerry, in that case.

Oh, and here's a picture of the Viet Cong thanking Kerry for helping them win the war.

http://www.therant.us/images/democrats/vietnam_kerry_pics/kerry_vietnamese_thank_you.jpg

Now what was that about traitor hell?


[..previous quotes removed..]


'Ooooh, how DAMNING, is it more or less damning than Rumsfeld shaking Saddam Hussein's hand after selling him chemical weapons?

[Atenhotep]

http://www.therant.us/images/democrats/vietnam_kerry_pics/kerry_vietnamese_thank_you.jpg

Now what was that about traitor hell?

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/atrios/rumsfeld-saddam.jpg

[kramsret]

Is there such a thing as a pathetic moron idiot fucktard who would call someone a "traitor" for meeting with some Vietnamese on 2004?

Surely not. Surely such a tragic figure, a shell of anything resembing a real American, doesn't exist?

[Atenhotep]

Kerry meets with them in the intersts of peace .. Oh, and you might notice he isn't shaking their hands or selling them WMDs btw ...

Bushites lost their voice.

They proved over these last four years they cannot be trusted.

Their opinion means nothing to me.

[GunnyL]

HIbbard is a traitor and a disgrace to the uniform. He's putting partisanship ahead of honor, by questioning a PURPLE HEART for God's sake!

I hope he dies soon, and gets sent straight to traitor hell.

You never cease to try outdoing yourself in stooping to new lows. The one who places partisanship above honor around here is YOU.

[jpn of Seattle]

http://www.freewayblogger.com/images/obfull3.jpg