posted on August 31, 2004 06:08:25 PM new
John its time to put up or shut up, last chance.....What do you bet john ignores their request?
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The following letter was delivered to the Kerry Campaign today by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
Swift Boat Veterans for Truth
P.O. Box 26184
Alexandria, Virginia 22313
August 31, 2004
Senator John Kerry
901 15th Street NW
Washington, DC 20005
Dear Senator Kerry:
As you prepare for your address before the American Legion in Nashville, Tennessee, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth encourages you to use this opportunity to clarify your actions in Vietnam and your statements about your fellow Veterans and shipmates when you returned home. Since you have made your four-month tour in Vietnam the centerpiece of your campaign, we respectfully insist that you be truthful. The public is owed a full and honest accounting of your actions. Veterans are owed an apology from you and an acknowledgement that there was no basis in fact for the accusations you made against them.
We urge you to:
1. Apologize for your conduct once you returned from Vietnam. Your exaggerated testimony before the US Senate; the blanket indictment of your fellow veterans; throwing away medals and ribbons; all of these actions dishonored America and the armed forces. Your rhetoric and actions were not only wrong, they aided the enemy and brought great pain to POW's, veterans and their families.
2. Clarify the conflicting accounts involving the Bay Hap River incident of March 13, 1969 (Bronze Star and 3rd Purple Heart). You have now described three different versions of this incident. In the first version of this incident presented during the Democrat National Convention, you stated: "No man left behind," suggesting to the American people that you alone stayed on the river to rescue Mr. Rassmann. Later, when forced to acknowledge conflicting eyewitness testimony from fellow swift boat veterans, you said that your boat left the scene to return moments later to retrieve Jim Rassmann from the water. Yet, in another version of the same incident discovered in the Congressional Record, you reported that your boat struck a mine and Rassmann fell off the boat. Mr. Kerry, please explain to your fellow veterans and the American people which version is the truth.
3. Affirm that the injuries for which you received your purple hearts never required any medical treatment beyond perhaps a bandage and that, in all instances, these injuries were self-inflicted and came from your own weapon. Further, that if any of these purple hearts were falsely awarded, that you would not have been eligible to leave Vietnam after serving only four months.
4. Acknowledge what your own biographer is now saying, that the Christmas in Cambodia claim is "obviously wrong," that you were never in Cambodia over Christmas or any other time during your brief, four-month tour in Vietnam and that your statements before the United States Senate in 1986 were false.
If you undertake these steps we will be satisfied that the American public has been sufficiently apprised as to these aspects of your career, and we will discontinue the media advertisements you have sought so fervently to silence.
Please know that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are eager to close our own personal chapters on Vietnam and instead focus on the war we're currently fighting — the ongoing war on terrorism. In the absence of full public disclosure and a public apology, we will continue efforts to carry our message to an ever-expanding base of grassroots supporters.
Senator Kerry, we want to get Vietnam behind us. But, we can only do so if the truth is told.
posted on August 31, 2004 09:20:25 PM new
That letter reminds me of what I was thinking after Bob Dole said he thought kerry should apologize to the VN vets for his 1971 testimony.
I wondered what the reaction would be should kerry do just that...apologize to them. Saying something like that was a different time - a different place. But the problem is kerry has reinforced his position from all those years ago by recently saying he still believes what he did was the right thing to do...and that he stands by what he said.
I just don't see kerry as a man who has the ability to apologize - to work towards healing old pains. He's too elite...too aloof...to ted kennedy in character to do that.
So...I don't expect it to happen, but think if it should it would be wonderful.
posted on August 31, 2004 11:32:36 PM new
I think he should tell the lying sacks o' ship what charming DICK Cheney told a senator,....go f--- yourself.
Those anti-American, anti-combat vets should hang their heads in shame at what they're inmplying about people who have actually FOUGHT in a war unlike Bush who couldn't even show up in America!!!
