PRESTOPUNDIT

"Kerry's claims of fighting in Cambodia come under fire"
Scott Canon, Kansas City Star

August 17, 2004

John Kerry's "reporting for duty" salute at the Democratic National Convention last month emphasized the key biographical boast of his campaign -- decorated combat service in Vietnam. Now his repeated claim that he also weathered combat upriver in Cambodia has drawn harsh skepticism -- driven by anti-Kerry veterans who star in a political commercial and book financed by Texas Republicans. Roy Hoffmann, a retired admiral who was a Navy captain in command of Kerry's unit at the time, said the candidate's statements about spending a Christmas Eve in Cambodia can't be true.

"I think he just outright lied," said Hoffman, now aligned with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and one of the officers criticizing Kerry in the ad. "He never was there." Over the years, Kerry has referred to spending Christmas or Christmas Eve 1968 in Cambodia and coming under fire. At the time, Cambodia was considered a neutral nation presumably off-limits to U.S. troops.

"I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia," Kerry said in 1986 at a Senate committee hearing during a debate on U.S. policy toward Central America. "I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there, the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared -- seared -- in me."

A few years earlier, the Massachusetts senator had talked with the Boston Herald about "the absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops." The Kerry campaign has since said that the presidential candidate's recollection was imprecise -- that his runs into Cambodia came in the early months of 1969. A June 2003 article in the Washington Post quotes Kerry talking about a mildewy and faded green camouflage hat he carries in his black attache.

"My good luck hat," Kerry told the Post. "Given to me by a CIA guy as we went in for a special mission in Cambodia." The book "Unfit for Command," put out by members of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, contends "all the living commanders in Kerry's chain of command ... indicate that Kerry would have been seriously disciplined or court-martialed had he gone" to Cambodia.

Yet the Kerry campaign said it was far from rare for American forces to pursue Viet Cong over the border. "Swift Boat crews regularly operated along the Cambodian border from Ha Tien on the Gulf of Thailand to the rivers of the Mekong south and west of Saigon," said Michael Meehan, a senior adviser in the Kerry campaign. "Boats often received fire from enemy taking sanctuary across the border. Kerry's was not the only United States riverboat to respond, inadvertently or responsibly, across the border." In 1969, Nixon authorized "Operation Breakfast," the secret bombing of Cambodia in an attempt to destroy North Vietnamese base camps and supply routes in that country. In April 1970, Nixon announced that U.S. troops were invading Cambodia.

Douglas Brinkley drew from Kerry's journal in his flattering biography "Tour of Duty." This account has Kerry's swift boat and two smaller patrol boats moving "up the Co Chien River to its junction with the My Tho only miles from the Cambodian border" and then tooling through idyllic canals north of Sa Dec -- a village roughly 50 miles south of Cambodia. On the border The book describes the day's tranquility destroyed by an ambush that seemed to extend beyond a Christmas truce. Having survived that attack, the book said, Kerry and his comrades later had to back off from a South Vietnamese base to avoid friendly fire.

In Meehan's statement on Friday, the campaign said Kerry spent Christmas Eve 1968 in "the watery borders between Vietnam and Cambodia deep in enemy territory. "In the early afternoon," the statement continues, "Kerry's boat, PCF-44, was at Sa Dec and then headed north to the Cambodian border. There, Kerry and his crew along with two other boats were ambushed, taking fire from both sides of the river, and after the firefight were fired upon again. Later that evening, during their night patrol, they came under friendly fire. "Many times he was on or near the Cambodian border and on one occasion crossed into Cambodia at the request of members of a special operations group operating out of Ha Tien" on the Gulf of Thailand, Meehan said in his statement.

Hoffmann said he was leery of Kerry's claim to have ventured into Cambodia in early 1969 to deliver CIA operatives or special forces soldiers. "I was always properly informed. The whole time I was there, I don't recall" such a mission, Hoffman said. The anti-Kerry group, consisting mostly of men who served on other boats in the Mekong Delta, has accused him of cowardice in a battle where he was decorated for pulling a soldier from the river. These veterans, many angry about his later anti-war activities, have also said his Purple Hearts were awarded for superficial or self-inflicted wounds. Kerry's crewmates have come to his defense. Kerry's defenders have dismissed the discussion of when and whether he fought in Cambodia as a ploy to diminish his military honors -- a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. "We're quibbling over these details when a man volunteered for service and earned these honors protecting his fellow comrades in arms," said Michael Golden, spokesman for Kerry's Missouri campaign.