BeldarBlog

Why I adore Laura Bush

Listening to her speak tonight at the Republican National Convention, I concluded that I adore Laura Bush because —

• She sounds like home to me.  Midland is 60 miles from the much smaller town where I grew up, and I still hear it in her voice.  She's a well-educated, stylish, poised woman who's worked hard to reach her personal potential, but she has never, ever tried to remanufacture herself to fit some elite concept.  She's not trying to be Jackie Kennedy.  She doesn't hate herself at all for being from Midland, Texas, and you know when you listen to her that she'd be equally accepting of you whether you were from from Bangor, Maine, or San Diego, California, or Roswell, New Mexico, or New York, New York, or Fargo, North Dakota.

• She has quiet, natural dignity.  She is not timid, but she is entirely comfortable not being the star.  She respects the grandeur of the position she's in but does not act at all like she thinks she's royalty.

• She realizes that she's the President's spouse and not an assistant President or a cabinet member.

• She also realizes that as the President's spouse, she can do something no assistant President or cabinet member can do — provide emotional stability and sustenance for the President 24/7/365, and thereby help him be a better man and a better President.  And she takes that job seriously and does it well.

• She's the antithesis of Theresa Heinz Kerry.  Whatever one thinks of Dubya, surely everyone can agree that Laura Bush won't be a hand grenade with a loose pin in the White House for the next four years.

Best line I've read today: Is Tommy Franks the 1st or 2nd best diplomat ever from Midland, Texas?

Okay, obviously I completely lied about not blogging tonight.  Beldar lied, nobody's died!   Anyway, Gen. Tommy Franks has endorsed Dubya:

Q: Do you think John Kerry can fight an effective war on terror?

A: Well, I support George W. Bush. You know what? I know what John Kerry is against. I'm having a little trouble figuring out what he's for.

SwiftVets offer Kerry peace with honor

I didn't intend to blog tonight while I'm clearly in a ranting frame of mind, but an alert reader emailed me with a link to the new open letter today from the SwiftVets to Sen. Kerry, entitled "Senator Kerry: Tell the Truth and We'll Stop the Ads."

I believe they would, but of course, he can't/won't/dare not.

I'm particularly tickled to read, at the end of the third numbered paragraph of the letter, that the SwiftVets have finally picked up on the Belodeau Eulogy.  Another reader has emailed me to say that Brit Hume has mentioned it again on Fox News.

The path outlined in the letter would be pretty close to what I sketched out some days ago in my post entitled "Staking the heart of the SwiftVets vampire."  The SwiftVets' own proffered stake would actually be less onerous — they'd let him get away without signing Standard Form 180 and releasing all the military records and other documents that he's stonewalling.  Think about it, Senator — you're being offered, in effect, a free pass for your cover-up, when conventional wisdom is that the cover-up is always a bigger deal than the underlying offenses themselves.  Heckuva deal.

The letter's conclusion:

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.

Sen. Kerry, don't you remember when you were in the Navy's brutal SERE (survival, evasion, rescue, and escape) program in the fall of 1968?  Don't you remember the most terrible part of it, as your pet biographer Brinkley (without a trace of apparent shame or irony on his part or yours) related  at pp. 123-24 of ToD?

The first torture drill involved forcing seven [trainees being treated as pretend] POWs into a box, crammed in one against another.  After about thirty minutes claustrophobia set in.  Then they were all shoved into solitary confinement cells half the size of a country outhouse.  "I almost panicked," Kerry wrote his girlfriend of the ordeal.  "My head was crammed down between my knees and I couldn't move it up. I have always had a fear of small places — of being shut in something and not being able to move.  I have never thought that it might happen in such an awkward and frightening way."

Just in the nick of time, with Kerry at the end of his rope and pounding his fist, screaming for air, he was released.  "I don't know how many pounds I sweated off in those minutes in the boxes but I was wet from head to toe," Kerry recounted, "and so thirsty again that I determined to steal water."

.... But at dawn the men were called out into the courtyard.  "Up the flag pole went the Stars and Stripes in place of the Hammer and Sickle that had earlier been there and the [pretend] guards all translated their bows into salutes as we knew them," Kerry wrote.  "We stood there as relief and pride surged through every pore of the body."

Aren't you feeling now like you're back in that box again, Senator?  You can fire a few campaign aides and "bounce off the walls" in your frustration — but you can't get out, can you?  There's only one way out of the box of lies that you've constructed for yourself.

Can't you just imagine how good the relief and pride would feel, surging through every pore of your body again, if you would just tell the truth, finally?  You could look in the eyes, perhaps, the men who spent not a day or a long weekend as mock POWs, but year upon year upon bitter year in the Hanoi Hilton and worse, where the guards weren't pretend and the torture and executions weren't mock — where they were forced to listen not to mock propaganda, but the words of a brother officer named John Forbes Kerry calling them war criminals in sworn testimony before the United States Senate. 

This is a whole lot more generous offer than the capitulation peace plan you recommended that the United States follow after you returned from meeting in Paris with representatives of the North Vietnamese government and Viet Cong.  Dammit, man, you don't even have to "confess" to things you didn't do!  You don't have to sell anyone out.

All you have to do is tell the truth, and then you can get on with your campaign.  You might actually finally heal the enduring wounds of your country from Vietnam.  Win or lose in November, wouldn't that be a great way to be remembered in history, Sen. Kerry?

No blogging tonight

Tonight I don't think I'll be blogging, beyond this short post.  I'm simply too angry at the moment to produce anything other than an ill-tempered rant that I'm sure I'd regret later.  Suffice it to say, for tonight, that having finished three-fourths of Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty, I no longer "kinda like" Professor Brinkley; I'm no longer willing to give him the benefit of any doubts; and I have nothing remotely positive, or even neutral, to say about him. 

SwiftVets' fourth ad focuses on medals over the fence

The fourth SwiftVets ad is out (hat-tip PrestoPundit).  It focuses on John Kerry's throwing his own/someone's medals/ribbons over a Capitol fence during antiwar demonstrations in 1971.  Actually, the ad ignores Kerry's own conflicting stories over whether it was his medals, or his ribbons, or someone else's medals, or some combination that he threw over the fence.  Instead, it has a video clip from Kerry saying on some TV interview ("Meet the Press"?) from November 6, 1971:

[We (?) — garbled] renounced the symbols this country gives .... And that was the medals themselves .... I gave back — I can't remember — six, seven, eight, nine ...."

I think the ad will be effective.  Some sizeable portion of the voting population has no clue that Kerry threw away either his medals or his corresponding service ribbons (it really doesn't matter which) — but they know Kerry has made a big deal out of those commendations throughout his campaign.  This ad is focused to educate those folks and — aided by press coverage about it, including the likely whining from the Kerry campaign in response — it will succeed.

Brinkley had in-hand the Belodeau Eulogy, but ignored it in telling the Rassmann rescue story

My regard for Kerry biographer Douglas Brinkley as an historian has dropped to a new low.  I've discovered that Brinkley must have had in his hands — and ignored — an unimpeachable source in which John Kerry told a version of the Jim Rassmann rescue that is completely, mutually inconsistent with the version which Kerry has related, and Brinkley himself has repeated, everywhere else.

In reading his book Tour of Duty:  John Kerry and the Vietnam War, I've mostly marvelled at Brinkley's tin ear — his seeming obliviousness to Kerry's own tendencies toward self-aggrandizement, exaggeration, and hyperdeveloped ego.  I'd wondered if Brinkley had noticed these things and was just being droll, passing them along with a straight face to let his readers draw their own conclusions.   I'd thought that Brinkley himself — despite being a professor of history and the Director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans — perhaps just didn't know much about, for example, the Battle of Antietam during the American Civil War.

But then I came upon this passage tonight at page 264 of Tour of Duty, in which Brinkley is writing about the crewmen young Lt. Kerry took over when he assumed command of PCF 94 when that Swift Boat's skipper, Tedd Peck, was wounded in an ambush on January 29, 1969 (boldface mine):

Rounding out Peck's five-man crew on PCF-94 was Radarman Thomas M. Belodeau, whose shy, demure demeanor masked a fighting instinct that had already made him a decorated seaman.  On July 5, 1968, Belodeau had been serving on PCF-27 when he spied a Viet Cong suspect running from a riverbank and went after him.  As enemy fire exploded all around, Belodeau had gone in and pulled the suspected VC from the water for interrogation, earning a Bronze Star with the Combat V device for his bravery.  "I cannot adequately convey or describe to you the measure of this man at war — screaming up a river in the dead of night, no moon, fifty yards from Cambodia, literally bouncing off the riverbank, waiting for a mine to go off or a rocket to explode," Kerry would later marvel at Belodeau.  "And always, always dependable — always there for the rest of the crew."

Since the point of this paragraph was to tell Belodeau's history, I have no particular quibble with Brinkley's failure to point out explicitly that Belodeau's medal-winning performance on July 5, 1968, long predated his association with Kerry.  (In July 1968, Kerry was finishing up his service on the Gridley and hadn't even started his Swift Boats training in San Diego.) 

But my jaw dropped upon reading the next lines — because the "Kerry later marveled at Belodeau" quote in ToD is drawn directly, word-for-word, from the eulogy that Kerry gave at Belodeau's funeral on November 10, 1997, and then had inserted into the Congressional Record for January 28, 1998!  As shown by this screencap of three consecutive paragraphs from the .pdf version (at 150 percent magnification) of page S186 from the Congressional Record on that date:

It is simply inconceivable that, in extracting the Kerry quote from the Belodeau Eulogy that he republished in Tour of Duty, Brinkley could have missed what appeared a mere two paragraphs up from it.  Anyone even vaguely familiar with Kerry's war-hero record could not possibly fail to recognize this as Kerry re-telling the Bay Hap River action — including the loss overboard of Green Beret Lt. Jim Rassmann, whose rescue got Kerry his Bronze Star.  And anyone even vaguely familiar with those events cannot fail to spot, immediately, the inconsistencies between the version of this story that Kerry told in the Belodeau Eulogy and the version that Kerry has told everywhere else — including the version later recounted by his authorized biographer Brinkley in Tour of Duty!

I've already blogged at length (here and here) about the inconsistencies between the Belodeau Eulogy version of the Rassmann rescue and that which Kerry has told elsewhere.  In the Belodeau Eulogy version, for example, Rassmann goes overboard during a "high speed turn to starboard," and the only mine has gone off some time prior to that, under Kerry's own PCF 94, lifting it two feet out of the water.  In the other versions that Kerry and his supporters have told, Rassmann goes overboard not during a sharp turn, but due to a second mine (or perhaps a rocket explosion, per Kerry supporter Sandusky), and it's Lt. Pees' PCF 3 that had previously been lifted out of the water (and indeed totally disabled) by the first mine.

I've been frustrated that these inconsistencies — which seem to me as simple and stark and obvious as those which led to the exposure of the "Christmas in Cambodia" fairy tale — haven't gotten any substantial attention in the blogosphere, much less in the mainstream media.  I was pleased to hear (although I don't yet have a verifying link) that Fox News' Brit Hume has mentioned the Belodeau Eulogy within the last couple of days.  And I am very pleased to read the just-published article on the Belodeau Eulogy by Art Moore in WorldNetDaily.com, in which Mr. Moore was kind enough to link and credit my blog for first finding it (although the credit should actually go to two of my readers who emailed me about it).

Brinkley's own tellings of the Rassmann rescue — both in Chapter Thirteen (at pp. 314-18) of ToD and in a slightly reworked version of that chapter later published as "John Kerry's Final Mission in Vietnam" on History.net — contain their own odd internal inconsistencies.  (For example, at page 314, the print version of ToD has Rassmann going overboard not from Kerry's own PCF 94, but from "PCF-35" — a boat that wasn't there at all that day.  And the History.net version has Rassmann aboard Pees' PCF 3, which is clearly wrong by everyone's account.)  In trying to sort through those inconsistencies — much less reconcile them to the versions told by Kerry's skeptics among the SwiftVets — I've been inclined to give Brinkley the benefit of the doubt, and to blame at least some of the errors on gremlins or sloppy editors.  I was inclined to attribute to an editor trying to shorten the online version, for example, the omission of this rather important sentence that, at page 313 in the print version of ToD, made clear that Kerry's butt-wound (which may have been at least part of the basis for his third Purple Heart) occurred through his own negligence rather than due to enemy fire:

"I got a piece of small grenade in my ass from one of the rice-bin explosions and then we started to move back to the boats, firing to our rear as we went," Kerry related.

But to find that Brinkley had the starkly different version of the Rassmann resuce that Kerry told in the Belodeau Eulogy actually in his hands — and that Brinkley ignored it! — simply stuns me.  This is simply not something one can blame on an incompetent editor or typesetting gremlins.

There's more mystery here, however:   In Brinkley's unnumbered "Notes" for Chapter Twelve at the conclusion of the book (at pp. 483-84), he gives no reference whatsoever for his "Kerry would later marvel at Belodeau" quote on page 264.  It's therefore unclear whether Brinkley was quoting from a written version of Kerry's Belodeau Eulogy as delivered at the funeral and maintained in Kerry's private records — records to which Brinkley was given exclusive access, and that the Kerry campaign disingenuously continues to insist, despite Brinkley's vocal disagreement, that Kerry's contract with Brinkley prevents Kerry from releasing — or instead from the presumably identical version of the Belodeau Eulogy that Kerry had inserted into the Congressional Record.  The troubling omission of any documentation, however, for the one Belodeau Eulogy quote that Brinkley did use in his book raises an inevitable ugly question: 

Was Brinkley just spectacularly incompetent?  Or did he deliberately deep-six the Belodeau Eulogy attribution that should have appeared in his notes section for Chapter Twelve, and then deliberately ignore its contradictory version for his telling of the Rassmann rescue in Chapter Thirteen?

Brinkley and Kerry as students of history

I could blog for a week, I'm sure, with nothing but my reactions while reading Doug Brinkley's Tour of Duty, but I'm intermixing my reading with some light blogospheric skimming, and another juxtaposition jumped out at me.

From ToD at page 115, discussing Kerry's reactions to the August 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, while he was training for his Swift Boats assignment in San Diego:

It was one more sign that America seemed to be unraveling into anarchy that year.  On top of the deadly riots in Detroit, Newark, and other cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King, John Kerry's great fear, as he watched an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 antiwar protesters clash with some 12,000 Chicago police, 6,000 U.S. Army troops, 6,000 National Guardsmen, and 1,000 FBI agents, was that a bloody massacre of Antietam-like proportions was in the offing.  The media dubbed the melee the Battle of Michigan Avenue.  Fortunately, the violence was contained with no loss of life.

"Antietam-like proportions"?

Although there were longer battles in which more men died, Antietam was the deadliest single-day battle in America's deadliest war, with 3650 Union and Confederate soldiers killed outright.  Did Kerry honestly expect 3650 deaths at the Chicago DNC?  And how can a professor of history report that with a straight face?

Of course, there's a more recent national catastrophe in another pair of large American cities in which something on the order of 3000 Americans did die in a single day, in a war most of them (and most of us) didn't yet realize was under way.  Roger L. Simon, blogging from the Republican National Convention in New York, nicely sums up the 2004 presidential election in one snapshot of bemused NYPD cops watching the anti-Republican protesters swirl around them, and one six-word quote from one of New York's finest (a quote so good I'll break my usual policy of avoiding hard profanity and quasi-profanity on BeldarBlog):

Cops were everywhere. It was fun talking to them. One of them said to me, "It's like fuggin' 9/11 never happened." His buddies seemed to agree.

Now there's a real student of history speaking!

The war-torn soul of John Kerry

From biographer Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, we get this powerful portrait of young John Kerry's anguish, quoting a lengthy letter he wrote to his sweetheart (pp. 82-83; boldface mine):

Judy Darling,

There are so many ways this letter could become a bitter diatribe and go rumbling off into irrational nothings.... I feel so bitter and angry and everywhere around me there is nothing but violence and war and gross insensitivity.  I am really very frightened to be honest because when the news [of the combat death of his college friend, Dick Pershing] sunk in I had no alternatives but  to carry on in the face of trivia that forced me to build a horrible protective screen around myself....

The world I'm a part of out there is so very different from anything you, I, or our close friends can imagine.  It's fitted with primitive survial, with destruction of an endless dying seemingly pointless nature and forces one to grow up in a fast — no holds barred fashion.  In the small time I have been gone, does it seem strange to say that I feel as though I have seen several years experience go by....  No matter [where] one is — no matter what job — you do not and cannot forget that you are at war and that the enemy is ever present — that anyone could at some time for the same stupid irrational something that stole Persh be gone tomorrow.

You can practically hear the mortar rounds shriek overhead Kerry's foxhole, can't you?  Everything around him "is nothing but violence and war" — "endless dying," the enemy "ever present."

Except that this letter was written in Febuary 1968, while Kerry was an ensign aboard the missile cruiser U.S.S. Gridley as it plied the dangerous waters of war-torn Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.  The Gridley was still almost 6000 miles and many weeks away from the waters offshore of Vietnam.  Certainly Kerry already knew that once there, he would remain aboard that large ship, on which his own risk of death or injury through combat would be essentially nill.  (During its entire service, the Gridley had only one combat fatality, Petty Officer William J. Duggan, who was killed while aboard a helicopter flying a search and rescue mission in 1967.  Kerry flew no such missions.)

I have no doubt that young Kerry felt genuine grief at the report of his college friend's combat death — certainly everyone who knew and loved Dick Pershing felt that.  Sadly, there were many deaths to mourn.  Nor do I mock or denigrate the notion that serving aboard the Gridley was important and patriotic.  [Update: And as a veteran of the Gridley aptly pointed out in my comments below, there were very real noncombat dangers in that service, as in much of military life even during peacetime.] 

But what's striking — and yes, what I frankly do mock — is the incredible self-aggrandizement and exaggeration of this letter.  Brinkley reports this with a straight face and, seemingly, a completely tin ear.

On to Kerry's shore patrol duties when the Gridley was at Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines.  This came after a brief patrol in which, as Brinkley reports, "[every] day that the Gridley patrolled the Gulf of Tonkin an enemy attack was remotely possible."  (That would be from the North Vietnamese Navy's combined battleships-and-aircraft-carriers task force, one presumes.)  At Subic, Kerry had Shore Patrol duty.  But even in that duty, Kerry and his biographer must find the seeds of Candidate Kerry's future greatness and nobility (page 88):

Kerry was both amused and surprised by the squalid life of this liberty city.  His "beat" was the bars and brothels part of town.... On [one] occasion he came upon a woman passed out on the floor of a bar, a sailor standing above her muttering, "Please don't let her die," over and over.  Kerry felt for her pulse and tried to bring her back to consciousness.  He succeeded.

Well, damn!  He woke up a drunk bar girl, isn't that worth another Bronze Star at least?

Later Brinkley writes breathlessly of the Gridley's return to Vietnamese waters, where Kerry came "only forty miles away" from "North Vietnam's treacherous Haiphong."  Now, again, I'm not suggesting this was trivial duty or that the Gridley should have turned off its radar and sonar and sent all its crew to bed drunk around 11pm.  But of this duty, we find Kerry writing to his parents (page 94-95):

The Viet Cong have tremendously increased their counter batteries along the coast and there is not a ship on the shore bombardment that does not encounter opposition.  Most of the shore effort is down south — in the I Corps area where Persh was killed.

I guess that must've been pretty much exactly like The Guns of Navarrone, wasn't it?

A couple of Brinkley's short passages about Kerry's service aboard the Gridley do resonate, so to speak — if not in ways Brinkley may have intended.  From page 84, describing the Gridley's voyage from Long Beach to Honolulu:

Every few days while at sea he would write an 800-word vignette about World War II battles that he would then read over the intercom in his best Edward R. Murrow stentorian tones.

And from page 86:

One time [Ensign Kerry] was directing helicopters during an exercise from the Combat Information Center.  [Robert E.] Jack, who was the watch officer that day, said, "Captain Harper (who had been listening to the radio chatter on the bridge) burst into CIC and asked me who was that person talking to the helos with the great voice.  So, I guess the skipper did at least give John a compliment on one occasion."

Too bad Kerry didn't have a chance to tell his shipmates about "Jeng-jhis" Khan, but I think we can all be sure that both his vignettes about naval history and his instructions to the helo pilots must have been "seared — seared" into their memories nonetheless.

Kerry's service aboard the Gridley has drawn almost no attention in the current SwiftVets controversy, and he's rarely mentioned it during his campaign — even though he spent three times as long assigned to that ship as he did in the Swiftees.  It's well worth your time to read the reactions to the chapter from ToD about his Gridley time from those who served with him then on the Gridley's website.  You'll find comments there detailing more of Kerry's consistent self-aggrandizement and exaggeration as reported by Brinkley in ToD — Kerry claiming responsibility for "motivating 400 swabbies," when his actual responsibilities were for 30, for instance.  The Gridley's website home page has a very understandable reaction: 

When questioned about [the relative lack of reporting in his biographical materials about Kerry's greater time aboard the Gridley], Kerry told Douglas Brinkley that "nothing much of note happened during his tour aboard the vessel."  So much for us!

I say again:  I do not mock or belittle Kerry's service aboard the Gridley.  It's something he should be very proud of — even if it wasn't the stuff of which Hollywood movies are made.  There are a whole lot more vets (and friends and family of vets) whose military service has resembled Kerry's aboard the Gridley, and can you not imagine how positively they'd have reacted if, instead of ignoring his time there, Kerry had made that service at least some small part of the balloons-lights-and-magic routine at the Democratic National Convention?

Instead, the only way he's used his Gridley service in his campaign has been as a basis for claiming that he served "two tours in Vietnam."  If anyone's mocking and belittling the Gridley, it's John Forbes Kerry.

Questions I wish Lisa Myers had asked, or would ask, William M. Zaladonis

In my recent posts, I've complained repeatedly about the fuzziness with which the press treats the various eyewitnesses who've surfaced in the SwiftVets vs. Kerry debate.  I suppose I should back that up with a specific example of how I think it ought to be done if one's goal is not to make headlines or spin the story for one side or the other, but to actually sort out the "truth" — or if not a single objective "truth" upon which everyone can agree, at least a more clear record as to what these gentlemen actually have to say and where their statements genuinely and irreconcilably conflict with one another.

NBC's Lisa Myers conducted a telephone interview with pro-Kerry Swiftee William M. Zaladonis to follow up on Mr. Zaladonis' claims that Adm. Bill Schachte was not aboard the "skimmer" with young Lt. Kerry on the training mission on 02Dec68, as a result of which Kerry was awarded his first Purple Heart.  Mr. Zaladonis stuck to his story.  But Ms. Myers' questioning of him was, shall we say, somewhat less skeptical and vigorous than her questioning of Adm. Schachte.  Worse, it was just damned sloppy.

So I've composed a list of follow-up questions that I wish Ms. Myers had asked, or would ask, Mr. Zaladonis. 

The questions are phrased to presume a continuation by her of the original interview, and hence refer to Mr. Zaladonis' "earlier statement"; if someone else were doing it, they'd need to be modified slightly, and a fair questioner would give Mr. Zaladonis the opportunity to review the full transcript from Myers' previous interview before starting the follow-up questioning, and upon his request at any time during the follow-up questioning.

I also should note that I'm assuming that Mr. Zaladonis said in the original telephone interview with Ms. Myers that he was firing an "M-60" — not (as it's transcribed in one place) an "M-16" — because he's consistently described himself as having manned the skimmer's M-60 machine gun in all of his other public statements that I've seen, and because the two phrases sound enough alike as to have encouraged a transcription error.

Note that if I were cross-examining Mr. Zaladonis as a hostile advocate trying to discredit and impeach his statements, I'd have written a very different set of questions than these fairly open-ended (but hopefully precise) ones.  If some of them are, technically, "leading," they're only gently leading to expedite the process.  If I confined myself to purely nonleading questions, not only would this post be twice as long, but the reader would have triple the difficulty making sense of the logical path of the examination.  The same information could be developed through a longer set of questions that all begin with a "what" or a "why" or a "how," which is what any seasoned advocate would do upon hearing a "leading" objection from opposing counsel. 

Nor have I asked any questions at all on the subjects of Mr. Zaladonis' potential biases.  And I have not  asked any of the broad set of questions intended to fully "place and identify" the witness — his pre- and post-military education and career, his family, his political affiliations and sentiments, and so forth — that would also be useful to an advocate who's trying to argue whether he or Adm. Schachte is inherently a more credible and trustworthy individual.  In short, these questions pretty much take Mr. Zaladonis and his past statements at face value, but simply seek to develop those statements in much greater detail than anyone in the press has yet done, so that observers can use their own common sense to decide how much weight they're entitled to.

----------------

• Did Lt. Kerry select you to participate in the skimmer mission on 02Dec68?  If not Lt. Kerry, who did select you?  What was your understanding of why you were selected?

• Did Lt. Kerry give you your instructions before the skimmer mission on what the purposes of the mission were and what your role in it was to be?  If not Lt. Kerry, who did?  What instructions were you given?

• Do you know who first conceived the idea of using skimmers for missions of the sort in which you participated on 02Dec68?  I'll represent to you that Adm. Schachte, then a lieutenant, has stated that he developed the concept for these missions and planned them.  If you assume with me that he's made that statement, do you have any first-hand or second-hand information to dispute that statement?

• Do you know whether similar skimmer missions had been conducted before 02Dec69?  Do you know who was the officer or who were the officers participating in any of those previous skimmer missions?

• I'll represent to you that Adm. Schachte has said that he participated in all such previous skimmer missions, and that it was his routine and unvarying habit and practice to personally command those missions.  Leaving aside for the moment the skimmer mission on 02Dec68 that you've described having been on, do you have any first-hand or second-hand information to dispute Adm. Schachte's statements about those other missions?

• Whether it was Admiral (then-Lieutenant) Schachte or another officer, do you believe it is likely or unlikey that there were other officers stationed there with you who had previous experience in commanding skimmer missions of the type you've said you participated in on 02Dec68?

• You described your rank as an "engineman third class," abbreviated "EN3."  Although I'm sure you had some training and perhaps some experience to qualify you, for example, to fire various weapons and perform other tasks as a Swiftee, is it fair to say that in general, EN3s' primary responsibilities were to look after engines?  Indeed, during the several weeks that you later served under Lt. Kerry's command while you and he were both assigned to a Swift Boat, PCF 44, was that your primary responsibility?

• Was Pat Runyon, who you've said was also with you and Lt. Kerry on the skimmer mission, and who's also shown on the Swiftboat.net website as an "EN3," another engineman third class like yourself? 

• You've said twice in your earlier statement that the mission on 02Dec68 was the only mission aboard a skimmer in which you ever participated.  Would it be fair to characterize this as a training mission for you?

• In your earlier statement, you said, "I'm fairly sure it was the only one that John Kerry was on — and the only one that Pat Runyon was on also." To the best of your knowledge, then, was the skimmer mission on 02Dec68 the only skimmer mission in which either EN3 Runyon or Lt. Kerry participated in?

• Was it your understanding that as of 02Dec68, Lt. Kerry had only recently arrived at your base from his Swift Boat training at Coronado Naval Base in San Diego, California?  As you understood it, as of 02Dec68, had Lt. Kerry been given responsibility for commanding his own Swift Boat?  Instead, as you understood it, was he supposed to complete some additional field training first, of which this skimmer mission on 02Dec68 was a part, before he'd be entrusted with his own Swift Boat command and the lives of crewmen like yourself on such a Swift Boat?

• In your earlier statement, you described this as, quote, "one of the scariest nights I've had in my life," unquote.  Is it fair to say that you understood the skimmer mission to have been at least a potentially dangerous one?

• As you understood it at the time, then, were you, EN3 Pat Runyon, and Lt. Kerry were being sent on a dangerous mission — of a type and on a type of craft that were completely new to each of you — without anyone aboard who'd ever participated in that type of mission on that type of craft?

• At the conclusion of the skimmer mission on 02Dec68, did then-Lt. Schachte debrief you regarding the mission?  Did any other officer debrief you, and if so, who?  If no officer debriefed you about the mission, do you have any explanation as to how Lt. Kerry's performance on this training mission was expected to be evaluated by his superior officers?

• As you understood it at the time and understand it now, shortly after the skimmer mission on 02Dec68, was Lt. Kerry put into a hostile environment potentially involving hot combat, in command of his own Swift Boat and responsible for himself, the Swift Boat, and its crew — without ever having had another senior or more experienced officer personally observe him in command of a small vessel in a potentially hostile environment, and without even having debriefed the enlisted sailors like yourself who'd personally observed him?

• Was the skimmer a small boat or a large boat?  Did it have only one engine — or more precisely, only an outboard motor — at its back or stern?  Was it a more or less complicated motor than the large twin diesel engines you later were in charge of on PCF 44?  As EN3s, would your and Mr. Runyon's training and experience have equipped each of you to have run that small outboard motor on the skimmer and keep it running?  In your judgment, would it therefore have made good sense for the officer or officers who selected the enlisted crew for skimmer missions like this one to generally put an EN3 in charge of running the skimmer's outboard motor?

• Was the skimmer's most powerful armament one M-60 machine gun in the front — that is, the bow?

• Is it also fair to say that there were other sailors whose classifications — for example, gunner's mate third class or GM3 — meant that in general, they were expected to maintain and fire machine guns?  Would Steve Gardner, the GM3 who served with you aboard PCF 44 in the Swift Boat's twin .50-caliber gun tub, be an example of someone like that?

• Do you have any explanation for why the officer or officers who selected the enlisted crew for the skimmer mission on 02Dec68 picked two EN3 and no GM3s — when there was only one motor, but also one machine gun?

• When you were asked earlier whether you recall any enemy fire that night, you answered, quote, "I'm not sure.  I don't really remember.  But it was so hard for me to tell.  I can't say there was or there wasn't.  I believe Mr. Kerry thought that there was, but I was busy with that M-60 and I was trying to empty all my ammo out as quick as possible, and get the heck out of there.  It was a pretty scary situation — I can't say we weren't fired on, but I can't really tell if we were.  I didn't see any tracers, but that doesn't mean anything ‘cause if they were using small arms there wouldn't have been any tracers," unquote.  Can we correctly assume from the fact that you did not mention hearing any large explosions, that in fact you did not hear any large explosions? 

• In an article from the Boston Globe by Scot Lehigh dated August 20, 2004, the following statement appears — quote, "'I am reasonably sure we didn't have an M-79,' Zaladonis said. 'I didn't see one. I don't remember it,'" unquote.  First, is Mr. Lehigh's quotation of you in the Globe substantially accurate? 

• Mr. Lehigh's article goes on to say, quote, "Runyon says the only weapons the trio had were an M-60 machine gun, two M-16 combat rifles, and, possibly, a .45 caliber pistol. Is he 100 percent sure there wasn't an M-79 grenade launcher in the boat? 'I wouldn't say 100 percent, but I know 100 percent certain that we didn't shoot them,' replies Runyon," unquote.  Is this quotation of you, and description of what you told Mr. Lehigh, substantially accurate?

• Who was responsible for selecting the armaments carried aboard the skimmer on 02Dec68?  Assume with me that others have said that it was routine to carry both M-16 assault rifles and M-79 grenade launchers aboard such skimmer missions.  Do you have any first-hand or second-hand knowledge to dispute that statement as to any other skimmer missions, other than the one on 02Dec68?

• In your earlier statement, when asked whether there was enemy fire that night, you said, quote, "I believe Mr. Kerry thought that there was, but I was busy with that M-60 and I was trying to empty all my ammo out as quick as possible, and get the heck out of there."  And in Mr. Lehigh's article, it says, referring to you, quote, "He does remember Kerry having trouble with his M-16. 'His gun jammed or he ran out of ammunition — I don't know which — but he bent down to pick up the other M-16,' he says," unquote, with "he" there referring to you, Mr. Zaladonis.  Is it fair to say that you were paying more attention to your M-60 and to "getting the heck out of there" than to the condition of Lt. Kerry's weapon or weapons?

• Did the skimmer ever turn over?  Did the skimmer or any of the gear on it sustain any blast or shrapnel damage to your knowledge? 

• I'll ask you to assume with me that Lt. Kerry and others have described his injury as being from a small piece of shrapnel.  If you assume with me that they have said that, do you have any first-hand or second-hand knowledge to dispute that statement?

• In your earlier statement, you said, quote, "I only remember popping a flare and the flare worked so it didn't explode or anything on the skimmer — it did its job," unquote.  Is it fair to assume that neither Lt. Kerry nor anyone else aboard the skimmer was injured by shrapnel from the flare?

• If we assume that Lt. Kerry's injury was indeed from a piece of shrapnel, is it fair to say that you simply cannot explain where that piece of shrapnel came from, based on your first-hand knowledge — what you saw with your own eyes and heard with your own ears?

• If we assume that Lt. Kerry's injury was indeed from a piece of shrapnel, is it fair for us to assume that something, somewhere, exploded to create that shrapnel — without your having noticed it?

• In your earlier statement, you said that Lt. Kerry, quote, "was firing an M-16 and it either jammed or he ran out of ammo.  And he bent over to pick up another one and then he got hurt, as he was bent over.  As far as I can remember," unquote.  And then when asked how Lt. Kerry got hurt, you said, quote, "I'm not sure.  I'm not sure at all," unquote.  When asked how you knew Lt. Kerry was hurt, you said, quote, "I guess we discussed that on the way back to the swift boat," unquote.  Is it fair to say, then, that your only knowledge as to whether, when, or how Lt. Kerry got hurt is second-hand knowledge, based on what Lt. Kerry told you?

• Whatever the scope of Lt. Kerry's injuries were, is it fair to say that after you heard about them from him on the way back to the Swift Boat, you saw no need to examine his wound or treat him yourself?  Did you have to clean any of Lt. Kerry's blood off of your own clothes or gear after the skimmer mission on 02Dec68?  Or off the skimmer or the Swift Boat?  Did anyone else, to your knowledge, other than perhaps Lt. Kerry with his own clothes?

• In your earlier statement, when asked how badly Lt. Kerry was hurt, you said, quote, "I don't know how badly he was injured.  I knew it wasn't life-threatening," unquote.  Later, you said, quote, "I knew he wasn't going to lose his arm or anything like that."  You said that when, quote, "we got back to the swift boat," unquote, Lt. Kerry, quote "went to the pilothouse and I went to the fantail. Myself and Runyon went back to the fantail and we both smoked back then so we went back there and smoked."  Is it fair for us to assume, then, that you did not observe Lt. Kerry receive any emergency medical treatment, administered by him or yourself or anyone else, while on the skimmer?  Is it fair for us to assume as well that you did not observe Lt. Kerry receive any emergency medical treatment back on the Swift Boat?  Is it fair for us to assume that you did not accompany Lt. Kerry and observe him receive any medical treatment at Cam Ranh Bay Naval Base?

• Assume with me that Dr. Louis Letson has said that he was the medical officer at Cam Ranh Bay as of 02-03Dec68, and that he says that he and the late Jesus C. Carreon, then a hospitalman first class, treated Lt. Kerry for his wounds.  If he has made that statement, do you have any first-hand information to dispute it?  Likewise, if he has described the nature of the wound he treated, or the nature of the piece of shrapnel he removed from Lt. Kerry's arm, do you have any first-hand basis to dispute those statements?

• In your earlier statement, you said that while you and Mr. Runyon were smoking on the fantail of the Swift Boat after the skimmer mission, quote, "we were talking to the Swift Boat crew."  Is it possible that, since you'd just been talking with Lt. Kerry about his injury, you may have discussed that with the crew, either while you and Mr. Runyon were smoking or at another time?  Do you know whether any of the other men who you were talking to on the Swift Boat may have accompanied Lt. Kerry to see Dr. Letson and Hospitalman Carreon for treatment?  Regardless of how they claimed to have come by the information they may have relayed to him, if Dr. Letson recalls having been told something by those other Swiftees about how Lt. Kerry was injured, do you have any first-hand basis to dispute Dr. Letson's statement?

• Do you have any knowledge as to whether an official casualty report was filled out by anyone in connection with the skimmer mission on 02Dec68?  Do you have any knowledge as to whether an after-action report was filled out by anyone in connection with that mission?  Do you know whether or not, as a matter of routine or regulations, such casualty reports should have been filled out if any American sailors were injured?  Do you know whether or not, as a matter of routine or regulations, such after-action reports should have been filled out if there had been any incoming fire from the enemy, regardless of whether any American sailors were injured?  If others say that there were neither a casualty report nor an after-action report filled out by anyone in connection with the 02Dec68 skimmer mission, do you have any first-hand or second-hand information to dispute those statements?

• You were asked again how you knew Lt. Kerry was hurt, and you said in your earlier statement, quote, "You know, up until recently, I hadn't thought about it a whole lot," unquote.  But you also said, referring to EN3 Pat Runyun, quote, "Pat and I have shared this story a few times since we've been out of the Navy.  We've been very good friends ever since we've been — when we were in the Navy and out — and this is something that we talked about every now and then."  Is it fair to say, then, that whatever else you and Mr. Runyon have "talked about every now and then" when you "shared this story a few times," your discussions did not include the fact that Lt. Kerry was hurt?  Or how badly hurt he was? Or how he came to be hurt?  Is it correct, then, that any in your and Mr. Runyun's discussions of the 02Dec68 skimmer mission, neither of you thought Lt. Kerry's wound was important enough to prompt you to discuss it further?  Is it also correct that you've only had occasion to discuss Lt. Kerry's wound from the 02Dec68 skimmer mission with anyone since Sen. Kerry began running for President?

----------------

I'm sure I've missed some details that someone with military experience would think to ask.  But I believe if we had Mr. Zaladonis' answers to these questions, we'd be in a far better position to resolve the differences between his statements and those of Adm. Schachte.

Update (Sun Aug 29 @ 1:20am): Tom Maguire and his commenters have an interesting debate going on regarding who to believe, which includes some links to other public statements of Messrs. Zaladonis and Runyon that I hadn't seen.

With friends like Doug Brinkley, does John Kerry need enemies?

PrestoPundit Greg Ransom has posted lengthy quotes from newspaper articles just published in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and WaPo about author Douglas Brinkley, whose early 2004 book Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War energized the SwiftVets into public action.  (Greg also gave me a hearty belly-laugh with his pithy description of this bit of nonsense from the Kerry campaign as a "John Nash moment.")

Clearly University of New Orleans Prof. Brinkley wants to be helpful to Sen. Kerry.  The whole point of his book, after all, was to argue that Kerry's tour of duty in Vietnam and his subsequent antiwar activism have shaped and defined his moral and political character to make him a fit President.  The WaPo article notes that

with this book, Brinkley has become a political historian as well, having authored a book that burnishes just the part of Kerry's biography that the candidate chose to highlight to defeat a wartime president who never has seen battle himself. "These days, Brinkley is acting a lot less like a historian and a lot more like a PR flack for John Kerry," wrote Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam. In its review, the New York Times referred to "the odor of salesmanship that lingers around 'Tour of Duty.'"

Now, I think it'd be harsh and unjustified to compare Prof. Brinkley to more obvious salesmen like, say, Joe Isuzu.  But just as the fictional Professor Philip Brainard's invention, Flubber, didn't always bounce the way one expected it to, neither has absent-minded Prof. Brinkley's output always bounced in ways that help propel John Kerry toward the White House.

In the back rooms of the Kerry campaign this morning, for example, there must be gnashing of teeth and low mutterings over this bit of candor from Prof. Brinkley in the WaPo article (boldface mine throughout):

The Kerry campaign has refused to release Kerry's personal Vietnam archive, including his journals and letters, saying that the senator is contractually bound to grant Brinkley exclusive access to the material. But Brinkley said this week the papers are the property of the senator and in his full control.

"I don't mind if John Kerry shows anybody anything," he said. "If he wants to let anybody in, that's his business. Go bug John Kerry, and leave me alone." The exclusivity agreement, he said, simply requires "that anybody quoting any of the material needs to cite my book."

From your mouth to WaPo's ears, Prof. Brinkley!  WaPo, "go bug John Kerry"!  How much material are we talking about?  Perhaps the Kerry campaign would prefer to downplay the size of the pile of evidence they're stonewalling to protect, but count on Doug Brinkley to give us some context here too:

"I'm talking a massive archive. I had to sit in his house, with this woman watching me, and go through the collection — 12-page letters, notebooks, journals. I made three different trips, and stayed there for days," said Brinkley, who also interviewed the senator for about 12 hours.

And people have mocked Nixon for merely keeping a few shelves full of Oval Office tapes!

Then there's this searing description from Prof. Brinkley of John Kerry's claims to have spent "Christmas in Cambodia":

"I'm under the impression that they were near the Cambodian border," said Brinkley, in the interview. So Kerry's statement about being in Cambodia at Christmas "is obviously wrong," he said. "It's a mongrel phrase he should never have uttered...."

Ahem.  "Mongrel phrase" might more aptly be used to refer to Kerry's tales of his acrobatic dog, "VC," who apparently was miraculously catapulted from PCF 94's deck onto another unidentified SwiftBoat at or about the same time the day before Lt. Rassmann was catapulted into the Bay Hap River.  But the flying pooch isn't part of Brinkley's ToD, and [ed: whoops] I'll leave the spirited fisking of that tale to Hugh Hewitt and James Taranto, the latter of whom has been sniffing out the story of VC's gymnastics since last spring.  [Update: And also to Steve Sturm, thanks!]

From the NOTP's article, we find that Prof. Brinkley is oddly comforted by the ways in which the SwiftVets have been able to make use of his book against Kerry:

Brinkley said the dual use of his successful book [by both the senator's opponents and supporters] is proof of his objectivity. Everything he has written and said to date, he insisted, has been based on the historical record.

Well, yes — that's sorta true, if one includes within the term "historical record" John Kerry's own amazing contemporaneous writings from his time "in-country."  For example, this passage from page 310 of ToD with a lengthy quote from Kerry's journals may not be a very profound or reliable source on the topic of war profiteering and corruption, but it certainly gives the reader some vivid, if weird and disturbing, insights into the self-absorbed mind of young Kerry during the 13Mar69 action that preceded the "rice pile explosion" and his subsequent Bronze Star and third Purple Heart:

I was amazed at how detached I was from the whole scene.  I just lay in the ditch, not firing because I wanted to save ammo and because I couldn't see what I was firing at, and I thought about what was happening in New York at that very moment, and if people really felt that I was doing something worthwhile while they went down to Schraaftt's and had another ice cream sundae or while some fat little old man who made another million in the past months off defense contracts was charging another $100 call girl to his expense account.  And then, when the shooting stopped, I came back to where I was.

This sort of detail is indeed useful for voters who are trying to decide whether the Global War on Terrorism should continue to be prosecuted by George W. Bush or instead by, say, Captain John Yossarian.

I'm about a quarter of the way through ToD, and I'm enjoying it.  And I have to admit, I sorta like Prof. Brinkley, from what I know about him.  I'm just worried, though, that the Kerry campaign is going to lock him in a small room for a long weekend of "strategic reprogramming" with James Carville and Lanny Davis.