Kerry's Belodeau eulogy: Yet another version of the Rassman rescue, and screaming up the river "50 yards from Cambodia" in the dead of night

Among young Lt. Kerry's crew on PCF 94 was the late Thomas M. Belodeau, who died in 1997.  Without a trace of snark or sarcasm, I begin this post by saying that I mourn Mr. Belodeau's death, and I honor his service to his country.  What follows does not discredit him in any way.  An unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of the current SwiftVets vs. Kerry controversy, however, is that we cannot dig through the factual record of Sen. Kerry's Vietnam service — which as even his supporters recognize, Sen. Kerry himself has chosen to make "the seminal character issue of his presidential campaign" — without discussing at least briefly some of our other veterans, like Mr. Belodeau, who've since passed away.

Mr. Belodeau's description of the event in which Sen. Kerry won his Silver Star was the genesis of Boston Globe reporter David Warsh's column during Sen. Kerry's 1996 re-election campaign that essentially accused Sen. Kerry of being a war criminal.  Many — including some who are now part of the SwiftVets' efforts — objected to what they thought was Warsh's cheap shot, and it appears that Mr. Belodeau actively assisted Sen. Kerry in rebutting that accusation, to the credit of them both.

It is unsurprising, then — and again to Sen. Kerry's credit — that reporter Mike Barnicle would write of him, just before the Democratic National Convention in Boston last month:

But John Kerry can cry. And listen. And see pain. All of that and more because of an element of his personality that he is often reluctant to display: He knows what it’s like to be afraid, to be vulnerable, to, quite literally, be wounded.

Part of him went to war and never came back. That portion occasionally reappears at odd, sometimes sad events: the funeral of Tommy Belodeau, a decent, solid, hard-working guy who was part of Kerry’s Swift Boat crew in Vietnam and had a difficult life after the war. Kerry could barely keep his composure giving the eulogy the day Belodeau was buried a few years ago; at small dinners where Kerry is surrounded by other veterans, men who have a shared friendship now due to a shared horror from the past. Intimacy and the alliance of combat can indeed expose his soul.

So, too, it is to Sen. Kerry's genuine credit that — as one of my commenters, Patrick R. Sullivan, pointed out on an earlier post, and as reader Alexandra H. Mulkern emailed me with a helpful link — Sen. Kerry spoke, quite eloquently, at Mr. Belodeau's funeral.  Only a ghoul would begrudge the tiny expense to the public fisc from Sen. Kerry's gracious gesture on January 28, 1998, in inserting into the Congressional Record a written version of the eulogy (.pdf files: first page, second page; or you can access the entry directly through the link-unfriendly search engine at the Congressional Record website) that Sen. Kerry delivered on behalf of Mr. Belodeau on November 10, 1997.  It was altogether fitting and proper that he do so.  Sen. Kerry was writing to honor a departed friend and brother whose "steady hand and courageous heart" helped keep young Lt. Kerry alive.  "How do you say goodbye to a man who shared the most challenging and terrifying moments of your life?"  Surely, at a minimum, one writes such a goodbye only with great care and attention to detail.

Like so many of Sen. Kerry's other written and oral recollections of his Vietnam service, however, this one contains discrepancies that are hard to reconcile.  In it, among those "most challenging and terrifying moments" of their lives, Sen. Kerry recounts what clearly seem to be the same incidents out of which young Lt. Kerry was awarded his Silver Star and his Bronze Star.  With regard to the latter:

There was the time we were carrying special forces up a river and a mine exploded under our boat sending it 2 feet into the air. We were receiving incoming rocket and small arms fire and Tommy was returning fire with his M-60 machine gun when it literally broke apart in his hands. He was left holding the pieces unable to fire back while one of the Green Berets walked along the edge of the boat to get Tommy another M-60. As he was doing so, the boat made a high speed turn to starboard and the Green Beret kept going — straight into the river. The entire time while the boat went back to get the Green Beret, Tommy was without a machine gun or a weapon of any kind, but all the time he was hurling the greatest single string of Lowell-Chelmsford curses ever heard at the Viet Cong. He literally had swear words with tracers on them!

The "Green Beret" in question almost certainly must have been Mr. Rassmann.  In this account, however, Mr. Rassmann is not sitting and eating a chocolate chip cookie when he's thrown into the river, but rather moving to get Mr. Belodeau another weapon when a "high speed turn" caused him to fall overboard.  This version only mentions one mine, which is consistent with the recollection of the SwiftVets who've described the episode from their perspectives on the other boats in formation with PCF 93; but this story has the single mine exploding under Sen. Kerry's boat.  And indeed, in this version, enough time had passed between the single mine explosion and the loss of Mr. Rassmann overboard that Mr. Belodeau's M-60 had time to "[break] apart in his hands."  Thus, this version events as told in Mr. Belodeau's eulogy fits none of the other published accounts from any of the participants, including Sen. Kerry as he's told of these events on other occasions, orally and in writing.

And then there's Cambodia, again (boldface added):

I cannot adequately convey or describe to you the measure of this man at war — standing in his peak tank in the bow, screaming up a river in the dead of night, no moon, 50 yards from Cambodia literally bouncing off the river bank, waiting for a mine to go off or a rocket to explode — and always steady, always dependable, always there for the rest of the crew.

I do not doubt that Mr. Belodeau deserved all the praise Sen. Kerry rendered in his eulogy.  And yet, I find myself asking the same question that Sen. Kerry ascribed to Mr. Belodeau in what was, no doubt, one of the eulogy's deft, lighter moments:

As many of you know, he was not a man of many words. So he'd just give you a look. And the look would tell it all — fierce determination; rollicking good fun; profound sadness.  I know you can see his expression for any mood he had. My favorite look of all was his bemused, "What the hell does  the skipper think he's doing now?"

But I ask that question with utmost gravity, and without a trace of bemusement.