Kerry killed VN civilians? An alleged quote from Zumwalt

[Mairead]

This is from the NY Sun, which used to be a good paper but might not still be (I really don't know). I'm quoting it because of the high quality of the alleged sources; the writer himself is clearly biased against Kerry (or possibly anyone to the left of Bush):

Taking a look at Mr. Kerry’s much-promoted Vietnam service, his military record was, indeed, remarkable in many ways. Last week, the former assistant secretary of defense and Fletcher School of Diplomacy professor,W. Scott Thompson, recalled a conversation with the late Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. that clearly had a slightly different take on Mr. Kerry’s recollection of their discussions:

“{T}he fabled and distinguished chief of naval operations, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt,told me — 30 years ago when he was still CNO —that during his own command of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam,just prior to his anointment as CNO, young Kerry had created great problems for him and the other top brass,by killing so many non-combatant civilians and going after other non-military targets.‘We had virtually to straitjacket him to keep him under control,’ the admiral said. ‘Bud’ Zumwalt got it right when he assessed Kerry as having large ambitions — but promised that his career in Vietnam would haunt him if he were ever on the national stage.” And this statement was made despite the fact Zumwalt had personally pinned a Silver Star on Mr. Kerry.

Mr. Kerry was assigned to Swiftboat 44 on December 1, 1968. Within 24 hours, he had his first Purple Heart. Mr. Kerry accumulated three Purple Hearts in four months with not even a day of duty lost from wounds, according to his training officer. It’s a pity one cannot read his Purple Heart medical treatment reports which have been withheld from the public. The only person preventing their release is Mr. Kerry.

By his own admission during those four months, Mr. Kerry continually kept ramming his Swiftboat onto an enemy-held shore on assorted occasions alone and with a few men, killing civilians and even a wounded enemy soldier. One can begin to appreciate Zumwalt’s problem with Mr. Kerry as commander of an unarmored craft dependent upon speed of maneuver to keep it and its crew from being shot to pieces.

http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2004/02/27&ID=Ar00800

[displacedtexan]

1. So all of those medals were for...?

Remember that Nixon wanted Kerry stopped.

[janx]

2. Why did Nixon want him stopped?

? I've never heard anything about any of this. ?

Edit: In other words, stopped from doing what?

[PVnRT]

7. Protesting the war

Kerry was one of the more vocal of the veterans who started agitating for peace, and we all know how Nixon felt about those people...

[janx]

11. Ah, that explains it. tnx.

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

9. His anti-Vietnam war work

Day after day, according to the tapes and memos, Nixon aides worried that Kerry was a unique, charismatic leader who could undermine support for the war. Other veteran protesters were easier targets, with their long hair, their use of a Viet Cong flag, and in some cases, their calls for overthrowing the US government. Kerry, by contrast, was a neat, well-spoken, highly decorated veteran who seemed to be a clone of former President John F. Kennedy, right down to the military service on a patrol boat.

The White House feared him like no other protester.

Colson, in a secret memo, revealed he had a mission to target Kerry: "Destroy the young demagogue before he becomes another Ralph Nader."

The effort by Nixon and his aides to undermine Kerry went much deeper than even Kerry realized. Yet it is this chapter in his life, as much as any other, that helped turn Kerry into a national political figure. By targeting Kerry, the Nixon White House boosted his stature in ways that still are having an impact.

http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/kerry/061703.shtml

[janx]

12. Hmmm...this article sounds a bit biased toward Kerry, no?

But I'll have to keep in mind that it's from Boston. I believe the gist of it though, even if the language comes off as being a bit hyperbolic.

Thanks.

[blm]

16. It was ON the TAPES and IN the memos.

It was Nixon and his thugs that were being hyperbolic.

[emulatorloo]

10. Nixon white house worked very hard to smear him because of protest

perhaps this is left over smear.

[madrchsod]

3. second hand testimony

the admiral is dead. zumwalt had a change of heart so to speak, when he found out his son was dieing of agent orange poisoning. he was directly responsible for the agent orange campaign

[LiberalFighter]

34. That is what I want to know

Who did Zumwalt tell this to? Hearsay? Was Zumwalt part of Nixon's plan?

[Name removed]

4. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[blondeatlast]

5. More slams at his VVAW activities,

This article is being parroted at several RW sites that I've seen with scarcely a change in the text.

I call it utter crap.

[BeachBuckeye]

6. Quoting a dead guy?

Absolutely without merit. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Pure B.S.

[KFC]

26. Thank you

I wonder why this shit was posted.

[dogman]

8. BS

This is like the smears on Clark, unsubstantiated. They could be true, but considering the Admiral pinned the Silver Star on Kerry, they have no credibility. If he honored a sailor he knew to be unworthy, then he was not honest and his comments would have no credibility. It's nonsense to quote a dead man unless there is proof which should have voided the Admirals actions. The story then is the same as the story now, you have no leadership at the top.

[LiberalFighter]

35. Good rebuttal

[RobinA]

13. OK, I've Never Been in the Military

but maybe military types here can set be straight. Zumwalt, as CNO, was aware enough of the actions of every single soldier on the ground in Vietnam that he knew what Kerry was doing in his boat? "Great problems" were created in Vietnam, at the very time they were supposedly happening, by soldiers who killed too many noncombatants? And Zumwalt rightfully predicted 30 years ago that Kerry would be on the "national stage?" Right. Top officers all over Vietnam were shaking their heads in 1968 over the problems then-20-year-olds were going to have due to their actions in Vietnam when they ran for President. This is REAL believable

[incapsulated]

15. Exactly

It's as if Zumwalt was making Kerry's individual actions out to be so horrid and extensive that he was personally having some effect on the progress war itself, heh.

:crazy:

 
 

[Mairead]

17. "Zumwalt knew what Kerry was doing?"

For someone of Kerry's social background, I've no doubt Zumwalt did, yes. Just as the corresponding admiral always had Kennedy's dossier available at a moment's notice during WW2. People of privilege are monitored closely by both sides, both because their powerful relatives want to be kept up to date and because of the mileage one can get out of having, oh, Ho Chi Minh's nephew fall into US clutches.

[incapsulated]

20. Long lost photo

Of Kerry in Nam:
 
 

 
 

[TacticalPeek]

37. ROFLMAO!

Lotsa Kerry/Kerrey confusion running around this thread.

Scott Thompson had better reread his Z-gram. Oh, wait, that's right, nothing in writing, nothing straight from Zumwalt.

How transparent! You should hear some of the things Hugh Shelton told me about Zumwalt. Oh, wait, Shelton's still alive. Maybe it was Gen Edwin Walker that told me those things about Zumwalt; right, that's the ticket.

[incapsulated]

14. Didn't he pretty much admit

That he killed civilians and burned villages in that old piece from his vets against the war days?

Jesus, this was Viet Nam folks. I can't remember half of the horrible stories I've heard from vets about what went on over there. I was a horrible war. Kerry had the guts to come home and speak out on what was going on over there and stand against it. I don't think anyone is going to hold this against him. You can't call him a pacifist hippy war criminal, for chrissakes.

 
 

[Old and In the Way]

18. VietNam was a guerilla war, unlike any other war we fought, I think.

For every NVA regular, there were probably 10 irregulars. Frankly, the whole madness of the war was that we were forced to destroy the people and infrastructure that we were supposed to be saving.

I think this particular story is BS. Believe me, it would have been used against him in the early 70s if it had any merit.

But it was precisely the nature of this war that Kerry and many other vetrans protested and, thankfully, helped to bring it to an end.

[Old and In the Way]

19. I think you may be confusing him with Bob Kerrey.....nt

[incapsulated]

21. I read this recently, here on DU

Of course, I could be confused. It wouldn't be the first time.

 
 

[janx]

22. Hmmm...dunno. Is there anything about it in his book?

The one he wrote "way back when"?

[incapsulated]

23. It was from that long statement he made

Where he mentioned war crimes, I think. I won't even try to search it, because there are a gajillion Kerry threads in the archives.

Maybe someone will show up who remembers what I'm thinking of.

Or, if I'm wrong, nobody will, heh.
 
 

[RhodaGrits]

27. The quote is in that boston globe article linked above.

I'm getting a bunch of these smears on kerry's war/anti-war records in emails from some RWingnuts I know... some of it is pretty vicious. It's obviously going to be a major attack point.

[janx]

28. My God! That's what happens to us when we don't read the

whole article. I am guilty of making assumptions based on the paragraphs posted.

This is not good.

[incapsulated]

30. Here is his statement before congress

http://www.richmond.edu/~ebolt/history398/JohnKerryTestimony.html


Although that is still not what I was thinking of.

Actually, it doesn't even matter whether he said it, what matters is this present attack. My point was, first, anyone involved in combat in Viet Nam had more than enough opportunity to have killed civilians in the course of the war, and second, that this portrayal of him as some sort of psycho out of control is unbelievable, and finally, if this is an attempt at a smear I don't see how it will stick given the attempt to portray him as some sort of Vet-hating, Hanoi John commie at the same time.

[LiberalFighter]

36. What are our troops doing in Iraq?

Making sure that no civilians are killed or injured?

[David Dunham]

24. Bob Kerrey (D-Nebraska) admitted to burning villages in Vietnam, not JK

[KFC]

25. He did not kill them. He had sex with them.

Get your unfounded rumors straight.

[bigtree]

29. If this is not out of bounds

this is sick

[mitchum]

33. bigtree, I don't think KFC is attacking Kerry...

but is instead using sarcasm to show his own disgust at this pathetic smear attempt. KFC has been quite supportive of Kerry

[KFC]

39. Thanks. I just got uber sarcastic over the latest slur

Citing a recollection of a dead man's take is, well, bullshit.

[John_H]

31. Did Zumwalt see all this with big binoculars when he was safe

on his big boat hundreds of miles off shore?

[Rose Siding]

32. Why won't Kerry release his records?

Seems that would clear up some of this smear. Why wouldn't he?

[DrFunkenstein]

38. Read This And Stop Slamming Kerry On Bullsh*t Charges

The possibility of killing innocent civilians haunted Kerry. With many of the South Vietnamese waterways in ''free fire zones'' - meaning that the US Navy was authorized to shoot anyone who was violating a curfew - the likelihood that innocent villagers could be killed was high.

Kerry said he was appalled that the Navy's ''free fire zone'' policy put civilians at such high risk. So, on Jan. 22, 1969, Kerry and several dozen fellow skippers and officers traveled to Saigon to complain about the policy in an extraordinary meeting with Zumwalt and the overall commander of the war, General Creighton W. Abrams Jr.

''We were fighting the free fire policy very, very hard, to the point that many of the members were refusing to carry out orders on some of their missions, to the point where crews were starting to mutiny, to say, `I would not go back in the rivers again,''' Kerry recalled during a 1971 television appearance on the Dick Cavett Show.

But Kerry went back in the rivers. Indeed, it was after this meeting that he began his most deadly round of combat. Within days of the Saigon meeting, he joined a five-man crew on swift boat No. 94 on a series of missions in which he won the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and two of his three Purple Hearts. Starting in late January 1969, this crew completed 18 missions over an intense and dangerous 48 days, almost all of them in the dense jungles of the Mekong Delta.

The most intense action came during an extraordinary eight days of more than 10 firefights, remembered by Kerry's crew as the "days of hell."

http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/kerry/061603.shtml

[sangha]

40. The Sun is a Freeper rag

It was started because the owners felt the NY Post wasn't conservative enough