Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
The veterans who tossed their medals at the steps of the U.S. Capitol in 1971 just wanted to wake up their country to the disastrous tragedy of Vietnam.
Apr 28, 2004 | Just days before Christmas in 2002, I interviewed Sen. John Kerry about his Vietnam combat experiences at his cluttered study high atop Boston's Beacon Hill. This is where Kerry keeps his Vietnam War archive, including artifacts from his swift boat days. At one juncture during our interview session, he pointed above his desk to a frayed American flag tattered with bullet holes. It was the one that had fluttered from PCF-94 over Kerry and his crew through the Viet Cong attacks they had survived together on the narrow waterways of South Vietnam in the first three months of 1969. We spoke about the harrowing day he saved the life of Jim Rassmann, a Green Beret who fell into a river amid a hail of mortar rounds.
"Do you still have the Silver Star," I asked Kerry. "Yeah," he said, "do you want to see it?" My answer was yes. He walked across his study to a secondary desk with clutter on top, mainly books, and opened the top right drawer. This is where he keeps all of his war medals.
"Nothing too fancy," he said as he pointed to the various boxes in which his medals were kept. "They don't bring back good memories." After glancing at them briefly we went back to our taped interview.
Out of all the stories that have hounded Kerry on the campaign trail, the issue of whether he threw away his ribbons or his medals is the most mendacious. Last week the media demanded to view Kerry's military records. The reason for the urgency was that Grant W. Hibbard, a lieutenant commander during Kerry's swift boat days in Vietnam, asserted that Kerry's first Purple Heart was undeserved. According to Hibbard, Kerry had a tiny scratch. The Boston Globe quoted him as saying, "I've had thorns from a rose that were worse." Over 35 years after the fact, Hibbard, a Republican, was trying to belittle, embarrass and malign Kerry.
But the release of Kerry's war record put an end to the flap. Stuck in the middle of released documents was an evaluation of Kerry by Hibbard, filled out two weeks after he supposedly told Kerry he didn't deserve a Purple Heart. Nowhere in Hibbard's evaluation did he mention any problem with Kerry over Kerry's winning a Purple Heart. In fact, Hibbard wrote that Kerry was one of the best sailors he knew in three categories -- initiative, cooperation and personal behavior. Why, if he thought Kerry was trying to finagle a Purple Heart, did he give him such high marks for personal behavior? As Katherine Q. Seelye reported in the New York Times once the document was released, Hibbard went underground, unwilling to grant interviews, hiding from the press in his retirement home in Florida. The story went away.
What we also learned from the release of his medical records is that Kerry still has shrapnel in his body from Vietnam. It often causes him discomfort.
The media showed little interest in that story. However, when ABC News showed an old clip of Kerry talking on a WRC-TV program called "Viewpoints" on Nov. 6, 1971, claiming he gave back medals during the famous Dewey Canyon III march in Washington in April of that year, they pounced. Why did he say on that show that he gave back medals when he was telling everybody else it was ribbons? Which Kerry was telling the truth?
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