Attack Of The Swifties
On February 25, 1969, he led a Swift Boat raid on the isolated peasant village of Thanh Phong, Vietnam, targeting a Viet Cong leader that intelligence suggested would be present. The village was considered part of a free-fire zone by the U.S. military.Kerrey's SEAL team first encountered a peasant house, or hooch, and killed the people inside with knives. While Kerrey says he did not go inside the hooch and did not participate in the killings, another member of the team, Gerhard Klann, said that the people killed there were an elderly man and woman and three children under 12, and that Kerrey helped kill the man. Despite the differing recollections about who actually stabbed these people, Kerrey accepts responsibility as the team leader for their deaths: "Standard operating procedure was to dispose of the people we made contact with," he told the New York Times Magazine. Later, according to Kerrey, the team was shot at from the village and returned fire, only to find after the battle that some of the deceased appeared to be under 18, clustered together in the center of the village. "The thing that I will remember until the day I die is walking in and finding, I don't know, 14 or so, I don't even know what the number was, women and children who were dead," Kerrey said in 1998. "I was expecting to find Vietcong soldiers with weapons, dead. Instead I found women and children."
Swift boats. A guy named Kerrey. Starting to get the picture? I foresee the rise of the Swift Boat Veterans and John Corsi.
Given what the Swifties did to a Presidential candidate just eight years ago and to Senator Max Cleland before that-- which in my book was even more abominable-- should give us pause and ask Bob Kerrey, "Are you really ready for this?" This narrative is not, so far as I know, under much attack and Kerrey's own recollections of the incident bear witness to his own anguish about it.
That's not going to stop the Rovians from gunning for Kerrey. And I suspect it will be even nastier this time, since the Senate is legitimately in play.
1 Comments:
They were already running ads in Nebraska against him before he said he wouldn't run weeks ago. The problem is there is no Democrat bench in Nebraska, if I am not mistaken Ben Nelson is the only Democrat elected in a statewide race, and has been for some time. I can't even say there has been a credible candidate for Governor for a few elections.
By Anonymous, at 10:06 AM
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