Forgive?

From the Washington Times

Vets refuse to forgive Kerry for Antiwar Acts

The same record Mr. Kerry wields as evidence of his leadership abilities is also used by his harshest critics, who question the severity of the injuries he used to get sent home early and the five medals he garnered in five months.

"If I got three Purple Hearts for three scratches, I'd be embarrassed," said Ted Sampley, who fought in Vietnam and publishes U.S. Veteran Dispatch. He remembers soldiers turning away awards for minor injuries.

Mr. Kerry has said none of his Purple Heart injuries, only one of which removed him from the field for two days, was critical.

After his third Purple Heart, Mr. Kerry requested and was granted permission to return to the United States to work behind a desk in New York. Even while still a Navy man, he began traveling to antiwar rallies with leading war protesters such as Adam Walinsky, a former speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy.

Mr. Walinsky recalled that Mr. Kerry flew him around the state of New York for several Vietnam Moratorium protests in October 1969.

"He was a guy who had been in the war," he said. "We spent a lot of time talking about the campaign, the presidential campaign and the Vietnam War."

Mr. Kerry has said he did not take part in the protests, but was intrigued by Mr. Walinsky's views about the war. The two men stayed in contact and "became reasonably good friends," Mr. Walinsky said.

Others were shocked by the Naval officer's association with the antiwar movement.

"He gets this cushy job in his hometown, goes around protesting the war, then asks to get out six months early," Mr. Sampley said. "What regulations were busted when Kerry — as a Naval officer and still on the payroll — was flying around protesting the war? And who had to stand in and fight for John Kerry after he left six months early?"

Mr. Sampley recently started a group called Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry. The Web site, which labels the senator "Hanoi John Kerry," has attracted thousands of anti-Kerry e-mails and online postings from other veterans.

In Mr. Kerry's first active-duty assignment, he served in the electrical department of the USS Gridley, a guided-missile frigate supporting the Navy's fleet of carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin.

"I didn't have any real feel for what the heck was going on [in the war]," Mr. Kerry told the Boston Globe in a story last summer, referring to his time on the Gridley.

He then became a commander of a Navy swift boat, which at the time were used to transport sailors to ships in the gulf. Two weeks after beginning his new assignment, the safe job he had picked became much more dangerous when the boats began being used in the Mekong Delta to seek out the Viet Cong and block North Vietnamese supply routes.

"I didn't really want to get involved in the war," the Globe cites Mr. Kerry saying in a 1986 book about Vietnam. "When I signed up for the swift boats, they had very little to do with the war. They were engaged in coastal patrolling and that's what I thought I was going to do."

Then Lieutenant (j.g.) Kerry got more than he had expected. He was involved in close combat with the Viet Cong, leading to all of his medals.

Questions arose during his 1996 Senate re-election campaign about whether Mr. Kerry deserved the awards, in particular the Silver Star. Accounts of the incident vary, but essentially Mr. Kerry chased down a wounded Viet Cong fighter, killed him and stripped him of the B-40 rocket launcher he had just fired at Mr. Kerry's swift boat.

The Viet Cong fighter had already been wounded by the boat's machine gunner, according to various reports from eyewitnesses, who had "laid down 50 rounds" into the hootch where the man had run to hide and from which Mr. Kerry emerged after applying what some described as the "coup de grace" to the wounded Viet Cong.