Over the last year or so, the blogging community has gained a measure of credibility and respectability for their rapid and insightful analysis of the day’s news. For instance, bloggers led the way in uncovering the horrendous and obvious lies that CBS and Dan Rather tried to feed us with their forged Bush service documents. Leave it to a blogger to notice discrepancies in fonts and kerning.
The credibility of blogging takes another huge step forward with this insightful interview by Dean Esmay of Dean’s World. In this interview, Dean asks swift boat veteran Van Odell—who served as a gunner’s mate in the same unit as John Kerry and who served with him longer than anyone else did in Viet Nam—some very direct questions and gets some very candid responses. Go read the entire interview for yourself. Now.
A lot of people picking sides on the Swift Boat Vets for Truth don’t have a clue as to what the hell they’re talking about. This applies equally to both sides. But there appears to be a common denominator amongst those with their heads buried the furthest up their respective asses: the further up your ass you have your head, the less likely it is that you have ever served in the military at all—much less a combat unit.
Each side has a group of vets that they’re parading out who supports their version of the truth.
The Left has a rather small (7 or so) contingent of veterans who served with Kerry and back up his accounts of his four-month tour of duty in Vietnam. This group diminishes the veterans opposing Kerry by saying that they didn’t serve on the same boat that he did, therefore they couldn’t possibly know what the hell their talking about (I’m paraphrasing here).
The Right, on the other hand, has a very large group of veterans (60+) who oppose Kerry’s accounts of his service in Vietnam. Most of these veterans did not serve on the same boat as Kerry, but rather in boats along side of his; boats on the same mission as Kerry’s.
When I first heard the excuse that the Swift Boat Vets claims were without merit because they “didn’t serve on the same boat as Kerryâ€, I thought “What a crock of shitâ€.
When I was a combat medic during the first Gulf War, I served in an ambulance platoon in a main support battalion for the 1st Infantry Division (the fabled Big Red One). There were two medics assigned to each ambulance. Our platoon rolled eight ambulances. If anybody had tried to tell me that I didn’t know the guys driving those other ambulances, or have first hand knowledge of what they did or didn’t see and do…I’d call you a fucking liar. Could I hear you cussing as we raced our HUMVEE Ambulances across the desert? No. But I could see your lips moving.
Just because we weren’t in the same ambulance doesn’t mean that I didn’t know you. Or what you did. Or didn’t do.
Mr. Van Odell puts it more succinctly:
DW: What do you say to those who say that because you were not on Lt. Kerry’s boat, you did not serve with him?
VO: …our boats served in combat together, we went on missions together, we knew each other intimately and fought together. This is like saying Major Reno and Captain Benteen did not serve with General Custer because they did not ride on the same horse with him.
Brilliant.
But I also understand that it’s possible for two people in the same place at the same time to have very different perspectives and opinions about an event. Especially 35 years after it occurred. Do I think that the few Veterans who served with Kerry and back up his claims are liars? No. Not at all. Their recollections help paint a part of the overall picture of the truth.
Just as the 60+ veterans who were also there and have their own perspective are not liars. And their perspectives and rememberances fill in the rest of the picture.
If the best that the Left can muster in refuting the claims of the Swift Boat Vets is “they weren’t on the same boatâ€, it’s not enough.
Besides, the bigger issue for most veterans isn’t how Kerry won that obscenely large number of medals in such a short time. For most veterans, it’s what Mr. Kerry did once he came back.
Again, I’ll leave it to Mr. Odell to summarize how I (and undoubtedly most other veterans and current soldiers) feel about Mr. Kerry:
I would just like to say that I am extremely concerned now having children that are military age and soon will have grandchildren of military age that someone like John Kerry who doesn’t respect the people, the men and women of the military, to be Commander In Chief, that concerns me to the point where I have taken a large amount of my life to tell the story of how Kerry behaved in Viet Nam and how his statements in 1971 affected veterans and the people he served with.
