Truth - Al Franken [31]
With one single shining exception. On August 20, Bill O’Reilly took a break from the character assassination of Kerry and turned his focus to Kerry’s character assassination of Bush. “Kerry’s got to know what’s going on,” O’Reilly opined. “He’s got to know MoveOn.org and all those people are assassinating characters all over the place. . . . I don’t think the Republicans have done that. . . . Do you know of any conservative right-wing websites that do what MoveOn.org does?”
Other than that, it was wall-to-wall “Why Is John Kerry Lying?”, “Will John Kerry’s Lies Hurt Him?”, and “John Kerry: the Man and His Lies.”
Finally, the previously silent William B. Rood, commander of PCF-23, couldn’t stands it no more.
Now, Bill Rood probably wouldn’t use a phrase like “I couldn’t stands it no more,” especially in such a serious context. He is, after all, an editor on the metropolitan desk of the Chicago Tribune, which is an utterly humorless paper. No, when Rood decided to break his thirty-five-year public silence by publishing a 1,760-word account of the encounter that led to Kerry’s Silver Star, he used phrases like “it’s gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there.”
Here’s how Rood described the “fleeing, wounded, armed, or unarmed teenage enemy” incident, which, for brevity’s sake, I will hereafter refer to as the “loincloth affair”:
As we headed for the riverbank, I remember seeing a loaded B-40 launcher pointed at the boats. It wasn’t fired as two men jumped up from their spider holes.
We called Droz’s boat up to assist us, and Kerry, followed by one member of his crew, jumped ashore and chased a VC behind a hooch—a thatched hut—maybe 15 yards inland from the ambush site. Some who were there that day recall the man being wounded as he ran. Neither I nor Jerry Leeds, our boat’s leading petty officer with whom I’ve checked my recollection of all these events, recalls that, which is no surprise. Recollections of those who go through experiences like that frequently differ.
With our troops involved in the sweep of the first ambush site, Richard Lamberson, a member of my crew, and I also went ashore to search the area. I was checking out the inside of the hooch when I heard gunfire nearby.
Not long after that, Kerry returned, reporting that he had killed the man he chased behind the hooch. He also had picked up a loaded B-40 rocket launcher, which we took back to our base in An Thoi after the operation.
Okay. So the rocket launcher was loaded. And the guy who had the launcher may not have been wounded. And he wasn’t alone. In fact, Rood wrote:
The man Kerry chased was not the “lone” attacker at that site, as O’Neill [coauthor of Unfit for Command] suggests. There were others who fled. There was also firing from the tree line well behind the spider holes and at one point, from the opposite riverbank as well. It was not the work of just one attacker.
In other words, it was kind of a dangerous place to be on a Friday afternoon. Not like a “casual Friday” at the Alabama Air National Guard base, where George W. Bush wouldn’t later go. Also, Rood addressed the whole “loincloth” issue—the very loincloth that gives the “loincloth affair” its name:
John O’Neill, author of a highly critical account of Kerry’s Vietnam service, describes the man Kerry chased as a “teenager” in a “loincloth.” I have no idea how old the gunner Kerry chased that day was, but both Leeds and I recall that he was a grown man, dressed in the kind of garb the VC usually wore.
Grown man? No loincloth? Loaded rocket launcher? Other attackers firing from behind the tree line and on the opposite riverbank? It seemed like Rood’s version agreed with what “he” (Kerry) said, not with what “she” (O’Neill) said.
If only there were some other people