Truth - Al Franken [32]
Hmm.
Vietnam . . . Vietnam . . . Was there anybody in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, besides the American troops?
Think. Think, Franken.
I was stumped. But Ted Koppel wasn’t. He took a Nightline crew to Vietnam, and talked to . . . the Vietnamese. Yes. That’s why Ted Koppel is Ted Koppel.
The story ran on October 14. Koppel’s team interviewed the villagers of Tran Thoi, along the Bay Hap river. Koppel, a gay anchorman who fusses constantly with his hair whenever the camera isn’t rolling, was naturally interested in the loincloth-clad teenager.2 Here’s how ABCnews.com summarized Koppel’s report on the villagers:
They have no problem remembering Ba Thanh, the man who has been dismissed by Kerry’s detractors as “a lone, wounded, fleeing, young Vietcong in a loincloth.”
“No, this is not correct,” Nguyen Thi Tuoi, 77, told ABC News. “He wore a black pajama. He was strong. He was big and strong. He was about 26 or 27.”
So the “loincloth affair” really should be called the “pajama affair.” Or, my publisher suggests, “the pajama party.”
Was the twenty-six- or twenty-seven-year-old Ba Thanh working alone, as the Swiftees claimed? Was there “little or no fire”?
“When the firing started, Ba Thanh was killed,” [Viet Cong Commander] Tam said. “And I led Ba Thanh’s comrades, the whole unit, to fight back. And we ran around the back and fought the Americans from behind. We worked with the city soldiers to fire on the American boats.”
So it’s not a teenager, no loincloth, loaded rocket launcher, maybe wounded, and certainly not alone. Kerry was definitely fighting “a numerically superior force in the face of intense fire,” exactly as his Silver Star citation had said.
Debunking O’Neill’s lies any further at this point is gratuitous. But please indulge me. Unfit for Command, you’ll recall, makes a big deal out of the claim that Kerry supposedly shot Ba Thanh, the 26.5-year-old teenager, in the back. O’Neill writes:
While Commander Elliott and many other Swiftees believe that Kerry committed no crime in killing the fleeing, wounded enemy (with a loaded or empty launcher), others feel differently.
Kerry’s version of the story, which I am beginning to believe, holds that “he was running away with a live B-40 [rocket launcher] and, I thought, poised to turn around and fire it.”
I don’t know about you, but if I put myself in Kerry’s position, that’s when I shoot the guy. I don’t wait for him to turn around.
Is that sporting? Hell, yes. Remember? It’s a war. Under what rule of war does an armed enemy in a firefight become off-limits just because he’s running away? I am fifty-four years old. I have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of war movies. In fact, I spent a great deal of the Vietnam War watching war movies. And I’ve never seen a single war movie in which it’s not okay to shoot a fleeing enemy in the back.
Does John O’Neill know some secret Geneva Convention governing the shooting of people who aren’t facing you? Is John O’Neill telling us that America could have saved thousands upon thousands of lives on D-Day if our troops had just backed up Omaha Beach?
“Nein! Don’t shoot! Not until zey turn around! Ach, those Americans are so shmart!”
The debunking was complete. But the damage had already been done. (Even so, the right-wing media kept flogging the story.) Because the Swift Boat Vets had dominated sixty successive news cycles, what should have been Kerry’s greatest strength became a defining liability.
Bush and his supporters spent a billion dollars creating a simple story line:
Bush was strong, patriotic, and steadfast.
Kerry was weak,