Two dozen veterans who served the same swift boat duty in the Navy as John Kerry in Vietnam, including some who served with or commanded him, said yesterday the Democratic presidential candidate is not fit to be commander in chief.
They are part of a group of 200 swift boat veterans who signed a letter saying Mr. Kerry, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, betrayed them in 1971 and to this day by saying he witnessed atrocities and war crimes during his time in combat.
“We don’t understand why three months, 35 years ago, would even be significant, but if in fact it is, if he hasn’t moved on like all the rest of us, including people who were badly wounded there, that’s his life, then we’re absolutely devoted to making sure the American people know the truth about that three months,” said John E. O’Neill, who commanded one of the same boats as Mr. Kerry several months later and who debated Mr. Kerry on “The Dick Cavett Show” in 1971.
Mr. O’Neill said so far only 19 swift boat sailors have declined to sign the letter, compared with the 200 who did sign as of last Thursday — including all of the men who were his commanding officers for any substantial period of time. He also pointed to a picture of Mr. Kerry with 18 other swift boat officers who served with him in Vietnam at the time, and said 12 of them have signed the letter, which they first circulated April 27.
Still, of the men who served under Mr. Kerry’s command, only one has signed the letter, and most are supporting Mr. Kerry’s campaign and traveling the country to campaign with him.
“We know he was a great leader. His decisions saved lives,” said Del Sandusky, one of Mr. Kerry’s crewmen.
Mr. Kerry is running advertisements touting his service in Vietnam, and has said in interviews that it was a critically formative period in his life. But it has turned out to be a mixed blessing politically.
While the circumstances surrounding his three Purple Hearts, Bronze Star and Silver Star medals were an issue for some of the veterans yesterday, their bigger issue was his protest of the war when he returned to the United States and his continuing charges of atrocities, including those he made in a recent biography, “Tour of Duty,” written about him by historian Douglas Brinkley.
“What torqued everybody is when he got back and started saying things about what happened in Vietnam that didn’t happen — not in my part of Vietnam,” said William Shumadine, who like Mr. Kerry was a lieutenant junior grade and skippered swift boats alongside him.
The veterans said Mr. Kerry tried to head off the letter.
Retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffman, who as commander of the Navy Coastal Surveillance Force lead the swift boats and who was the driving force behind the letter, said that after it began circulating last week Mr. Kerry called him to try to talk him out of going forward with the project. Adm. Hoffman said Mr. Kerry said he felt Mr. Brinkley’s book had maligned the admiral’s service, and that Mr. Kerry asked if they could correct any of the errors in the book.
Kerry campaign senior adviser Michael Meehan said yesterday he was surprised that some of the same men had supported Mr. Kerry in his 1996 Senate race, coming to defend him in the days before that election.
“That was then; it’s politics now,” he said. “That’s OK. They’re entitled to have their political views, but let’s be clear — over the first 25 years afterwards, they came to defend Kerry and his service at the height of a political campaign.”
“If they want to have a political choice now, if they want to be for a guy that went to the Guard, that skipped active duty, that’s their choice. They can vote however they want,” he said. “But we’re not going to stand for people who have signed written reports about Kerry and then misrepresent them 35 years later.”
But the swift boat veterans said it’s not about parties. Mr. O’Neill said he paid for the press conference room yesterday at the National Press Club himself, and said he didn’t know of anyone in the group who had contact with the Bush administration or re-election campaign.
He said the only unifying factor within the group was trying to stop Mr. Kerry from becoming commander in chief: “If Kerry drops out and allows the American people a real choice, a fit choice, to be president, we all go home.”
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