by JEFFERY ST. CLAIR
Retraction: John Kerry’s spokesman was forced to retract her denial that the Secretary of State has been enjoying water sports during the Egyptian crisis PHOTO/Daily Mail
With John Kerry currently in full Henry Kissinger regalia, parading around the Middle East, brow-beating the Palestinians and their allies in the region and Europe into signing onto a deeply flawed peace accord that primarily serves Israeli and American interests, it may prove a useful exercise to inspect the curriculum vitae of this putative peace-maker, especially during those formative years when the Secretary of State first carved out his name in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Though Kerry has a reputation as an anti-war activist, his brief tenure in Vietnam and Cambodia was notable both for acts of casual savagery and his striking lack of contrition for his own participation in atrocities that in a rational society might easily be classified as war crimes.–JSC
In his senior year at Yale in 1966 John Kerry enlisted in the US Navy, with his actual induction scheduled for the summer, after his graduation. Already notorious among his contemporaries for his political ambition, he’d maneuvered himself into the top slot at the Yale political union, while also winning admission to Skull and Bones.
While George W. Bush, two years behind Kerry, was seeking commercial opportunity at Yale by selling ounce bags of cocaine, (so one contemporary has recalled) Kerry was keeping a vigilant eye on the political temperature and duly noted a contradiction between his personal commitment to go to war and the growing antiwar sentiment among the masses, some of whom he hoped would vote for him at a not too distant time.
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Kerry sustained a very minor wound to his arm, probably caused by debris from his own boat’s salvoes. The scratch earned him his first Purple Heart, a medal awarded for those wounded in combat. Actually there’s no evidence that anyone had fired back, or that Kerry had been in combat, as becomes obvious when we read an entry from his diary about a subsequent excursion, written on December 11, 1968, nine days after the incident that got Kerry his medal. “A cocky air of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel, because we hadn’t been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven’t been shot at are allowed to be cocky.”
He received two more Purple Hearts, both for relatively minor wounds. Indeed Kerry never missed a day of duty for any of the medal-earning wounds.
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On daylight missions the Swift boats were accompanied by Cobra Attack helicopters that would strafe the river banks and the skeletal forest ravaged by napalm and Agent Orange. “Helos upset the VC [sic, meaning anyone on the ground] more than anything else that we had to offer”, Kerry tells Brinkley, “and any chance we had to have them with us was more than welcome.”
An example of these Cobras in action. It’s daylight, so the population is not under curfew. Kerry’s boat is working its way up a canal, with a Cobra above it. They encounter a sampan with several people in it. The helicopter hovers right above the sampan, then empties its machineguns into it, killing everyone and sinking the sampan. Kerry, in his war diary, doesn’t lament the deaths but does deplore the senselessness of the Cobra’s crew in using all of its ammunition, since the chopper pilot “requested permission to leave in order to rearm, an operation that left us uncovered for more than 45 minutes in an area where cover was essential”.
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