Potomac River ambush: Kerry still fighting 35 years later

By Jimi Wilson
Opinion Editor

Retired Navy Chief Petty Officer Del Sandusky was hardly a wide-eyed draftee when he met John Kerry in Vietnam, having already served eight years before the future Senator became his commander.

“I spent two-and-a-half years on the riverboats in Vietnam,” Sandusky told members of the press in Fayetteville Aug. 28. “John Kerry was my last boat officer, and he was the best. We knew right away when he came onboard that he was somebody special. We followed all of his orders. He saved our lives, and we saved his.”

Book appears

One member of one of Kerry’s two crews, Gunner’s Mate Steven Gardner, doesn’t paint such a complimentary picture of Kerry, however. Gardner joined the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth—whose book, Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak out against John Kerry, is a runaway best seller. To hear SBVT tell it, Sandusky and the rest of Kerry’s crew are dupes, and SBVT have accused Kerry of exaggerating his military record, and have called him a reckless, cowardly liar.

Sandusky and others are dismissive of Unfit for Command, which Sandusky says is “Full of BS,” and was written but to smear the reputation of a good man. He and other veterans have said that in the process of going after Kerry the book and SBVT have cast doubts on the all of Kerry’s comrades. “They never talked to me about the truth, to any of our boat crew. They never talked to Kerry’s boat crew from 1968. What kind of truth does that prove?”

A grudge

Indeed, SBVT is hardly the paragon of truth, and veterans with whom they have spoken often have taken on a pod-people aura, suddenly turning on their own previous testimonials and jealously guarding their military records—records which vindicate Kerry.

Kerry crewmate Jim Wasser’s assessment of Gardner is that he had “some kind of weird grudge against Lieutenant Kerry,” which many attribute to Kerry’s later stance against the war, not Kerry’s performance in Vietnam.

According to an article by Douglas Brinkley, the author of Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, Wasser told him Gardner had “developed a strange, negative assessment of Lieutenant Kerry. It shocked me. His memory is dead wrong. He remembers things so differently...”

Affidavits used

One of SBVT’s tools is the use of sworn affidavits, as opposed to source material such as Navy records. Sounds fair enough if the records are misleading, but a number of veterans who were interviewed by the group have accused the group of altering their original statements. One such witness, Patrick Runyon, told The New York Times that his recollections about the mission in which Kerry earned his first Purple Heart had been significantly altered, an incident during which Runyon says—as do military records—that there was hostile fire. “[The affidavit] made it sound like I didn’t believe we got any returned fire,” he told the Times. “[The interviewer] made it sound like it was a normal operation. It was the scariest night of my life.”

Kerry’s former commander, George Elliot, praised Kerry during the war but signed an SBVT affidavit accusing Kerry of shooting a wounded fleeing Viet Cong in the back.

Other veterans who were present have disputed this, and Elliot later told the Boston Globe, “It was a terrible mistake probably for me to sign the affidavit with those words.” He has since recanted again and has refused to talk further to the press. (Apparently his programmers didn’t do a good enough job the first time.)

William Rood, a swift boat veteran who is now an editor at The Chicago Tribune, wrote in his editorial, “Anti-Kerry Vets Not There That Day,” that, “There were three swift boats on the river that day in Vietnam more than 35 years ago - three officers and 15 crew members. Only two of those officers remain to talk about what happened on February 28, 1969. One is John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate who won a Silver Star for what happened on that date. I am the other.”

Rood went on to defend Kerry, writing that “…critics have taken pains to say they’re not trying to cast doubts on the merit of what others did, but their version of events has splashed doubt on all of us. 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.”

Amazing tactic

Skip Barker, commander of another swift boat who served on joint operations with Kerry, told area veterans Saturday, “I came to know John Kerry quite well,” and he credited Kerry as “the guy that came up with the amazing tactic, the idea of turning into the ambushers,” in order to overwhelm them. It was effective and it saved lives, he said. Barker, Rood and official Navy records support the assertion that Kerry had discussed and planned the tactic at length before its successful use—an innovation for which Kerry was lauded at the time by his commander, Cam Rahn Bay brass and the Secretary of the Navy, and contradicting claims made in Unfit for Command.

Dirty tricks

Del Sandusky didn’t mince words when asked about SBVT claims. “They’re funded by a group out of Texas headed by John O’Neil, who attacked John Kerry in 1971. [O’Neil] was in Nixon’s pocket and was schooled in dirty tricks, and he’s been doing them ever since.”

O’Neill, Sandusky says, is motivated not only by ideology but by political aspirations as well.

Earlier this month Kerry said of the group, “They’re a front for the Bush campaign. And the fact that the president won’t denounce what they’re up to tells you everything you need to know. He wants them to do his dirty work.”

Kerry finally took his own advice and turned on the ambush. Sadly, this time his enemy may have the advantage. Though Bush did manage an anemic condemnation of 527 partisan groups, he never singled out SBVT, nor did he specifically deny the group’s accusations against Kerry. While it’s far from time for Kerry to scuttle the craft, the smear campaign seems to have worked: Kerry’s polls have slipped with veterans.

Smear techniques are hardly a new tool in the Bush campaign’s bag of tricks. In its Aug. 25 editorial, “These Charges are False…” The Los Angeles Times pointed out, “The technique President Bush is using against John F. Kerry was perfected by his father against Michael Dukakis in 1988, though its roots go back at least to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. It is: Bring a charge, however bogus.”

Bush campaigners specialize in bogus charges. Karl Rove, Bush’s chief strategist, waged a nasty Texas gubernatorial campaign against incumbent Democrat Ann Richards. Rove typically targets perceived strengths in rivals. Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.), and Sen. John McCain (R-Az.), both Vietnam War heroes, saw their service savaged and their patriotism questioned when they challenged Bush.

Plausible denial

In the lead-up to the 2000 election, Rove employed push-polls asking voters if they had known that then-rival McCain had fathered an illegitimate child with a black woman and that his wife was a drug abuser would they still vote for him? The polls implanted false rumors, while still allowing Bush’s campaign plausible denial. McCain’s support waned, and he lost the Republican nomination.

Now Bush faces Kerry, a veteran with an impressive record. Bush’s handlers know that to attack directly would be foolhardy, even for daredevil Rove. It would strike most voters as unseemly coming directly from the White House, so Bush’s forces outflank, using surrogates such as SBVT to carry out character assassination.

So Sandusky and others campaign for Kerry, fighting once again as a team. And, unfortunately for Bush, the administration’s ties to SBVT are becoming increasingly clear.

Ultimately, this campaign should be about issues. Smearing the name of good veterans is, as we said in the Army, a No-Go. And so is Bush’s tacit approval of such tactics.