It is interesting that the MSM continue to choose to believe the things that John Kerry says. After all, he has been making up wild tales for four decades now (take your pick from our sidebar). They are the most peculiar fabrications, often dense with obscure and unnecessary details that highlight their falseness. Imagine living a life in which you were constantly trying to make yourself fascinating, and each new version of your made-up exploit had to outdo the last one. Is it possible to be so troubled and yet so boring at the same time? Apparently so.

Thomas Lipscomb has done an amazing job of nailing down the details of Purple Heart One that the NYT never bothered to do, apparently preferring ideology and comfort over truth. Here is an excerpt of Lipscomb’s work at RCP:

Schachte says he personally led seven out of the eight skimmer missions he ran at Cam Ranh, and the one he didn’t lead was not led by what Hibbard terms “a ‘rookie’ who knew nothing about the concept or tactics involved to command the skimmer.” Schachte points out that if he had risked the lives of two enlisted men with a green officer on a difficult night mission like this he should have been reprimanded. Kerry, after all, was an “officer in training” at Coastal Division 14. Kerry had never had a command and had not yet been released to a first command of his own. His job was to go on missions with veterans and learn.

In fact, the one mission Schachte didn’t lead was led by veteran Swift boat skipper Tedd Peck, two nights after the Kerry mission, to the same place, with Peck as leader with two other officers, Stephen Hayes and Mark Janes. In advance of the mission, according to Peck, “Schachte made us go down and have a gunner’s mate train us with the M-60 machine gun which was not part of the Swift boat arsenal at the time, but was the main armament of the skimmer. It took two hours and we finished it just before we left on the mission.”

According to the Times account: “Bill Schachte was not on that skimmer,” Mr. Kerry says firmly. “He was not on that skimmer. It is a lie to suggest that he was out there on that skimmer… .The three guys who in fact were in the boat all say he wasn’t there and will tell you he wasn’t there. We know he wasn’t there, and we have all kinds of ways of proving it.”

Let’s take a look at the “all kinds of ways.” One of the “ways” would be for Kerry to disclose how he was ordered on this mission and by whom, but he has never done so. According to Coastal Division 14 commander Hibbard, every mission was assigned by Schachte. Does Kerry expect us to believe Schachte assigned him, in the face of his and Hibbard’s statements, and they are both lying about it?

In that case, who was in command of the Kerry mission and where is the after action report? Does Kerry claim that as a trainee he was placed in command over an experienced Swift boat commander with his own boat like Mike Voss? Kerry hasn’t told us about that either. And what about Mike Voss’s statement to Lisa Myers of NBC that “I’m pretty certain Schachte was there in the skimmer?”….

What about the mission itself on December 2-3 1968? Schachte reports that after creeping around the shoreline of empty Nha Trang Bay in the dark and finding nothing, he thought he saw movement on shore around 3AM, popped a parachute flare, and fired his M-60 where he saw the movement until it jammed while Kerry fired his M-16. When Kerry’s M-16 stopped, Schachte heard the distinctive “POW” of an M-79 grenade launcher. Now they had made such a spectacular son et lumiere announcement of their once secret mission, Schachte decided to get out of there, back to Voss’s supporting Swift boat, and home. The mission was a bust. No enemy action, not even the sighting of enemy, with rookie Kerry claiming he had been wounded in the arm and demanding his purple heart.

Kerry and his men describe a magical mystery tour – that same night and that same time in a parallel universe – in a traffic-jammed Nha Trang Bay that apparently had scheduled a starlight sampan regatta that evening. According to Kerry’s account to Brinkley, “Most of the night had been spent being scared shitless by fishermen whom we would suddenly creep up on out of the darkness…” In Brinkley’s summary, “For the next four hours Kerry’s Boston Whaler, using paddles, brought boatloads of fisherman they found in sampans… back to the Swift. It was tiring work.”

“Tiring work?” If you ever tried to paddle an almost 15-foot long Boston Whaler with three in crew, loaded with arms, ammunition, and a bunch of jabbering Vietnamese fishermen crammed onboard, 2 ½ miles out to a Swift boat a number of times in monsoon seas you would enthusiastically agree and want to shoot the idiot who refused to use the engine.

Kerry’s version makes no sense of course, because it isn’t true. Lipscomb goes on in the piece to list three different and utterly inconsistent versions of that night offered by Kerry himself. It’s funny stuff.

Still, there’s nothing funny about the harm that this tortured soul did to our military or Vietnam, and there’s nothing funny about the MSM who continue to put up with and endorse the wildest fabrications. We wish we had a solution, but we are constantly reminded, from Kerry to Rathergate to Jenin to the “Haditha Massacre,” that the truth of a thing is not what matters anymore.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 12th, 2006 at 7:35 am and is filed under art, culture, Democrats, General, Left of Left, MSM, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.