Swift Boat Veterans For the Truth?
Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth, an organization composed of former Naval officers who served as peers or superiors to John Kerry in Vietnam, has sponsored a TV ad sharply critical of Kerry’s conduct in Vietnam. The ad, funded by a Houston businessman with close ties to the Republican Party, has run in only three states, but can be seen on the Internet. John McCain, recently stumping with George Bush, has called it “dishonest and dishonorable.”
In the ad, retired Navy Captain George Elliott, tells us that “Kerry had not been honest about what happened in Vietnam.” In an affidavit, he explained that Kerry did not deserve the Silver Star he was awarded: “I was never informed that he had shot a wounded, fleeing Viet Cong in the back.” If Elliott is representative of his fellow Swift Boat Veterans’ commitment to the truth, then McCain is correct that the ad is “dishonest and dishonorable.”
As John Kerry’s commanding officer, it was Elliott who recommended Kerry for a Silver Star, the Navy’s third highest award for valor. Kerry, on 28 February 1969, had turned his Swift boat directly into the path of a Viet Cong rocket attack, beached it, left the boat in pursuit of a Viet Cong soldier with a B-40 rocket launcher armed and in his hands, and killed him. A single B-40 round is a devastating weapon, fully capable of sinking a Swift boat and killing or maiming its crew. The after-action report is clear. An armed B-40 rocket launcher was recovered. These facts are not in dispute.
In 1996, the Boston Globe, a liberal newspaper that has never been foursquare behind Kerry, published an article calling into question Kerry’s behavior that day. The reporter, David Warsh, connected two apparent facts, that the Viet Cong soldier Kerry killed was already wounded and had sought to retreat behind a hootch, and then speculated: “What’s the ugliest possibility? That behind the hootch Kerry administered a coup de grace to the Vietnamese soldier – a practice not uncommon in those days but a war crime none the less.” But it was all speculation, and utterly irresponsible. There is no evidence then or now that Kerry did what Warsh imagined as the “ugliest possibility.”
Among Kerry’s defenders in 1996 was the late Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., who had pinned the Silver Star over Kerry’s heart, and who described the Globe article as “an absolutely outrageous interpretation of the facts.”
George Elliott also came to Kerry’s defense in 1996. He described Kerry’s behavior that day as an “act of courage.” He would repeat the claim in 2003. Interviewed by the Boston Globe, Elliott said that Kerry’s Silver Star was “well deserved.”
Less than a year later, Elliott changed his position. When the Boston Globe called, Elliott did a second stumbling about-face: “I still don’t think that he shot the guy in the back. It was a terrible mistake probably for me to sign the affidavit with those words. I’m the one in trouble here” Within a day, Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth would assert that the Globe had misquoted Elliott, and would issue a second affidavit from him confirming his initial story, or rather his initial story of 2004. The Globe stood by its quotes, and I suppose we should be thankful that we have not heard from George Elliott again.
When Kerry returned to the US, he took exception to American policy in Vietnam on both principled and tactical grounds. Among his tactical objections was that Swift boats were being deployed too deeply into Vietnam’s rivers with insufficient aerial or ground support.
Elliott, interviewed by Douglas Brinkley for Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, had taken a similar position. Elliott’s Commanding Officer was Roy Hoffman, who had a reputation as an aggressive and ambitious man intent on flag rank. “Hoffman wanted to send men into the U Minh Forest,” Elliott recalled, “It never did any good.” Elliott’s principled defense of his men cost him his job. Hoffman transferred him to coastal patrol duty off the relatively peaceful waters of Qui Nhon. Now Elliott and Hoffman, a retired Admiral, are together again, proclaiming the “truth” as principals of Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth.
It’s a tawdry story, an egregious politicization of memory. Elliott’s inept and pathetic contradictions emerged only after his former subordinate captured the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. It reflects badly, not just on him, but on his fellow Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth. Elliott’s story will not make reasonable people confident that the anti-Kerry Swift Boat Veterans will shed much light on the truth.