SELF-INFLICTED WOUND:

A very Kerry Christmas (John Leo, 8/30/04, US News)

Some people wondered how long the major media would be willing to ignore the Christmas-in-Cambodia story. Well, the answer is in: at least 10 or 11 days. I first noticed the story August 6 on Glenn Reynolds's Instapundit blog. Soon it was all over the Internet, the conservative press, talk radio, and some cable shows. But the networks, the New York Time s , the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and other major media didn't run the story. Some papers, like the Kansas City Star, got protests from readers on what appeared to be a news blackout. Finally, after an agonizingly slow response from the Kerry campaign, big media took account of the issue, muffling and burying the story they didn't want to carry in the first place.

The story is simple and by now well known. For 25 years John Kerry has said repeatedly that on Christmas or Christmas Eve of 1968 he took his swift boat into Cambodia on a covert and illegal mission. He said he got shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians or by "our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas." In 1979, Kerry wrote a piece for the Boston Herald noting that "the absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real." Kerry was wrong about Nixon, who was not yet president at the time--a minor and unimportant slip--but he said the memory of the Cambodian Christmas "is seared--seared into me."

The anti-Kerry Swift Boat Veterans for Truth book, Unfit for Command, argued that Kerry had never been in Cambodia. That charge was easily challenged as partisan. But a book supportive of Kerry and written with his help, Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, said Kerry was on patrol 50 miles from the Cambodia border on Christmas Eve 1968 and spent Christmas Day writing journal entries back at his base. As the Washington Times argued in an editorial, all living commanders in Kerry's chain of command denied that Kerry had been in Cambodia, and three of Kerry's swift boat crew denied they or their boat had been in Cambodia during Christmas 1968. Two others refused comment.

Like the issue of President Bush's National Guard service, the Cambodian Christmas story is important only for the light it may shed on a candidate's mind and character. But unlike the Bush story, Kerry's Cambodian story set off no media frenzy.

Until the Senator set off the frenzy himself.

MORE:
Kerry won Vietnam vets' wrath describing what he couldn't see (HAROLD W. ANDERSEN, 8/22/04, Omaha WORLD-HERALD)

It is one of the bigger gambles of the presidential campaign. But with most of the news media looking the other way, John Kerry has been getting away with it so far.

I refer to Kerry's gamble that the news media won't finally take a hard look at his anti-war activities instead of concentrating on his four-plus months of combat-zone experience as a decorated, wounded veteran of the Vietnam War - experience that Kerry incessantly promotes as qualifying him to be president and commander in chief of the armed forces.

There have been occasional, brief news-media references to, but no details of, Kerry's controversial testimony to a U.S. Senate committee. It took place af- ter he opted out of the customary one-year tour of duty under a Navy policy that allowed such an early out if a serviceman so elected after receiving his third Purple Heart.

(The Marines stopped awarding a Purple Heart for a minor wound, even if the Marine received medical treatment. None of Kerry's wounds was serious enough to require hospitalization.)

Let's take a detailed look at Kerry's Capitol Hill testimony. It will, I think, help explain why many Vietnam veterans oppose Kerry's presidential bid.

Revealed: how 'war hero' Kerry tried to put off Vietnam military duty (Charles Laurence, 07/03/2004, Daily Telegraph)

Senator John Kerry, the presumed Democratic presidential candidate who is trading on his Vietnam war record to campaign against President George W Bush, tried to defer his military service for a year, according to a newly rediscovered article in a Harvard University newspaper.

He wrote to his local recruitment board seeking permission to spend a further 12 months studying in Paris, after completing his degree course at Yale University in the mid-1960s.

The revelation appears to undercut Sen Kerry's carefully-cultivated image as a man who willingly served his country in a dangerous war - in supposed contrast to President Bush, who served in the Texas National Guard and thus avoided being sent to Vietnam.

This is hardly a revelation given that he told the Boston Globe:

"I didn't really want to get involved in the war. When I signed up for the swift boats, they had very little to do with the war. They were engaged in coastal patrolling, and that's what I thought I was going to do."

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 22, 2004 6:44 PM