Drowning in Cambodia
It has been a rough ten days for Senator John Kerry. First Democratic Party moneybags George Soros said Kerry’s name on the Presidential ballot was a dead loser. Then Teresa Heinz Kerry decided to borrow a dead winner’s rather than a live loser’s last name, reverting to “Teresa Heinz” for public appearances. But the worst day Kerry had was a Sunday answering Tim Russert’s questions on Meet the Press on --- (what else?) ----Vietnam.
Asked about his Christmas Eve in Cambodia “seared, seared” in Kerry’s memory, according to one of his Senate speech transcripts, Kerry tried a half-baked variation on the theme: “Was it on that night? No, it was not on that night. But we were right on the Cambodian border that night. We were ambushed there, as a matter of fact. And that is a matter of record, and we went into the rec-- you know, it's part of the Navy records.”
Alas “as a matter of fact,” at least according to Kerry’s own journal, supplied to his biographer Douglas Brinkley for inclusion in TOUR OF DUTY, “that night” Kerry was in Sa Dec in Viet Nam, south of Saigon and fifty miles from Cambodia, writing his parents about “visions of sugar plums.” And it isn’t “part of the Navy records” either. An “ambush” would require an official after action report like the ones Kerry exhibits on his “complete” website. So either Kerry doesn’t include one on this because there isn’t one, or Kerry’s website isn’t complete, or both.
It gets worse. Under Russert’s questioning Kerry has a burst of sudden recall. “But we did go five miles into Cambodia. It was on another day. I jumbled the two together, but we were five miles into Cambodia. We went up on a mission with CIA agents--I believe they were CIA agents--CIA Special Ops guys. I even have some photographs of it, and I can document it. And it has been documented.”
But even assuming there is somewhere a top secret after action report that backs up Kerry and those nasty Swifties are taking advantage of the fact that we can’t see it because it is still classified, Kerry proudly told Russert and the world what his top secret mission was. “We delivered weapons to the Khmer Rouge on the coastline of Cambodia. We went out of Ha Tien, which is right in Vietnam. We went north up into the border. And I have some photographs of that, and that's what we did.”
If that is true, the United States should have shaken up the CIA 35 years earlier. The “Khmer Rouge,” so named derisively by Cambodian leader Prince Sihanouk, were the Cambodian communists who were later to murder millions of their fellow citizens in the “killing fields” in 1974. “Ridiculous,” snorted a former CIA station chief from neighboring Laos, “That is the equivalent of delivering arms to the Viet Cong.” Robert Turner, an expert on North Vietnamese and Vietcong affairs at the embassy in Saigon at the time and now a professor at the University of Virginia says: “Kerry has gone delusional. This is hilarious.” When Kerry was in Vietnam in 1969 the estimate of Khmer Rouge strength was only 2500. They would have been hard to find, much less deliver weapons to, scattered around a country of 10 million almost the size of Oklahoma.
All this confusion will be cleared up now Russert has gotten Kerry to agree to sign the Standard Form 180 that will allow the Navy to release all Kerry’s records after a false start or two that has the ring of Kerry: “I'd be happy to put the records out. We put all the records out that I had been sent by the military. Then at the last moment, they sent some more stuff, which had some things that weren't even relevant to the record. So when we get--I'm going to sit down with them and make sure that they are clear and I am clear as to what is in the record and what isn't in the record and we'll put it out. I have no problem with that.” A week later The Boston Globe confirmed Kerry’s pledge “to sign Form 180, releasing all of his military records.” But Kerry does want to “make this clear: My full military record has been made public."
Except that a day later on The Don Imus Show Kerry seems confused again about what has been made public, and rededicates himself to signing the still-unsigned form 180 “Shortly… . As soon as I get, as required by the military, precisely … . Because I have a stack of different material they sent me. Every time they send me something I want to know what they sent me. I'll get it done. ...”
As a born again Christian, professing compassionate conservatism, the least President Bush can do is appoint Kerry U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia before this gets any worse. Perhaps then Kerry can find out what really did happen before even CBS finally figures out who ran for the Presidency based on dubious statements about his military record.