Want to know if the Swiftboat Veterans' claims are true? Why not ask the Vietnamese who were there on the day:
Vietnamese witnesses have lent credence to Senator Kerry's disputed account of his actions on the day he won the Silver Star in Vietnam.
The witnesses - interviewed by a producer from the ABC network's Frontline program - are still living in the same villages where the fighting took place more than 35 years ago.
Senator Kerry commanded a Navy Swift Boat during the war. According to his military citation, he was awarded the Silver Star for his actions during an intense firefight at the hamlet of Nha Vi on February 28, 1969, during which he shot and killed a Viet Cong fighter who was armed with a rocket launcher.
Members of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group have said that the Viet Cong was a teenager who was alone, wounded and running away when Senator Kerry shot him.
But according to Vo Van Tam, now 54, who was a local Viet Cong commander, there were at least 20 Viet Cong soldiers at Nha Vi when two Swift Boats approached the hamlet. His wife, Vo Thi Vi, 54, told ABC News it was a day that the villagers would never forget. "Everything was destroyed. There's no houses left. They levelled everything. There was no leaves left. The fighting was very fierce."
She was only a couple of hundred metres away when a Swift Boat approached the shore, unleashing a barrage of gunfire. "I ran," she said. "Running fast ... And the Americans came from down there, yelling 'Attack, Attack,' And we ran."
Her husband said the man with the rocket launcher was hit in this barrage of gunfire. Then, he said, "he ran about 18 metres before he died, falling dead". Tam did not know how the rocket launcher man died. But he knows his name - Ba Thang.
According to the report of the action, Senator Kerry beached the Swift Boat and then "chased VC inland, behind hooch, and shot him while he fled, capturing one B-40 rocket launcher, with round in chamber".
None of the villagers seems to be able to say for a fact that they saw an American chase the man who fired the B-40 and shoot him, but they have no problem remembering Ba Thang, the man dismissed by a Kerry detractor, John O'Neill, a Swift Boat veteran, as "a lone, wounded, fleeing, young Viet Cong in a loincloth".
"No, this is not correct," Nguyen Thi Tuoi, 77, told ABC News. "He wore a black pyjama ... He was big and strong. He was about 26 or 27."
No comments:
Post a Comment