^∞Fouroboros

...None of the veterans interviewed said the challenge by the anti-Kerry group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, had changed their minds on the election. But a handful said the attacks were making them rethink support for Mr. Bush.

"I'm a Republican - I voted for Bush last time - but I may go to Kerry this year," said Ron Ostrander, who served in the Army from 1966 to 1969 and lives in Vancouver, Wash. "To me, it's irrelevant whether Kerry's boat went into international waters or not, or how he got his medals. The fact that he served and did his duty - don't try to take that away from him."

Ralph Bozella, a 55-year-old veteran who lives in Longmont, Colo., said the more he followed the Swift boat controversy, the more he drifted into Mr. Kerry's camp.

"I feel like what they did to attack his record is an affront to all veterans," said Mr. Bozella, who was an infantry soldier in Vietnam in 1971. "When you honor one veteran, you honor all veterans, so when you disgrace one veteran, you disgrace all veterans, especially a Vietnam veteran."

A Navy veteran and Republican who voted for Mr. Bush in 2000, Mike Weiss of Portland, Me., said Mr. Bush should denounce the attack advertisements. "It's very sad for me," said Mr. Weiss. "I'm not surprised, but I think Bush is playing a dangerous game, and I think he's turning a lot of people off, myself included."

When Bob Dole Said No
By Noel Koch

"They want me to head Veterans," Bob Dole said. "They" meant the Bush White House. His tone said there were things he would rather do.

I asked him whether he was going to do it -- take on the campaign role of going after the veterans' vote. "Probably have to," he said, although he added that he knew the Bush campaign would want him to attack John Kerry, and he didn't intend to do that. He didn't have anything against Kerry, he said...

Bob Dole knows as well as any person how capricious is the gleaning of medals. Some men deserve what they don't get; some get what they don't deserve. And who should know better than he that it is craven to belittle a man's service because it didn't extend over some arbitrary stretch of time?

Bob Dole spent little time in combat. But as a result of the time he did spend, he lay on his back for years, recovering, and helping others to recover.

I spent a year in Vietnam and came home without a scratch. My brother served two tours in Vietnam, earned three Purple Hearts (and was hospitalized, and does draw disability -- weird yardsticks used to measure John Kerry's alleged shortfall), and yet spent far less time than I did in-country. Indeed, his first "tour" lasted about 15 minutes, ending on the beach near Danang in the midst of the U.S. Marines' first amphibious assault in Vietnam.

Time in-country, how often a man was wounded, how much blood he shed when he was wounded -- it is hurtful that those who served in Vietnam are being split in so vile a fashion, and that the wounds of that war are reopened at the instigation of people who avoided serving at all. It is hurtful that a man of Bob Dole's stature should lend himself to the effort to dishonor a fellow American veteran in the service of politics at its cheapest.

There was a time when he would have refused. I know. I was there.

The writer was special assistant to President Richard Nixon from 1971 to 1974. He was [Reagan's] assistant secretary of defense and director for special planning at the Defense Department from 1981 to 1986.

Swift boat memories

Eagle Point vet who was there backs Kerry's assertion that bullets
were flying the day he won two medals on a river in Vietnam

By PAUL FATTIG
Mail Tribune

Robert E. Lambert doesn't plan to vote for John Kerry.

But the Eagle Point man challenges claims by a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that there was no enemy fire aimed at the five swift boats, including the one commanded by Kerry, on March 13, 1969 on the Bay Hap River in the southern tip of what was then South Vietnam.

Lambert, now 64, was a crew member on swift boat PCF-51 that day. The boat was commanded by Navy Lt. Larry Thurlow, a now-retired officer who questions why Kerry was awarded a Bronze star for bravery and a third Purple Heart for the March 13 incident.

"He and another officer now say we weren't under fire at that time," Lambert said Wednesday afternoon. "Well, I sure was under the impression we were.." Lambert's Bronze Star medal citation for the incident praises his courage under fire in the aftermath of a mine explosion that rocked another swift boat on that day 35 years ago. "Anytime you are blown out of the water like that, they always follow that up with small arms fire," he said.

Lambert contacted the Mail Tribune after reading a lengthy article from the Washington Post examining the controversy...