Swift Boat Heroes Tell All -- Kerry "Unfit For Command"

John Kerry has made much of his "war hero" status. He even arrived at the convention by water, with a couple of his fellow swift boat vets at his side, just to make the point. But what do his fellow swift boat vets have to say about John Kerry?

We're about to find out, with the publication of Unfit for Command, by the members of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. And the Kerry camp is already squawking.

According to Drudge, the book claims

# Two of John Kerry's three Purple Heart decorations resulted from self-inflicted wounds, not suffered under enemy fire.

# All three of Kerry's Purple Hearts were for minor injuries, not requiring a single hour of hospitalization.

# A "fanny wound" was the highlight of Kerry's much touted "no man left behind" Bronze Star.

# Kerry turned the tragic death of a father and small child in a Vietnamese fishing boat into an act of "heroism" by filing a false report on the incident.

# Kerry entered an abandoned Vietnamese village and slaughtered the domestic animals owned by the civilians and burned down their homes with his Zippo lighter.

# Kerry's reckless behavior convinced his colleagues that he had to go -- becoming the only Swift Boat veteran to serve only four months.

Now I cannot help but note that, beyond the questions of honesty and interpretation, at least one of these matters arguably constitutes a war crime. Given Kerry's later conduct, including his statements about war crimes in Vietnam, I find it very likely that the charge against the senator is true. He admits it in a 1971 debate with John O'Neill on the Dick Cavett show.

MR. CAVETT: Well, let's talk about that. Did you see war crimes committed and –

MR. KERRY: Well, I have often talked about this subject. I personally didn't see personal atrocities in the sense that I saw somebody cut a head off or something like that. However, I did take part in free fire zones and I did take part in harassment interdiction fire. I did take part in search-and-destroy missions in which the houses of noncombatants were burned to the ground. And all of these, I find out later on, these acts are contrary to the Hague and Geneva Conventions and to the laws of warfare. So in that sense, anybody who took part in those, if you carry out the applications of the Nuremberg principles, is in fact guilty.

Speaking of his post-war activities, I stumbled across a site devoted to documenting the activities of Kerry and others involved in the famous Winter Soldier investigation. The notion that anyone involved in this could be elected to any office, especially the highest office in the nation, is appalling. It includes a link to John Kerry's infamous book, The New Soldier Better look at it quickly, because Kerry and his associates refuse to allow the book to be republished (used copies sell for over $500 -- and it is rumored that many of them are purchased for destruction), and regularly threatens legal action to knock sites off the web when they post this historical document that sheds such light on the character of the man who would be President.

In short, Kerry is clearly Unfit for Command.