Funny, but it's still THE DOORS

To: Chris Matthews, Hardball, MSNBC

You guys are driving me nuts ‘cause none of you talk Navy or have any understanding what it means.

Before you have two civilian lawyers who clearly don’t talk Navy lingo bang heads over Kerry and his Swift Boat guys, PLEASE have at least one old salty Navy alumnus who can keep you from making fools of your selves.

Today you and the young woman author fell into utter cross purposes because neither of you understood what was meant by self inflected. Nobody is accusing Senator Kerry of shooting himself. That’s not what “self inflected” means when you’re talking about a Purple Heart. In one case Senator Kerry shot a round from an M-79 grenade launcher and the grenade detonated close enough to his boat to “blow back” shrapnel. On another one of his Purple Hearts the shrapnel that hit him appears to have been caused by one of his boat's rounds setting off a cache of VC munitions and rice on the beach and again their was a shrapnel blow back. Kerry did good. But the rules for Purple Hearts are clear that the injury (it can be small, medium or major) must be cause by hostile fire -- the bad guys had to shoot at you. Blow Back, even when it is a major wound does not rate a Purple Heart.

Capish’?

Even a minor nick from enemy fire gets a medal. Even a major wound from “blow back’ or friendly fire gets no Purple Heart. (It might get you some other medal, but that a different story.)

I served up river from the Swift Boats from Jan through August 1969 when my ship was ordered home to be scrapped. .(It was an ugly old tub that had been an LST in WW II.) The Swift Bats operated in the ocean just off the coast and in the lower Mekong, they drew too much water to operate well up river. Up river the Navy used smaller faster PBR's and Mike boats and some other shallow draft boats.

My opinion is: Kerry’s Christmas in Cambodia yarn is pure fiction. The two times my ship wandered into Cambodia in 1969, the Cambodians came right up in patrol boats and led us back to Vietnamese water. Everything was friendly and polite. The river charts were 1935 French Navy surveys and hopeless. The Mekong is a big muddy river and the channels are always changing. Things got nasty in Cambodia in 1971, long after me and Senator Kerry were back in the USA.

Senator Kerry’s Bronze and Silver Stars smell OK to me, a lot of guys of his rank got them and I don’t have any reason to doubt them.

Senator Kerry’s three Purple Hearts don’t fit the normal pattern for Navy guys. They got a geedunk quality. His early out home really smells geedunk.

Note one: as you have seen for yourself, most of the officers who served on Swift Boats got it out for Senator Kerry. He rubbed them the wrong way big time back in 1969. This is an old and very deep Navy feud. You get the picture. They have hated him for more than thirty years. He had to know he would stir them up big time when he presented himself as the John Paul Jones of the Mekong Delta.

Note two: In addition to his old squadron mates and wardroom fellows, there is another attack on Senator Kerry’s Vietnam campaign that could in fact be even more dangerous. The no surrender stripe of Left-wingers doesn’t like him. Check out Alexander Cockburn’s July column on Kerry. It is the most vicious attack on Kerry I have ever read. Mr. Cockburn is a Trotskyite Brit who lives in Mendicino County California. His Dad was Claud Cockburn who was the novelist Evelyn Waugh’s “Communist Cousin.” Old time left-winger, but as you might expect, he writes very well. He openly accuses Kerry of being an real war criminal and someone who was deranged and acted out his derangement with a M-79 grenade launcher and machine guns. Kerry killed some people who may or may not have been legit targets, he alleges.

He ends his column quoting Admiral Elmo Zumwalt (a truly beloved Navy leader) that Kerry was a loose cannon who shot up civilians every chance he got and they had to straight jacket him and get him home early. (If true it would explain why a couple of the Purple Hearts look geedunk. They were the geedunk that Zumwalt used to finesse Kerry's early trip home to the States.)

If you want to know what geedunk means, ask an old Navy guy.

Johnny Cabral
SM2 USN 1968-1971

PS Tonight I was reading a blog by a young California soldier in Mosul, Iraq. After a long day he was on his bunk listening to a CD of THE DOORS. Like a familiar smell that triggered memories -- THE DOORS were a major part of the sound track to the Vietnam War. I remember hearing them on AFVN Saigon. I guess there is no Armed ForcesRadio Iraq like we had all those years ago. I doubt soldiers also listen the Shirrells? AFVN Saigon used to play them a lot, but I don't think today's army listens to "Soldier Boy, I'll be true to you" or "Dedicated to the one I love."