oneill20

Six lies about what Tour of Duty says about Kerry's description of an interrogation of a detainee

p. 27

On page 27 of Unfit for Command O'Neill writes:

Interestingly, from his very first days in Vietnam, Kerry kept a journal that he showed to no one. One of his first Vietnam entries involves what he called a "cruel little game."6 In this antiwar entry, Kerry described a fisherman quaking with fear while being interrogated by the division commander and several officers. Kerry wrote that they kept running "their index fingers across their throat." According to Grant Hibbard, the division commander, and other Cam Ranh officers, this entry is a complete lie. The officers involved in this story could not speak Vietnamese, and prisoners were turned over to Vietnamese military authorities for interrogation.
Since the beginning of his tour, Kerry had a habit of wildly exaggerating his experience in his journal...

The endnote in the text (note 6 for chapter two) cites page 158 of Tour of Duty. When what is on that page is compared to what O'Neill here says is on that page, six lies by O'Neill become apparent. On that page Tour describes two different incidents Kerry described to Brinkley, in which Kerry purportedly witnessed cruelty to a "detainee". The first is one in which a Swiftboat crewman named Wasser (who later would become one of Kerry's crewmen) cruelly theatened a fisherman detainee. The second was one in which Kerry purportedly witnessed a division commander and some other officers threatening and interrogating. Pages 158-9 say,

While Kerry and crew had been strafing the shore, Wasser had been on the Swift boat interrogating the Vietnamese fishermen the patrol kept bringing back. When one man loudly vented his frustration at the slow pace at which the Americans were processing detainees, Wasser replied that at midnight he was going to kill him. The fisherman believed the threat... Wasser would come up to him, look pointedly at his watch, and then glare at the old man menacingly...Finally, near midnight, he began to cry. Precisely at midnight, Wasser started to laugh. Somehow he managed to get the old man laughing with him...
This rather cruel little game reminded Kerry of a similar incident he found far less amusing. It had occurred just a few days after his arrival in Cam Ranh, when one of the Swift boats inspecting a junk had turned up a man whose documents apparently were not in order. The crew detained him despite the man's passionate insistence that his identification papers were legitimate. After they brought him aboad the Swift he continued to jabber excitedly, flapping his arms about in an even more agitated frenzy.... While the fisherman was kept waiting, the commander of the division and several other officers, in on the shakedown, walked up to him and asked if he was VC. Each time the man shook his head vigorously, his eyes bulging with fear. The officers would then laugh and run their index fingers across their throats to indicate what would happen to him if he was. The old man's face contorted through several levels of fear and confusion as he remained squatting on the floor, pathetic and alone, through the ordeal. Kerry found out a day or so later that the man was, in fact, a legal fisherman whose papers had been misread... The division acted as though it were a minor mistake...

The six lies by O'Neill are:
(1) O'Neill misattributed the words "cruel little game" to Kerry. Obviously, these were Brinkley's words, not Kerry's. (Also, O'Neill removed the word "rather", exaggerating and sharpening the label he falsely attributed to Kerry.)
(2) Tour of Duty uses these words to refer to the incident done by Wasser, not the incident Kerry said was done by the division commander.
(3) O'Neill contends that the man was described in Tour of Duty as of a kind that wouldn't have been introgated by US military personell at all, and instead given to the south's military. Tour of Duty obviously doesn't say anything like this.
(4) O'Neill says Tour of Duty describes the man as a "prisoner". But the book actually labels the man a "detainee".
(5) O'Neill changed the plural "throats" to "throat"
(6) O'Neill falsely implies that the interrogation was one that required the interrogators to know Vietnamese. But simply asking if someone is a VC in Vietnamese requires very little knowledge of the language (what could be learned in a minute or two, I estimate)

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