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A msiquoting by O'Neill about Kerry's searches of boats |
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p. 55 |
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This misquoting seems relatively insignificant, but I find it interesting for what it seems to reveal about O'Neill's motives. On page 55 he says that Kerry admits that during his |
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...entire stint in Vietnam, he never found a single piece of contraband on the hundreds of vessels he searched. |
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As a source O'Neill cites page 202 of Tour of Duty. I almost failed to find the words O'Neill used as inspiration until I looked at page 201, where these words begin (extending onto page 202): |
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During Kerry's entire stint in Vietnam he never found a single piece of contraband on a junk or sampan, unless one counts a U.S. military-issue anchor he confiscated from a Vietnamese barge. |
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O'Neill altered the source information in three ways:
--giving a lower-limit number, of "hundreds", for how many boats Kerry ordered searched by his PCF crewmen
--changing Brinkley's list of three different types of vessels from junk, sampan, and barge to simply "vessels"
--removing mention of the anchor (a trivial change in my opinion)
These changes seem motiviated by a desire to make Kerry's job seem simpler (by removing the list of three different types of boats), and to give readers a tangible, fairly large number of boats, enabling readers to better visualize the searches-without-warrant ordered by Kerry. |
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