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O'Neill stuffs another quote in Kerry's mouth, about Cam Ranh Bay |
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p. 27 |
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This is a significant misquoting that I think reveals a lot about the lengths O'Neill will go to defame Kerry. On page 27 O'Neill says that Tour of Duty quotes Kerry using these words to describe an "incident" on Cam Ranh Bay |
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Since the beginning of his tour, Kerry had a habit of wildly exaggerating his experience in his journal and in his accounts of his experience. Cam Ranh was a safe place, and being an officer in training was hardly exciting. In letters home, Kerry invents a nonexistent adventure that he repeats in Tour of Duty. He explains that after a few patrols in rough water at Cam Ranh, officers "come back pissing red and that several people have broken bones." None of the Swiftees from Cam Ranh remember any incident of this kind. Division commander Grant Hibbard brands it a lie, since there were no records or memory of any such incident in the year Kerry was there.
These exaggerated entries in his journal would serve as the basis of Kerry's Vietnam stories for the next thirty years. The theme of these stories is always the same: Kerry protrays himself as a noble war hero who has no choice but to struggle mightily against the many military villians who surround him from the top down in the United States Army or Navy. |
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O'Neill gave no page number for this quote (the words in quotation marks above). However, I was able to find the quote using the software of the www.amazon.com site (which allows one to search the contents of Tour of Duty). It appears on page 144. On that page, Brinkley describes what Kerry said in a letter home to his parents, about bad weather tossing boats on Cam Ranh Bay (O'Neill uses the word "incident", which could apply to either a weather event or a combat event, to invite the false inference that Kerry was claiming that it was a combat event): |
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That November in the Gulf of Tonkin a weather menace so major it earned the moniker "Monsoon Mamie" was making its presence felt up and down South Vietnam's thousand-mile coast. Just ferrying local passengers the twenty-four miles from Cam Ranh to Nha Trang proved a five-dramamine endeavor. "I felt like I was in a submarine riding a runaway missile -- we would go smashing into some waves, rise completely out of the water with the screws screaming away and then come crashing down again to lose complete sight of what was ahead," Kerry wrote to his parents. "My arms were cramped from hanging on and several of the passengers were sick before long. I'm told by some of the OINC's [officers in charge] that after a few patrols like that they've
come back pissing red and that several people have broken bones. Sounds like fun, no?" |
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As is obvious from the original text, O'Neill falsely attributed a claim to Kerry that actually was a claim Kerry said he heard from other officers. At issue, therefore, isn't whether the "incident" occurred, it's whether Kerry accurately quoted the other officers.
The fact that O'Neill went on to attribute angry words to Hibbard, claiming Kerry "lied" about an "incident" that "never happened", means that O'Neill either
(1) lied to the officer, misleading him into thinking that Kerry himself made the claim about people pissing red and having broken bones, or
(2) didn't lie to the officer, but the officer was willing to lie about what Kerry said, or
(3) O'Neill made-up the angry words of the officer saying Kerry told a "complete lie"
I believe that either (2) or (3) is what happened (probably 3, and with the permission of the officer).
A fourth possibility...that O'Neill himself was lied to about what Tour of Duty says, seems so unlikely that I need not seriously consider it, in view of all the other misquotings of Tour of Duty by O'Neill that I've found.
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