Crossing into Cambodia
James Robbins:
James Robbins:
...The Cambodia story fits another Kerry pattern. His testimony about atrocities and war crimes in Vietnam seen during his four months is also a convient fantasy that is meant to further a political objective. The point is, Kerry makes things up to achieve political objectives. What else has he made up in his most recent campaign?
Crossing into Cambodia by boat was not easy, unless one was patrolling the Bassac River, which runs along the southernmost border between the two countries, so if you landed on the wrong shore you were technically "in Cambodia." Steve Gardner, who served with Kerry on PCF-44 during the period in question, said it was impossible for their boat to have crossed the international border elsewhere because of concrete pilings and U.S. Navy patrols blocking the way. The barriers were intended as much to keep our people in South Vietnam as to keep theirs out; we had already run into problems with people making it too far upriver without an invitation. On July 17, 1968, the Cambodian Navy captured eleven Americans on a boat a mile inside Cambodian waters. The men were on a re-supply mission but, lacking proper charts, they had inadvertently strayed across the line. The Cambodians believed they were up to no good and put the men in detention, treating them well but rejecting U.S. requests that they be repatriated. The eccentric Cambodian ruler Prince Norodom Sihanouk demanded a bulldozer or tractor in exchange for each man, but the president refused to meet his terms. Sihanouk finally released them, along with another American who had fallen from a helicopter on the wrong side of the border on December 19, 1968. He said it was in honor of Christmas — a Buddhist making a goodwill gesture to Christians, as he put it. Thus on Christmas Eve, 1969, the border issue was a hot topic; it is doubtful President Johnson would have tolerated any sailors blundering their way into Cambodia to foment a new crisis, much less have ordered them there.
...
My own take on the conflicting and questionable statements Kerry has made is that over the years he probably got sloppy with the facts, making his story more romantic and self-aggrandizing in the process. By juxtaposing his presence in Cambodia with Nixon's statement that we had no troops there, Kerry gets to call the president a liar and make himself out to be something of a casualty of "Nixon's War" (as he calls it; I can understand why he would not want to credit his hero John F. Kennedy, but skipping entirely over LBJ strikes one as simply odd). In his account, he is both hero and victim, warrior and dissenter, able to lean toward whichever persona is most useful to him at the time. If anything, it tells us a lot about Kerry's self-image. But even if everything Kerry said was true — even if he was in Cambodia when the president said we had no troops there — the candidate's tone of weary cynicism over the affair is misplaced. He was never ordered to go to Cambodia, and if he got there at all, he was violating U.S. policy and international law. The president might have honestly (so far as he knew) stated we had no troops in Cambodia, not knowing that Lieutenant Kerry was drifting around there in existential agony, trying to figure out how to turn a navigation error into an event of great moral significance.
Comments
Post a Comment