Counterbalance: See John Run!
Commentary by Darryl Wood, ^©2004 Wood Communications, LLC 

Perhaps fearing that his anti-military, anti-war, missing-in-action senate voting record may be too risky to focus on, John Kerry and his campaign chiefs decided to recast his image by hitching his campaign wagon to his four month combat tour in Vietnam. Now he's in the political firefight of his life. The enemy, however, is not some shadowy, pajama-clad militia, but a group of American veterans.

Far from accepting his largely self-proclaimed heroics at face value, 250 plus highly decorated Vietnam Swift Boat veterans are taking Mr. Kerry to task and holding him accountable for conflicting assertions about his war record. They particularly take offense with Kerry's post-war Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony in 1971, in which he branded his fellow Vietnam veterans as arsonists, murderers, rapists, and torturers.  The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is answering those characterizations; essentially calling Kerry a liar regarding his war wounds, service decorations, and combat missions they say didn’t happen.  Perhaps more damning, however, than the Swifties’ counter-allegations may well be Kerry's 'response' to their well-documented claims.

Fahrenheit 451 state of mind
"Fahrenheit 451" is the futuristic vision of author Ray Bradbury and points to a time where free speech and free thought are punishable offenses. The book draws a bizarre picture of governmental censorship and control run amuck, when firefighters are summoned to start, rather than extinguish infernos. The fires they ignite are mass book burnings in the town square and the houses from which the books have been confiscated. Any book or periodical that challenges the status quo or the party line is illegal contraband to be confiscated and destroyed. No one is allowed to speak his or her mind or have an original thought.

Life imitates art
When Swift Boat Veterans for Truth released their first television ad challenging the conditions under which John Kerry received his medals and his combat wounds, instead of rebutting the charges he cowered behind a battery of attorneys and dispatched a press release threatening to sue any television station airing the ad. His first impulse as a self-proclaimed democracy-loving war hero is not to come out swinging, but to come out suing. As he ducks and runs for the tall grass, Kerry is using his legal arsenal to attempt to deny his fellow veterans the right to tell the truth as they experienced it. In my mind it raises the specter of a Fahrenheit 451-style tactic to limit free speech. Furthermore, instead of welcoming open inquiry and honest debate on the merits, or lack of merits of the charges, Kerry’s heavy-handed legal response seeks to circumvent the publics' right to even see the ad so as to draw their own conclusions-fortunately, only a few TV stations were intimidated-and undaunted by the threats, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth released a second ad, wherein former POW’s appear alongside film comments taken from John Kerry’s 1971 Senate Foreign Relations testimony, which they say malign and misrepresent the service of those who fought in Vietnam. Once again, instead of answering the charges directly, his legal team-like a big brother standing up for his bullied, beleaguered sibling-attempted to coerce and stifle open debate by filing a complaint with the Federal Election Commission claiming that the vets are somehow producing the ads collusively with the Bush-Cheney campaign. Far from a direct response to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads, we get another unsubstantiated, desperate assertion. 

Likewise, in a seeming disregard for freedom of the press, as reported by WorldNetDaily.com-an independent Internet news source-a Kerry campaign official speaking in an interview for Salon.com believes that Regnery Publishing should remove from store shelves the best-selling book "Unfit for Command" in which Swift Boat veteran John O’Neill and co-author Jerome Corsi challenge the senator's Vietnam war record using copious military documentation and eye witness accounts. It appears that in the high stakes game of political brinkmanship, Kerry can dish it out, allowing so-called 5-2-7 organizations to do the dirty work of raising funds to produce and launch assault ads on the opposition; but Kerry can't stand the heat when the same tactic is used to demonstrate his mendacity on the very issue he chooses to focus his entire campaign: Vietnam. Furthermore, Kerry's repeated calls for the president to demand a halt to the Swift Boat Veterans ads is disingenuous and misleading, because the president didn't start this fight. Kerry did. The battle is between him and the men with whom he served.

To tell the truth
Regardless of whose side one believes, this whole brouhaha would dissipate quickly if John Kerry would do any or all of the following:

1. Answer the charges point for point without changing the story every other day.
2. Release his full military record for public scrutiny, just as the president did.
3. Apologize to the veterans living and dead, whose service and good names were tainted by his April 1971 Senate Foreign Relations testimony.

For the sake of political expediency, it isn't likely Kerry will follow any of these suggestions. To do the first would further unmask a pattern of deceit by removing any of the front men and legal barriers behind which Mr. Kerry is attempting to hide. To do the second would prove embarrassing, if not politically and legally disastrous because it would lead to the revelation of certain discrepancies and/or manipulations of the official record that are now coming to light. To do the third would all but torpedo any hopes Mr. Kerry has left of competing for the White House because it would force him to admit he acted traitorously.

Reaping what he sowed
Candidate Kerry stoked this fiery furnace of fury with disparaging allegations about his fellow veterans. He assaulted their honor, tarnished their valor, and stained their integrity as warriors. Consequently, he calls into question serious concerns about his own conduct and character. Is he ashamed of the alleged atrocities he committed, or is he proud of his service to his country? Was his "band of brothers" heroes or war criminals? He can't have it both ways.  And that's creating major problems for his campaign.

In his White House bid John Kerry faces war on two battle fronts: the Bush-Cheney camp, and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who for the first time in a long time have a chance to set record straight for those who fought honorably in Vietnam.

If John Kerry could turn back the hands of time would he choose a different campaign strategy? Would he avoid emphasizing his hellish days as a daring Swift Boat commander in Vietnam?  Might he downplay his accounts of war atrocities and protests? Would he retract his post-war rhetoric and anti-war activism? That, of coarse, would leave him the unenviable alternative of campaigning on the merits of his senate record. That subject is sure to create its own political firestorm when Mr. Kerry stops running from it.