A pair of his fellow Vietnam junior officers, Stephen Sherman and Mackubin Thomas Owens, have some damning things to say about John Kerry the war protestor. Both reference B. G. Burkett’s book Stolen Valor, which apparently has much more on the topic.
The pieces are worth reading in full; I won’t excerpt them here. The basic charge is that Kerry knowingly misled Congress, used witnesses who were in fact not actually veterans or who were lying about the nature of their service, and otherwise fabricated much of the evidence used to paint an ugly picture of the Vietnam war. As Craig Henry observes,
For a long time the popular media image of Vietnam veterans was as drugged out losers who were haunted by the atrocities they were forced to commit. Gullible journalists helped create this image by retelling the fictions of fake veterans. If Burkett is correct, Kerry was an early enabler of this big lie and willingly smeared his fellow veterans for political gain.
Indeed.
I find this troubling but would like to know more about the situation.
