A Matter of Honor

Visto que se trata de um artigo de Michael Novak, esta sugestão de leitura é especialmente dedicada ao CN...

Backed up by many sworn affidavits from well-placed eyewitnesses, John O'Neill's lawyer-like chapters tell a story of each major action very different from Kerry's. This may not seem important to the rest of the world, but to the Swift Boat Vets it means a great deal. They feel an obligation to the truth as they saw it, felt it, and shared it among themselves at that time and for years afterwards. They want to cut clear from Kerry's new version of events ? and for the first time they see what his old version of events was, as recorded in Brinkley's quotes from his journals.

One of the places at which their account is dramatically different from John Kerry's concerns the famous "Christmas in Cambodia" trip that Kerry has publicly presented some 50 times as a turning point in his life. Although records show that Kerry was at least half-way across Vietnam from Cambodia at that point ? 55 miles ? he has often said that that Christmas day was "seared ? seared" into his memory. That's because he remembers President Nixon saying there were not Americans in Cambodia at that time. But there Kerry was.

The Swift Boat Vets write that the trip didn't happen ? indeed, couldn't have happened.

Reluctantly, the Kerry campaign has conceded that the Cambodia trip was not at Christmas (Nixon was not yet president). They have also had to back off from their first, second, third, and fourth accounts of how Kerry made that mistake.

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The Swift Boat debate is one of those cases that has persuaded me that if one seeks the truth of things, much more help is on the way from the best of the bloggers, liberal as well as conservative, than from the main organs of the national press.