Stung by a column questioning the circumstances of his greatest war triumph, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry gathered his commanders and crew from Vietnam on Sunday to rebut what several called an assault on Kerry's integrity.
Kerry, visibly angered, recounted how he chased down a Viet Cong soldier in February 1969 and killed him as he was just about to fire a rocket into Kerry's Swift boat. The action earned him the Silver Star, the country's third highest honor for bravery.The column, however, quoted the boat's forward gunner as saying Kerry finished off the soldier after the gunner wounded him.
On Sunday, the gunner, Tom Belodeau, stood beside Kerry and said he had been misquoted.
"This man was not lying on the ground. This man was more than capable of destroying that boat and everybody on it. Senator Kerry did not give him that opportunity," Belodeau said.
Belodeau conceded that he may have wounded the Viet Cong soldier with a burst from his own gun, but he said Kerry did more than just finish him off. In the column, economics writer David Warsh of The Boston Globe noted that such a "coup de grace" would have been considered a war crime.
"The soldier that Senator John Kerry shot was standing on both feet with a loaded rocket launcher, about to fire it on the boat from which (Kerry) had just left, which still had four men aboard," Belodeau said.
The column clearly struck a nerve with Kerry, a Democrat who finds himself in the closing days of a close re-election battle with Gov. William F. Weld, a Republican.
In his own remarks, Kerry took on the column's author personally.
"This was a firefight, life or death, and it was that way every single day, and for some desk jockey who wants to come in, who hasn't seen a firefight in his life, to try to say that, it's just wrong. Period. Wrong," he said.