Holiday in Cambodia (good article)

[TheReligiousLeft]

<http://www.slate.com/id/2105529/>
It is a twisted state of affairs that George W. Bush's most avid surrogates are trying to make this election turn on the question of whether Lieut. John Kerry was or was not in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968.

Having pretty much failed at their efforts to disprove the official U.S. Navy account of Kerry's valor in battle as skipper of a "Swift boat" patrolling the Mekong Delta, the veterans against Kerry have moved to discredit his more obscure claim—made a few times over the years, in interviews and Senate floor speeches—that, on Dec. 24, he took CIA or special ops forces across the border into Cambodia, even while Washington claimed no American troops were there.

Kerry first told this story publicly in an article published in the Boston Herald on Oct. 14, 1979, before he was a senator:


Long short this article asks the question Why would John Kerry, when in Enemy Waters, not write secret missions to Cambodia in his diary? Good stuff.

[RobertSeattle]

1. If Kerry had only said, "British Intelligence has learned...

As a preface to everything he said back then, he'd be off Scott free.

[TheReligiousLeft]

3. True enough.

[HEyHEY]

2. Where's Sydney Schanberg when you need him?

[VOX]

4. No one was officially in Cambodia. Remember the scene in "Apocalypse Now?"

http://djpope.outraged.com/scripts/apocalypsenow.txt
CHIEF
"I don't think. My orders are I'm not supposed to know where I'm taking this boat, so I don't. But one look at you and I know it's gonna be hot, wherever it is."

WILLARD
"We're going up river about 75 klicks above the Do Lung bridge."

CHIEF
"That's Cambodia, captain."

WILLARD
"That's classified. We're not supposed to be in Cambodia, but that's where I'm going. You just get me close to my
destination and I'll cut you and the crew loose."
- - - - - - - - - -
Francis Ford Coppola co-authored this script with John Milius, known gun afficionado and conservative who also made "The Wind and the Lion" and "Red Dawn." Michael Herr also contributed to the "Apocalypse Now" script -- and he wrote "Dispatches," one of the best books about the Vietnam War.