This just makes me want to cry. NYT: "Veterans Long to Reclaim the Name ‘Swift Boat’"

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/us/politics/30swift.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Swift boat veterans — especially those who had nothing to do with the group that attacked Senator John Kerry’s military record in the 2004 election — want their good name back, and the good names of the men not lucky enough to come home alive.

“You would not hear the word ‘Swift boat’ and think of people that served their country and fought in Vietnam,” said Jim Newell, who spent a year as an officer in charge on one of the small Navy vessels in An Thoi and Qui Nhon. “You think about someone who was involved in a political attack on a member of a different party. It just comes across as negative. Everyone who is associated with a Swift boat is involved in political chicanery.”

...

“It’s completely inappropriate,” said Michael Bernique, a highly regarded Swift boat driver who led missions up a canal that became known as Bernique’s Creek. “The word should connote service with honor, which is what was conducted. Anything that demeans that honor is shameful.”

In an April column in Proceedings magazine of the United States Naval Institute, Harlan Ullman, a Swift boat driver in Vietnam and a Pentagon consultant known as a creator of the “shock and awe” concept, wrote: “It is time to ban a word that is at once offensive, demeaning and obscene both to and for anyone serving in the naval profession. That word is ‘Swiftboating.’ ”

This month, a group of veterans who served with Mr. Kerry took up the challenge by Boone Pickens, the billionaire Texas oilman who helped finance the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004, that he would give $1 million to anyone who could disprove anything in the group’s campaign against Mr. Kerry.

“One of the prime reasons we’ve done this is the way it’s taken on the connotation of political sport versus honoring those that sacrificed everything,” said Fred Short, who was in the gun tub of a Swift boat during one of the firefights that the veterans group said Mr. Kerry had exaggerated.


Read the whole thing.

Weird, that after all these years, I realized Lipscomb's attack very much upset me. Why can't they just stop? Kerry isn't president. "Mission Accomplished", so shut up already.

were so hideous and sadistic, I think the memory of all that still hurts all of us supporters (and I can hardly imagine how JK and those close to him feel about it). It was like that Star Trek episode with the box that contains something so ugly that if you look inside, you'll go mad. Then to have them still peddling their lies and evil 4 years later -- it's hard to take.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/6/30/181324/024/789/544325

He points out the obvious. Where the hell were these guys in '04? They were largely silent, while a fellow vet was smeared, and only NOW they're mad about the word "swift boat" meaning a smear? I think a lot of them could not deal with it, and just hoped it would all go away. Which it hasn't.

Remember when I posted this?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=273&topic_id=138039

People were mad at Leeds, but man, he's looking a hell of a lot better than the 3400 who largely stood idly by while their brother was smeared. Only 200 were the SBVT; 3400 did not join that group. I wish I had those numbers in '04.

Also look at the great picture the NYT has. Note that almost every person there is just blankly looking at or smiling at the camers. There are only two clearly engaged in a conversation -- and one is Kerry. (I would have loved both those numbers and that photo in 2004. )