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| Sat, 08-28-2004 - 6:35pm |
Thursday, August 26, 2004 Opinion
WWII Veteran looks at Kerry’s Vietnam controversy
The unseemly battle about John Kerry’s war record is so politically skewed that everybody — pro-Kerry, pro-Bush, journalist, pundit — is ignoring the fact that warriors who fought in the same battle honestly remember details differently and that military clerks who write up citations have to work with those differences. Here, a handful of real-world personal experiences with military records:
n Apparently confusing two firefights which took place during the same three- or four-day battle, the soldier-clerk who wrote up my citation for a Bronze Star described as the man I saved a soldier who was already dead. Although I did save another man’s life pretty much as the citation describes, that happened in another firefight, so the official record is at least partially wrong.
Two or three days after one battle, resting and reminiscing in a hotel we had captured, several of us in that battle had differing memories about the flow of the firefight — so much so that some of the replacement kids began to wonder if we weren’t making up some of what we were telling them.
Once, after I had lost several men, killed and wounded — including one whose right leg was blown off — my knee was grazed by shrapnel and I spent a few hours in a nearby field hospital. When the medic began asking for name-rank-serial number to write me up for a Purple Heart, I convinced him to have the record show that I was there for treatment of a severe case of athlete’s foot. In truth, my feet were soaking in potassium permanganate while my scratch was being dressed, and I had purple feet for weeks afterward. Today, with the scar gone, I can’t remember which leg was hurt. The point is that if that hospital record exists it will not show that a battle wound was treated.
Forty years after World War II (about the same time-frame as that in which the Vietnam veterans are currently working), some vets — I, among them — had to look at maps and find ways to reconstruct the sequence of events. Did Sessenheim come before or after Wurzburg? Was it Christmas Eve, or later that winter, when we were ordered not to move until 0600 and to fire on anything or anyone who moved after 2400?
Finally, in the months after VE Day (May 8, 1945), I was appointed Information & Education Sergeant for my battalion. A major part of that I & E function was to speak to units about current affairs. When I returned to the states, the rookie who filled out my discharge papers saw I & E and recorded that I was leaving the service as an “Intelligence NCO,†something I didn’t read until years later. My official discharge, therefore, incorrectly identifies the last duty I performed before leaving the Army.
All by way of saying that memories of combat can differ among those who actually took part in the firefight — whether they end up Democrats or Republicans — and that official records can be intentionally or unintentionally modified by people who were nowhere near the battle. So, it would be great if the pro-Kerry and pro-Bush partisans forget Vietnam and argue about Iraq.
Frank Versagi, a management consultant and long-time civic activist, serves on Royal Oak’s Charter Review Committee and is past president of the Chamber of Commerce and the Lions Club. Currently, he is best known for encouraging partisans to debate civic matters on his Web site:

Absolutely. I'm assuming the Republican Convention will put an end to this seemingly endless news cycle about Vietnam and exactly how much blood Kerry shed in defense of his country. Thanks for posting that.
My first and only experience with the army was when I was 13 and was enrolled in a summer basketball camp at West Point. Somehow the 13 became an 18 on my paperwork and I was put in with a group of very tall senior girls. At first I didn't notice, and just wondered why I suddenly completely stunk at basketball. When my friends, who were happily doing drills with other 13 year olds, pointed out the obvious, I tried to straighten it out, but it took the entire week, and by then, camp was over. I left thinking that the Army sure had a beautiful dining hall, but they were very bad at paperwork. If I ever run for public office in the future, the Republican party can claim that Army records show I'm lying about my age. I'm a vain flip-flopper who can't even tell the truth about how many years I've been on this earth. Pathetic.