Indochinese "Where's Waldo?"

Is beholding Senator Kerry’s unraveling “Christmas in Cambodia” fable reminding anybody else of an Indochinese version of Where’s Waldo?

On the Senate floor in 1986 Kerry said the following:

I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared – seared - in me.

Well, first off, “the President of the United States” in December 1968 was still Lyndon Johnson, not Richard Nixon, the one who ordered the invasion of Cambodia some two years later, or long after Kerry had returned Stateside. Second of all, in December 1968 Cambodia was a neutral country several years away from falling under the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge, which means unless Pol Pot had a Delorean equipped with a flux capacitor, Kerry could never have battled the KR. And third, according to John O’Neil, co-author of Unfit for Command and the Swift Boat commander who took over Kerry’s boat, Lurch never got anywhere near the Cambodian border in his four months and twelve days in Southeast Asia:

Despite the dramatic memories of his Christmas in Cambodia, Kerry’s statements are complete lies. Kerry was never in Cambodia during Christmas 1968, or at all during the Vietnam War…he was more than fifty miles away from Cambodia.

Reports Drudge:

Kerry was stationed at Coastal Division 13 in Cat Lo. Coastal Division 13’s patrol areas extended to Sa Dec, about 55 miles from the Cambodian border…Tom Anderson, Commander of River Division 531, who was in charge of PBRs (small river patrol crafts] confirmed that there were no Swifts anywhere in the area and they would have been stopped had they appeared. All the living commanders in Kerry’s chain of command…deny that Kerry was ever ordered to Cambodia. They indicate that Kerry would have been seriously disciplined or court-martialed had he gone there. At least three of the five crewmen on Kerry’s boat, Bill Zaldonis, Steven Hatch, and Steve Gardner, deny that they or their boat were ever in Cambodia.

And that’s not all. According to Kerry’s biography, Tour of Duty, which was taken from his own journals of the time – you know, part of the documents he refuses to release - on Christmas Eve 1968, the Lieutenant was at Sa Dec - 55 miles from the Cambodian border – and pining piteously about a quiet Christmas far from home:

Visions of sugarplums really do dance through your head and you think of stockings and snow and roast chestnuts and fires with birch logs and all that is good and warm and real. It's Christmas Eve.

Yet he has stuck to the more “dramatic” alternative all the way up to this campaign.

Once again, it needs to be reiterated that none of this “controversy” about Kerry’s Vietnam exploits or lack thereof would be an issue if he himself hadn’t based his entire candidacy on it and invited the country to examine that record to the blanket exclusion of the thirty-four years since then. That’s the final straw that brought the Swiftboat Vets forward. And it’s damaging the Kerry campaign precisely because it is a question of facts, not opinion, what actually happened in Vietnam, not opining about Kerry’s actions after he returned home.
And look at how Kerry’s camp is retreating, ducking, and dodging.

First they denied that Kerry had ever told the “Christmas in Cambodia” story. Then, after being confronted with quotes of same from the Congressional Record and the Boston Globe, the spin changed to the standard “Mistakes were made” gambit.

Kerry campaign aide Jeh Johnson on Fox News' Fox and Friends:

John Kerry has said on the record that he had a mistaken recollection earlier. [You know, the one that was seared – seared – into his memory] He talked about a combat situation on Christmas Eve 1968 which at one point he said occurred in Cambodia. [“At one point” being thirty-four years] He has since corrected the record to say it was some place on a river near Cambodia and he is certain that at some point subsequent to that he was in Cambodia. [IOW, he’s trying to have it both ways] My understanding is that he is not certain about that date. [IOW, he hasn’t had time to make up a more convincing one yet]

Michael Meehan, a Kerry campaign adviser speaking on NBC News, tried to explain his boss’ “confusion” but only ended up adding to it:

The Mekong Delta consists of the border between Cambodia and Vietnam, so on Christmas Eve in 1968, [Mr. Kerry] was in fact on patrol ... in the Mekong Delta between Cambodia and Vietnam.

Nuh-uh, says the Washington Times:

[A]t the point where the Mekong River intersects the Cambodian/Vietnam border, there is no "between." As the map on the opposite page reveals, the river in fact runs from Cambodia to Vietnam, unlike, say, the Potomac River, which creates the border between Maryland and Virginia, and Virginia and Washington. If there is a point where the river meanders in a way that Cambodia is on one side and Vietnam the other, it constitutes such a small area that for Mr. Kerry to be in that exact spot on the river would be highly dubious…

And just today, Drudge reports that Doug Brinkley, who authored Tour of Duty, is rushing a piece for the New Yorker to “set-the-record-straight” on Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia tale. But the Brinkley article will now say that Kerry was not in Cambodia during Christmas, but rather in January.

How that little detail matters when the issue is whether or not Kerry was ever in Cambodia at all, is anybody’s guess. But it does reveal two striking things: (1) Mr. French is in retreat on this fiasco; and (2) he still thinks he can get out of it by merely tweaking his tall tales here and there instead of cutting his losses and fessing up to the truth. And what that suggests is that he doesn’t realize how much trouble this fiction has gotten him into, and how much damage it can do between now and November.

The Times closed with this question: “What are Americans to make of a presidential candidate whose life-altering moment was a figment of his imagination?”

My corollary? How are voters supposed to trust the word and judgment of a presidential candidate who either can’t tell the difference between fiction and reality - or simply doesn’t care about it?

“Scary Kerry,” indeed.