McHale's Navy, Eat Your Heart Out

Everybody knows by now (because John Kerry won’t stop telling us) how then-Army Special Ops stud Jim Rassman fell into the Mekong River and was rescued by then-Lieutenant John Kerry. But the thing to which I had never really given much thought is just how it is that he ended up in the water.

Well, the Swiftboat vets’ account, as you might imagine, makes the answer to that question more than a little comical.

Distilled to the essentials, Swiftboat #3 hits a mine in the river, the mine explodes and damages the boat, sending several crew members into the drink. The other swiftboats in Kerry’s unit gather around #3 to try and salvage the boat as well as rescue the overboard crewmen – except for Kerry’s boat, which took off downstream and then returned soon thereafter.

So how did Rassman end up treading water? The most likely answer according to this account is that when the mine blew up, Kerry panicked, whipped his boat around and gunned it out of harm’s way. Now if you’re Rassman, and you’re standing on deck without a handhold within reach, you stand a good chance of losing your balance and falling off. Which Rassman did.

IOW, Kerry drove his boat right out from under Rassman. Then, when he re-gathered his wits about him, he came back and cherry-picked him out of the river right out from under another swiftboat. And from Rassman’s perspective, with everything happening so fast, all he perceives is an explosion, then hitting the water, then coughing and spluttering, and then John Kerry’s arm reaching down to pick him up.

So Rassman’s loyalty to Kerry can at least somewhat be understood. As, in a highly cynical way, can Kerry’s embellishment of the incident to make himself look like a hero braving “heavy fire from both sides of the river to save a comrade in distress” tossed into the after-action report instead of “I panicked and dumped the Army guy into the soup and then covered my ass by almost running him down in my haste to retrieve him.”

“Hoo-ra!” indeed.