abcnews.go.com/Nightline/print?id=166434
John Kerry's service in Vietnam, Americans have heard from Kerry, from the crew of t he Navy Swift boats he commanded, and from other Swift boat veterans who question the official account of a 1969 incident for which Kerry was aw arded a Silver Star. But there is one group they have not heard from: th e Vietnamese who were there that day. According to the military citation, Kerry was awarded the medal for his a ctions during an intense firefight on Feb. M embers of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group have charged that the Viet Cong fighter was a teenager who was alone, who was not part of a nu merically superior force, and who was already wounded and running away w hen Kerry shot him. Nightline traveled to Vietnam and found a number of witnesses who have ne ver been heard from before, and who have no particular ax to grind for o r against Kerry. The witnesses, all Vietnamese, are still living in the same villages where t he fighting took place more than 35 years ago. A Nightline producer visi ted them and recorded their accounts of that day. The accounts were subs equently translated by a team of ABC News translators. For the full report, watch Nightline Thursday night at 11:35 pm ET on A BC. A Village Unchanged Life along the Bay Hap River in Southern Vietnam has changed very little in those years. The river is lined with small hamlets and isolated shack s reachable only by boat. They are surrounded by marshland, separated by winding canals, and concealed by thick walls of vegetation. The canals lead to Tran Thoi village, the coordinates of which are public ly available in the US military's after-action report on the 1969 batt le. The Vietnamese government initially rejected Nightline's request to visit the village, saying they did not want to somehow influence the US . Once Nightline explained that the intention was to simply find out what the Vietnamese people remember and think of wha t happened there, permission was granted. According to Kerry's medal citation, the boats "came under intense automatic weapons and small arms fire from an entrenched enemy force les s than 50 feet away.
The Swift boats, which were transporting a group of the Americans' South Vietnamese allies, turned into the ambush and beached. According to the after-action report, the South Vietnamese troops stormed ashore, overwhe lming the local insurgents. More Fighting The fierce firefight at Tran Thoi was just the beginning of the day that has become so central to Kerry's biography. Kerry's boat, PCF 94, and on e of the other boats continued up river. The ABC News team took the same route to the site of the second deadly incident that day. According to the Navy's official report, following the initial ambush, Ke rry's boat, PCF 94, and another Swift boat continued up the river to an area where gunshots had been reported. Less than a kilometer upriver is Nha Vi, a small hamlet. Vo Van Tam, now 54, was a local Viet Cong commander during the war. According to him, th e area was a hotbed of guerrilla activity. They had recently been reinfo rced by a 12-man unit, supplied with small arms and one B-40 rocket laun cher. He said the reinforcements had been dispatched from provincial hea dquarters specifically to target the Swift boats. According to Vo, there were at least 20 Viet Cong soldiers at Nha Vi ther e that day. "There were 12 soldiers from the provincial level and eight from the district level," he said. According to the citation for Kerry's Silver Star, when the boats approac hed the hamlet, "a B-40 rocket exploded close aboard PCF 94" -- Kerry's boat. He "personally led a landing party ashore in pursuit of the enemy, " the citation says, before commending Kerry's "extraordinary daring and personal courage" for "attacking a numerically superior force in the fa ce of intense fire." That account is disputed by Swift boat veteran John O'Neill, author of "U nfit for Command," who maintains in his book that the statement "is simp ly false. Different Accounts Villagers say this is what they saw: "Firing from over here. She was only a couple hundred yards away when a Swift boat turned and app roached the shore, she said, adding that the boat was unleashing a barra ge of gunfire as it approached. Her husband Tam said the man who fired the B-40 rocket was hit in this ba rrage of gunfire. Then, he said, "he ran about 18 meters before he died, falling dead." Was the man killed by Kerry or by fire from the Swift boat? It was the he at of battle, Tam said, and he doesn't know exactly how the man with the rocket launcher died. He was o ne of the 12 reinforcements sent to the village by provincial headquarte rs, and after he died, the firefight continued, according to Tam. "When the firing started, Ba Thanh was killed," Tam said. "And I led Ba T hanh's comrades, the whole unit, to fight back. And we ran around the ba ck and fought the Americans from behind. We worked with the city soldier s to fire on the American boats." According to the after-action report, after beaching the Swift boat, Kerr y "chased VC inland, behind hooch, and shot him while he fled, capturing one B-40 rocket launcher, with round in chamber." None of the villagers seems to be able to say for a fact that they saw an American chase the man who fired the B-40 into the woods and shoot him. But they have no problem remembering Ba Thang, the man who has been dismissed by Kerry's detractors as "a lone, wounded, fleeing, young Vietcong in a loincloth." Tuoi said she didn't see Ba Thanh get shot either, but she and her husban d say they were the first to find his body. They say they found him a go od distance from his bunker, though she could not confirm that Kerry -- or anyone else -- had pursued him into the bush. Her husband, Nguyen Van Ty, in his 80s, had a slightly different account of how Ba Thang died. "I didn't see anything because I was hiding from the bullets and the bomb s," he said. "It was very fierce and there was shooting everywhere and t he leaves were being shredded to pieces. He also said the Swift boats were coming under attack from the Viet Cong fighters on shore. "We tried to shoot at the boat," he said, "but we did n't hit anything." Kerry's citation says he "uncovered an enemy rest and supply area, which was destroyed," but according to the villagers, the Americans missed the military supplies. In fact, Vo Ti Vi said, just a few weeks after the a ttack, the Viet Cong raided a US base stealing weapons and ammunition. The weapons remain in Nha Vi all these years later, she says, buried un der her garden. Back in Tran Thoi, villager Nguyen Van Khoai said that about six months a go he was visited by an American who described himself as a Swift boat v eteran and told him another American from the Swift boats was running fo r president of the United States. "They say he didn't do anything to deserve the medal," Nguyen said. "The other day, they came and asked me the questions and I said that the reco gnition for the medal is up to the USA" He said that, after they met, the Swift Boat veteran and the cameraman tu rned around and went back down the river. Campaign Issue Arises His awards should have been the most unassailable part of Kerry's record. But then came those campaign ads from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth . "He is lying about his record," said Ensign Al French in one ad. Most of the charges in the ads were general: "When the chips were down yo u could not count on John Kerry," said Lt. Some of the charges referred to the anti-war testimony Kerry gave before Congress. But John O'Neill, the officer who took over command of Kerry's swift boat after Kerry left Vietnam, raised some specific questions about the inci dent for which Kerry received his most significant award, the Silver Sta r: "In the Silver Star incident, John Kerry's citation reflects that he char ged into a numerically superior force, and into intense fire," O'Neill t old ABC News in an August 2004 interview. "But the actual facts are that there was a single kid there who had fired a rocket, who popped up, and John Kerry with his gunboat, with or without a number of troops, depend ing on who you talk to, plopped i...
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