The time has come to expunge from our political vocabulary a word that is offensive, demeaning, and profane to anyone who serves or has served in the Navy. That word is "swiftboating." A remark by a TV commentator after Super Tuesday two months ago triggered this plea.
Senator Barack Obama had just closed the gap with Senator Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. This meant Obama was in trouble, the commentator said, because the Clinton machine was about to "swiftboat" him.
This verbal distortion arose during John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign. In full disclosure, I supported Kerry then. A political action committee called Swiftboat Veterans for Truth (SBVFT), run by supporters of President Bush, savaged Kerry's achievements in Vietnam as a Swiftboat skipper in a fusillade of highly negative TV ads.
The Swifties, as the group became known, attacked Kerry relentlessly, claiming he had exaggerated his combat record and did not deserve his medals. There were other allegations, none with merit. It made no difference. The scurrilous and disgraceful attacks hit home and damaged Kerry's campaign. Truth was the first casualty.
For the record, Kerry earned Silver and Bronze Stars for heroism along with three Purple Hearts. Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., then Commander, U.S. Naval Forces, Vietnam, cited Kerry's valor and audacity when he pinned the Silver Star on him. In later years, Zumwalt was a forceful affirmer of Kerry's heroism, as was Kerry's crew. While one could quibble about the extent of his wounds for one of his Purple Hearts, Kerry saw considerable action patrolling South Vietnam's rivers. Having been wounded three times, he returned stateside after four months at war.
Swiftboat skippers were typically young, reckless, inexperienced, and prone to idealism. Some regarded themselves as latter-day descendants of the Lafayette Escadrille of World War I or the PT boat crews of World War II. They took pride in their service. Swiftboats had little impact on the war. But the courage, commitment, and dedication displayed by the crews were in inverse proportion to that impact.
Swifts were 50 feet in length and armed with three .50-caliber machine guns, an 81-mm mortar, and small arms. The thin aluminum skin often had difficulty keeping out the huge waves of the South China Sea and the Tonkin Gulf in storms, monsoons, and the occasional typhoon, let alone AK-47 and RPG rounds. The work was mostly routine, but occasionally very dangerous.
Swiftboating has now become the term of choice for describing a political smear campaign that resembles the Swifties' attacks on Kerry. While politics has always had a mean and nasty edge, and records have always been distorted for political purposes, the men who served with honor in these thin-shelled watercraft deserve better than seeing their boats turned into a synonym for dirty politics and unscrupulous attempts to portray courage as weakness.
John F. Kennedy was praised for his wartime heroism as skipper of PT-109. And Lyndon Johnson won a Silver Star during World War II. But why was Kennedy not "PT-boated" for having his boat cut in half in the middle of the night by a Japanese destroyer or Johnson "Silver Starred" for a medal the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam described as the least-deserved decoration in modern times? After all, there were many senior naval officers during the war who considered Kennedy incompetent (and who in peacetime would have been routinely relieved for colliding with another ship) and regarded Johnson's medal as the worst example of pandering to a politician.
The answer was that World War II was a just and justified war. Service was accepted at face value. Few rocks were turned over. Even the unbalanced Senator Joe McCarthy, known as "Tail Gunner Joe," was unchallenged for a largely invented World War II record.
We are at a point in politics now in which one's entire history can and will be placed under a microscope. Fair enough. But let us not use the term "swiftboating" to dignify this often-unsavory process and demean real heroism under fire.