Text 1623, 53 rader
Skriven 2004-08-22 05:50:14 av FRED NOON (1:275/311)
Ärende: (3) Navy Officer Backs Kerry
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Part Three

Anti-Kerry Vets Not There That Day
By William B. Rood


There's at least one mistake in that citation.  It incorrectly
identifies the river where the main action occurred, a reminder that
such documents were often done in haste and sometimes authored for their
signers by staffers.  It's a cautionary note for those trying to piece
it all together.  There's no final authority on something that happened
so long ago -- not the documents and not even the strained recollections
of those of us who were there.

But I know that what some people are saying now is wrong.  While they
mean to hurt Kerry, what they're saying impugns others who are not in
the public eye.

Men like Larry Lee, who was on our bow with an M-60 machine gun as we
charged the riverbank, Kenneth Martin, who was in the .50-caliber gun
tub atop our boat, and Benjamin Cueva, our engineman, who was at our aft
gun mount suppressing the fire from the opposite bank.

Wayne Langhoffer and the other crewmen on Droz's boat went through even
worse on April 12, 1969, when they saw Droz killed in a brutal ambush
that left PCF-43 an abandoned pile of wreckage on the banks of the Duong
Keo River.  That was just a few months after the birth of his only
child, Tracy.

The survivors of all these events are scattered across the country now.

Jerry Leeds lives in a tiny Kansas town where he built and sold a
successful printing business.  He owns a beautiful home with a lawn that
sweeps to the edge of a small lake, which he also owns.  Every year,
flights of purple martins return to the stately birdhouses on the tall
poles in his back yard.

Cueva, recently retired, has raised three daughters and is beloved by
his neighbors for all the years he spent keeping their cars running.
Lee is a senior computer programmer in Kentucky, and Lamberson finished
a second military career in the Army.

With the debate over that long-ago day in February, they're all living
that war another time.




-------------------------
William B. Rood is an editor at the Chicago Tribune. 

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