Simply not true.

Why Truth Matters

by James Bond Stockdale, II


40 years ago I secretly sat on our kitchen steps in California and listened to my Dad tell a story that would plague our family and the national conscience for more than a generation. He was home for 18 hours between his fighter squadron in the Tonkin Gulf and his boyhood home in Illinois. Before returning to the USS Ticonderoga, he would attend his father’s funeral.

I listened as his narrative unfolded for some invited navy friends. Dad wanted to get ‘on the record’ personally so others would know what had occurred in case ‘something happened’ when he returned to combat in a few days.

On the night of August 4, 1964 he had been the only pilot in the air over the destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy in the Gulf. He turned himself and his fighter ‘inside out’ trying to keep up with the shouts of a panic-stricken shipboard radio operator. His jet’s cannon blasts, the radio ranting, and missiles fired into the darkness at supposed ‘sightings’ of North Vietnamese P.T. boats went on for over an hour. He eventually ran low on fuel, climbed into the ominous clouds, and headed back to the aircraft carrier.

No boats. No attack. Hot, humid weather and thunderheads had played tricks with the radar. An atmosphere of apprehension and fear ‘on deck’ contributed to conjuring ghosts in the mist. The whole thing had been a fire drill. He and his squadron pilots laughed it off in the carrier’s ready-room. None of it mattered until Dad was shaken awake six hours later to lead a ‘reprisal raid’ for the preceding night’s ‘attack.’

Nothing had happened. But using the radio traffic transcripts laced with threat, Robert McNamara decided he had the angle he had been looking for to wage a full-fledged war. His plan fit with Lyndon Johnson’s Texas gunslinger words of direction to his state department: "Tell the Vietnamese that, unlike others, I am not afraid to use what I wear on my hip." The pieces were in place for a blunder of epic proportions.

Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in this provocative atmosphere. The lie grew too big and too fast for any moderation. Real moral leverage (so critical when committing young men to prolonged battle) can only be built on authentic events. Yet it was dismissed as passé by the bureaucrats and superfluous by political leaders. And an entire generation of Americans would get left holding the bag.

One year later Dad was shot down and captured. As the senior Naval officer in prison, he issued clandestine orders designed to forestall the use of prisoners’ statements for propaganda. He and many others were tortured severely – in large measure a result of those expectations. Some of these same men are now participating in propaganda of a different sort. They suggest that John Kerry’s testimony before Congress resulted in additional torture and prolonged imprisonment. Simply not true.

In the classified debriefs of prisoners held in North Viet Nam (over 500 volumes of transcription) there is not one mention of John Kerry’s name or any reference to his activity. Dad ended his career as the only three-star Admiral in the history of the U.S. Navy to wear both aviator wings and the Medal of Honor. He (literally) wrote the book on prison history. In all those years he has never written or spoken of John Kerry’s involvement. In fact, no former prisoner ever remarked about John Kerry until it became politically expedient 6 months ago. LINK