by Julia Reischel

As time runs out before the presidential election, one Massachusetts resident is making last-minute press rounds in an attempt to keep John Kerry’s conduct during and after the Vietnam War in the minds of voters.

“We just don’t think Kerry is fit to be a commander,” said Adrian L. Lonsdale, a Coast Guard veteran who commanded Kerry’s squadron in Vietnam and who is now a member of the Swift Vets and POWs for Truth organization.

Formerly known as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth before joining forces with a POW veterans’ group, the Swift Boat Vets are famous for running a series of cable television ads beginning last spring that criticized Kerry’s record of service in Vietnam and accused him of being unfit to be Commander-in-Chief of the nation’s armed forces.

Lonsdale has appeared in several of the commercials run by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. In one ad, he said that Kerry lacks the capacity to lead.

For Lonsdale, it’s been a long road to his anti-Kerry position. He was born in Seattle, Washington, and entered the Coast Guard academy in 1945, beginning a life-long career as an officer. He was later stationed in Massachusetts, where he served as captain of four different Coast Guard cutters.

In Vietnam, Lonsdale served as the Task Group Commander of the 4th coastal zone from March 1968 to April 1969. That tour of duty that completely overlaps Kerry’s service there from November 1968 to March 1969. Lonsdale commanded 900 men manning both swift boats and coast guard cutters and patrols and knew Kerry personally, meeting him occasionally in the officers’ mess.

In 1969, upon his return from Vietnam, Lonsdale said that unlike fellow veterans John Kerry and founding member of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth John O’Neil, he remained almost entirely apolitical.

“When I left Vietnam, I just kind of forgot,” Lonsdale said. “I had a wife and a new house.”

“I do remember getting very churned up when listening to Kerry’s Senate testimony,” Lonsdale said, referring to Kerry’s anti-war appearance before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1971.

On that date, Kerry said that American troops had raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam. This particular statement has drawn the ire of a diverse array of Kerry’s critics, who say that Kerry exaggerated and generalized isolated atrocities.

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Web site accuses Kerry of creating phony war crimes.

“Yes, there were atrocities that happened,” said Lonsdale. “But to say that everyone did it, when it was just a small fraction, is not right. It set the tone for all the books and movies that came after.”

“In my area, no one ever reported an atrocity. Kerry himself never reported anything—they were just making up stories,” he said.

“He was accusing us all, including all the higher ups, of committing atrocities. I never encouraged anybody to commit atrocities,” he said.

As time passed, Lonsdale said that his outrage at Kerry’s claims of veteran atrocities waned. “I was always aware of the testimony,” he said.

“I’d kind of forgiven him for that, because I thought he had changed,” he said.

In the spirit of forgiveness and the brotherhood of combat, Lonsdale went on the record defending Kerry’s war record in the media, he said.

During Kerry’s Senate campaign, when a Boston Globe columnist questioned Kerry’s war record and suggested that he had committed war crimes, Kerry responded by inviting veterans, including Lonsdale, to come up to Boston and speak to the press in his defense.

Lonsdale did so, telling assembled reporters at a press conference that Kerry was among the finest of those Swift boat drivers and a very good officer.

Lonsdale said he is aware of the apparent contradiction between 1996 and today. “I came to Boston and stood up for Kerry. Kerry was being accused of committing atrocities, and I knew that there were no atrocities.”

Lonsdale said that he and his wife spent the whole day of the press conference with Kerry and Teresa Heinz-Kerry. “We thought they were terrific.”

Lonsdale said the main reason behind his 1996 defense of Kerry was loyalty. “I stood up for him simply because he’s a Swift Boat guy,” said Lonsdale. “Unfortunately, for Kerry, loyalty only goes one way.”

For Lonsdale, there was a turning point for his transformation from Kerry supporter to Kerry critic, he said. That point came when retired Navy Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann, Lonsdale’s direct superior in Vietnam gave him David Brinkley’s biography of John Kerry.

Hoffman is also the chairman of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Brinkley’s book, “Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War,” came out last year as the campaign season was heating up. In it, Brinkley describes Kerry’s war history in voluminous detail and draws upon extensive sources written by Kerry himself.

The book’s treatment of Kerry’s commanders and brothers-in-arms galvanized many of the Swift Boat Veterans in opposition to Kerry, Lonsdale said.

“He was obviously lying,” said Lonsdale. “There were big errors. There was only one hero in Vietnam and he was running for President, and the rest of us were baby-killers and rapists.”

Lonsdale said he finds fault with several specific episodes in the book. When Kerry describes a “massacre” that left 17 people were wounded, Lonsdale remembers only a skirmish where four people were killed.

In other parts of the book, Lonsdale said he himself was protrayeed unfairly.

In one section, Douglas criticized Lonsdale personally for not sending any air cover to one of Kerry’s missions. To this, Lonsdale angrily retorts: “Air cover is hard to come by.”

Lonsdale said although Douglas claims that Lonsdale refused to meet with him, there was never any formal request for a conference.

More than his own reputation, Lonsdale said he bristled at Kerry’s criticism of Hoffmann.

There was never a question that Lonsdale would spring to the defense of Hoffman, a man he considers one of the best men he knows, he said.

What sealed Lonsdale’s opinion of Kerry was his general sense that Kerry was inflating his Vietnam experience to suit his political needs. “It was full of his own self-aggrandizement,” he said.

“He’d only been there a month. He thought he would cruise offshore safely, but just as he arrived things changed. So, he found himself running up the rivers, so he worked hard to get three purple hearts and get out,” he said.

After reading Brinkley’s book, Lonsdale decided to join the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. “I called Hoffmann back and said ‘I’m on board,’” he said.

Nowadays, Lonsdale ticks off Kerry’s wrongdoings rapid-fire. He criticizes the legitimacy of all of Kerry’s war decorations. “He got rice grains in his rear end,” said Lonsdale.

Lonsdale argues that Kerry’s anti-war activities were disloyal, incorrect, and perhaps treasonous. “He helped fire up anti-war sentiment. He secretly went to Paris, conferred with the North Vietnamese and Viet Kong, and gave the North Vietnamese the courage to hang on.”

Lonsdale said, “A North Vietnamese general later said that the war was won in the U.S. and Kerry gave them the encouragement. He wanted us to accept their terms, to pay reparations, while still an officer. That’s called ‘aiding and abetting the enemy.’”

Lonsdale also said there could be still more blemishes on Kerry’s record, kept secret because Kerry refuses to release the full extent of his military records to the public.

“There’s something in Kerry’s records,” said Lonsdale. Kerry’s war medals were reissued in the late 1970s under President Carter.”

“Which suggests that for some reason, he had been stripped of his medals previously,” he said.

Lonsdale added that if there isn’t anything to hide, the Kerry campaign should release the records to the public. “I think he got less than an honorable discharge,” Lonsdale said.

Lonsdale said his opinion of John Kerry is not, and has never been, shaped by partisan interests.

“Remember, as a Republican, I stood up for him,” he said, referring to his 1996 defense of Kerry’s war record.

Instead, Lonsdale said, a feeling that Kerry has betrayed the brotherhood of Swift Boat veterans drives his opposition of Kerry. “Brotherhood is involved,” he said. “Any Swift Boat Vet other than Kerry would transcend politics.”

Lonsdale said other Swift Boat veterans of many different political leanings agree that Kerry has betrayed their brotherhood.

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth includes 250 of Kerry’s fellow veterans, including one from Kerry’s own boat, while only four veterans are actively supporting Kerry, he said. “Only four guys have stuck with him, and none of them are ever interviewed.”

Lonsdale also said that his group’s criticism of Kerry ends at the ballot box. “If he becomes the commander-in-chief, it’s the will of the people. If that happens, our group will cease all our activities, and we will support him.”

At bottom, Lonsdale and his fellow Swift Boat Veterans want to offer history and the public a fundamentally different image of Vietnam from the one put forth in Kerry’s biography and campaign.

Where Kerry argues that soldiers in Vietnam accomplished little, Lonsdale said he came away from his tour of duty feeling victorious. “I felt like we contributed,” he said.

“By the time I left, I could go anywhere I wanted—we had won the battle there; we had control. We never lost any battles,” he said.

“The war was lost here,” he said. “Nixon was working hard. Kerry got in there and muddled up the works. Nixon was ending the war, but Kerry and his anti-war band made the war go on and on.”

At the heart of Lonsdale’s disagreement with Kerry lies a difference of opinion about whether a member of the armed forces can ever conscionably criticize the military.

Lonsdale, a career Coast Guard officer, said he cannot see a situation that would ever necessitate going outside military chains of command to criticize the armed forces publicly, as Kerry did in the 1970s.

Lonsdale said that if a soldier or sailor has criticisms of any aspect of a war, he should act through his own internal review process to effect change. “There are channels for that,” he said.

“If Kerry becomes the commander-in-chief, he can’t get the confidence of the armed forces,” he said. “Iraq is a war we have to win, because if we don’t, we’re doomed.”

“I don’t think Kerry can win it,” he said.