"I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared, seared, in me."
It is an assertion he made first, insofar as the written record reveals, in 1979 in a letter to the Boston Herald. Since then he has repeated it on at least eight occasions during Senate debate or in news interviews.
When Swift boat veterans presented statements from his commanders and members of his unit denying that his boat entered Cambodia, none of Kerry's shipmates came forward to corroborate his account.
After his discharge, Kerry became the leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Once, he presented to Congress the accounts by his VVAW comrades of having "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires . . . to human genitals . . . razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan . . . poisoned foodstocks."
Later it was shown that many of the stories on which Kerry based this testimony were false, some told by impostors who had stolen the identities of real GIs.
Kerry has repeated his Cambodia tale throughout his adult life. He has claimed that the epiphany he had that Christmas of 1968 was about truthfulness.
"One of the things that most struck me about Vietnam was how people were lied to," he explained in a subsequent interview.
Kerry himself has lied about what he did in Vietnam, and has done so not merely to spice his biography but to influence national policy.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27211-2004Aug23.html
