An Unimpeachable Source
Three swift boats took part in the operation that day, and Kerry and Rood commanded two of them. According to Rood, the three skippers set out having decided that instead of fleeing the inevitable ambush, their boats–under Kerry’s command–would turn toward shore and counterattack. Rood won a Bronze Star, and the Tribune published the citation from Vice Admiral Elmo Zumwalt that praised his “courage under fire and exemplary professionalism” as well as the message from task force commander Roy Hoffmann, now one of Kerry’s critics, calling the “extremely successful raid and land sweep…a shining example of completely overwhelming the enemy.”
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Rookie reporters get noticed by busting their butts on stories they’re expected to cheap out. A CTA service disruption on August 17 could have been one of those stories. It wasn’t.
Gaffney told me it wasn’t true that there was no northbound service–some trains were kept running from downtown to Fullerton. I asked her if any passengers in the stalled trains got out. The el tracks are always precarious, and it was raining, she said, so hiking to the nearest station wouldn’t have been a good idea. But did some passengers do it anyway? “We heard that at Diversey, some people on the middle tracks–the ones not adjacent to the platform–were told to stay on the train by CTA and city cops.”
“People started to get antsy after the first hour; by the time the train finally backed into the southbound platform of the Sedgwick station, it was very bad. Several people were pacing the length of the car repeatedly, back and forth and back and forth, and cell phone conversations became more and more animated and urgent….As we were backing up, there was an announcement that buses would be waiting to take folks to their Brown Line stops. At the same time that the train I was on began to empty, another train arrived on the opposite platform and emptied–hundreds of people were on the street, and there were no buses to be seen. There was a very quiet moment, and then people began running–running–to North Avenue to compete for taxis.”
Steve Chapman in the Tribune, August 22: “From listening to both sides, you’d think Kerry and President Bush were running for trustee of VFW Post 836. Though the differing war stories may be endlessly fascinating to anyone who served in Vietnam, or anyone who strove heroically to avoid serving in Vietnam, the rest of us would rather hear the candidates recite from a volume on patent law.”
