As the Kate Zernike front page Memorial Day weekend New York Times story indicates, a number of Kerry supporters were disappointed that Kerry had not vigorously defended himself against the charges of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth during the 2004 Presidential campaign. Some according to Zernike "are compiling a dossier that they say will expose every one of the Swift boat group's charges as a lie and put to rest any question about Mr. Kerry's valor in combat."

That might not only be a difficult task but it could backfire badly. As Vanity Fair's acerbic columnist Michael Wolff said in the 3 minute 2 second trailer to a Kerry-sponsored (and Kerry-censored) documentary campaign film by respected producer Steve Rosenbaum, Inside the Bubble, the real problem with the Swift Boat claims was they were "largely true." And as former Dean of the Stanford Law School Bayless Manning has cautioned enthusiastic advocates: "As an attorney, you needn't worry too much about the lies told by your opponents. Your real danger is the lies told by your client." Ask the ghost of Alger Hiss.

Case in point, an obviously phony picture billed by Zernike as Kerry showing "a photograph of the skimmer being towed behind his Swift boat, insisting that it could barely fit three people, himself and two others." Why is it so obviously phony? If Zernike had referred to Douglas Brinkley 's Tour of Duty she would have learned Kerry had not even been assigned a Swift boat at the time he went on the much-disputed skimmer mission on December 2-3 1968. The picture may be a photo of "a" skimmer, not "the" skimmer, being towed behind "a" Swift boat, not "his" Swift boat, somewhere, sometime, but that is all one can say. It certainly can't be what Kerry claimed and Zernike ran as a fact in the Times .

Until the 5th of December Brinkley states: "Kerry had not even been assigned a Swift boat of his own ... " At a four o'clock operations meeting that afternoon, the Swift boat officers were asked for two boats to volunteer to go down to An Thoi to replace two boats that had been knocked out of action. Kerry wasn't present and in time-honored military fashion he was "volunteered" and found himself on the way to An Thoi with a pickup crew and his first command of a clunker called PCF 44 along with Tedd Peck's PCF 57 the evening of December 6 th 1968.

The Swift boat that had been on duty and towed the skimmer the night of the disputed December 2-3 action was Mike Voss's boat. There has been no question of that until Kerry's new allegation in the Zernike story. It just adds one more contested fact in the bizarre conflicting accounts of Kerry's skimmer mission. It is well worth sorting out the details.

According to Kerry's accounts in both Michael Kranish 's Boston Globe reporting, the Brinkley account of Tour of Duty, and the Zernike Times piece, Kerry, an officer stationed at Coastal Division 14 at Cam Ranh Bay, still in training before being assigned a Swift boat, who had never been in combat before, "volunteered for a special mission on what the Navy called a skimmer but he knew as a Boston Whaler." Coastal Division 14 operations officer Bill Schachte, who says he was glad to have Kerry volunteer, agrees so far.

Kerry claims he was joined on the mission by two enlisted men, William Zaladonis and Patrick Runyon.and they confirm that. None of the three of them had ever been on a skimmer mission before. According to Grant Hibbard, the commander of Coastal Division 14, under whom all these men served, "These missions were originally designed and executed by my executive officer, Bill Schachte, who served as my operations officer."

The purpose of the missions is not in dispute. According to Schachte: "I had gotten Hibbard's permission to conduct some skimmer missions out of our base when we appeared to have actionable intelligence. The bombing pause of North Vietnam was on and we expected more infiltration traffic of supplies down the coast, particularly at night.

We would generally tow a 'skimmer' (a Boston Whaler stripped down for a lower silhouette) behind a Swift boat into a likely area leaving the noisier Swift boat offshore and taking the skimmer in quietly to observe and fire on targets of opportunity. The areas we operated in were 'free fire zones.' All personnel in the specified area we investigated presumed to be enemy and having been selected by intel as worth taking a look at."

Schachte says he designed the missions for two officers and one enlisted man to run the boat. He commanded forward with an M-60 7.62 machine gun, the other officer would carry an M-16 with a starlight scope scanning the shoreline or an M-14 with an infrared scope if it was cloudy. He wanted two officers because as an intelligence-generated mission he wanted to make sure two men on the boat had been cued in at the 4PM operations meeting on what to look for in the area to be explored. Enlisted men did not attend that meeting.

Schachte's regular call sign on the radio was "Bacardi Charlie," but when he ran the occasional skimmer missions Schachte took on a distinctive new call sign "BATMAN" and the supporting Swift boat, whoever was in command, was "ROBIN."

Schachte says he personally led all the 8 skimmer missions he ran at Cam Ranh, but one, and the one he didn't lead was not led by what Hibbard terms "a 'rookie' who knew nothing about the concept or tactics involved to command the skimmer." Schachte points out that if he had risked the lives of two enlisted men with a green officer on a difficult night mission like this he should have been reprimanded. Kerry, after all was an "officer in training" at Coastal Division 14. Kerry had never had a command and had not yet been released to a first command of his own. His job was to go on missions with veterans and learn.

In fact the one mission Schachte didn't lead, was led by veteran Swift boat skipper Tedd Peck, two nights after the Kerry mission, to the same place, with Peck as leader with two other officers, Stephen Hayes and Mark Janes. In advance of the mission, according to Peck, "Schachte made us go down and have a gunner's mate train us with the M-60 machine gun which was not part of the Swift boat arsenal at the time, but was the main armament of the skimmer. It took two hours and we finished it just before we left on the mission."

According to the Times account: " Bill Schachte was not on that skimmer," Mr. Kerry says firmly. "He was not on that skimmer. It is a lie to suggest that he was out there on that skimmer... ."

"The three guys who in fact were in the boat all say he wasn't there and will tell you he wasn't there. We know he wasn't there, and we have all kinds of ways of proving it."

Well, now that the phony photo didn't prove anything, it is time to take a look at the "all kinds of ways." One of the "ways" would be for Kerry to disclose how he was ordered on this mission and by whom, but he has never done so. According to Coastal Division 14 commander Hibbard, every mission was assigned by Schachte. Does Kerry expect us to believe Schachte assigned him, in the face of his and Hibbard's statements, and they are both lying about it?

In that case who was in command of the Kerry mission and where is the after action report? Does Kerry claim that as a trainee he was placed in command over an experienced Swift boat commander with his own boat like Mike Voss? Kerry hasn't told us about that either. And what about Mike Voss's statement to Lisa Myers of NBC that "I'm pretty certain Schachte was there in the skimmer?"

Certainly training on the M-60 seems to have been essential enough to operations officer Schachte to have three officers grubbing around in the dirt, training with an M-60, the afternoon of their night mission.  But...