sisyphusshrugged | yeah, "lovely" about says it.

What the Swift Vote Veterans (and the likeminded human waste whose death threats drove the reservist who came forward about the abu Ghraib abuses and his wife into protective custody) don't seem to be able to wrap their minds around is that our armed services are made up, in the main, of decent human beings.

Decent human beings don't support, defend or cover up for the comparatively few of their fellows whose moral idiocy makes them forget that human life has value. The insult to our military is not in saying that there are abuses in war. The insult to our military is to say that the whole of our military stand behind the few who commit them.

It seems that there is a special reason that one of the Swift Boat Vets has a problem with that concept.

Means, a 55-year-old investigator for several Bakersfield law firms, was particularly annoyed by the words of one retired admiral. Roy F. "Latch" Hoffman, one of the co-founders of the pro-George W. Bush group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, had publicly criticized Kerry, a former Swift boat commander, for having brought back stories about alleged war crimes by U.S. forces -- often carried out, Kerry said in 1971, "with the full awareness of officers at all levels."

Seemed to him, Means said, his own Swift boat crew had come close to committing a war crime themselves one day. A senior officer, hitching a ride up the coast aboard their Swift boat, had ordered the crew to fire on a small group of unarmed Vietnamese fishermen working their nets in unrestricted waters, Means said. The boat's commanding officer had refused to comply.

Was that the way the boat's commander remembered the incident too, all these years later? Means had to know.

So he got on the Internet and hunted down Thomas W.L. "Tad" McCall, the retired Navy captain who'd commanded Means' boat, PCF 88, as a newly minted ensign. Means called him.

Not only did McCall remember the day in question, and that confrontation off the coast of South Vietnam, he remembered the name of the officer who had given the command to shoot: "Latch" Hoffman himself, then a Navy captain in charge of the entire Swift boat task force in Vietnam.

Perhaps "Officers Who Were Thwarted in Their Attempt to Get Swift Boats Under Their Command to Commit War Crimes" didn't fit on the letterhead.