
The WaPo is slowly accepting the fact that Kerry lied. “[Kerry fighting in Cambodia] is an assertion he made first, insofar as the written record reveals, in 1979 in a letter to the Boston Herald.” This is an interesting date since that was the same year the movie “Apocalypse Now” premiered.
The 1979 letter was in fact a review (mainly negative) of Apocalypse Now, which makes the whole story a little weirder. It couldn't be an unintentional memory or conflation of the movie with his own experience. At any rate, he clearly had seen the movie before writing the letter. Kerry envisioned himself to be Captain Willard, secretly slipping into Cambodia under the cover of darkness. (Make that Christmas Eve for greater effect.) Except that the agents who really did perform such missions claim that their mode of transportation were helicopters, not boats, and if boats were used, they didn’t used the large, noisy swift boats. Kerry may be Captain Willard in his mind, but he’s become more like the pathetically docile Walter Mitty these days. The fact is that Kerry's version is nothing more than someone else's fiction.