The row about US Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry's war record became more heated on Sunday with the resignation of a Bush campaign adviser on veterans' affairs and the publication of a personal account of the events that led to Kerry being awarded a Silver Star.
Ken Cordier, a former Vietnam prisoner of war, resigned from the Bush campaign after it emerged that he had appeared in a commercial made by the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," the group that has led the attacks.
It gave further credence to suggestions, first aired in the New York Times on Friday, that the questioning of Kerry's war record is tied to the White House.
Kerry's record was backed with the publication in the Chicago Tribune of a first-person article by a senior editor there who commanded a Swift Boat (river patrol) alongside Kerry. William Rood's account supports the official version upon which the awarding of Kerry's Silver Star was based.
"It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there," Rood wrote in a sideswipe at the credentials of some of the members of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
Rood scorned one of the group's allegations: that Kerry had not chased and killed a Vietcong soldier but a "teenager in a loincloth."
"I have no idea how old the gunner Kerry chased that day was," he wrote, "but ... he was a grown man, dressed in the kind of garb the VC usually wore."
He highlighted the alleged inconsistencies of some of Kerry's critics, pointing out that Roy Hoffmann, then a rear admiral but now speaking for the anti-Kerry veterans' group, had congratulated Kerry on the day.
On Friday, Kerry complained to the federal election commission that the group had violated election laws by coordinating its attacks with the White House. White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, accused Kerry of "losing his cool."
A Kerry campaigner responded: "McClellan needs to understand that John Kerry is not the type of leader who will sit and read My Pet Goat to a group of second-graders while America is under attack," a reference to the moment Bush was told of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Next week's Republican convention is expected to portray George Bush as a dependable leader in wartime.
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