Roy Hoffmann - Hoffmann and Kerry

Hoffmann and Kerry

"Hoffmann acknowledged he had no first-hand knowledge to discredit Kerry's claims to valor and said that although Kerry was under his command, he really didn't know Kerry much personally."

Roy Hoffmann, one of the group's top guns, March 2003: "I am not going to say anything negative about him. He's a good man."

Of Kerry's Silver Star, he said, "It took guts, and I admire that."

Jonathan Z. Larsen, in the March/April 2004 Campaign Journal article "The Endless Assignment. Nine Perspectives from the Edge of Hell," cites from "Tour of Duty" that he "found of interest ... the specific criticism the book offers of the officers to whom Kerry and his fellow Swift boat skippers reported."

"Captain Roy Hoffmann was the commander of the Navy Coastal Surveillance Force, and it was Hoffmann’s decision to send Navy Swift boats up the narrow rivers in the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam — almost always without support from helicopters or artillery — where they ran the risk of mines and were fired on almost at will by Viet Cong dug in along the river’s banks. A Swift boat mission up a Mekong Delta river was a fool’s errand, serving no greater purpose than showing the flag."

Hoffmann's immediate superior was Area Commander Adrian Lonsdale.

Alexander Cockburn's March 27, 2004, comment:

"... As part of the U.S. Navy's slice of the action, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt and his sidekick, Captain Roy (Latch) Hoffmann, had devised 'Operation Sea Lords,' in which the Swift boats would patrol the canals and secondary streams of the Mekong Delta, with particular emphasis on the areas near the Cambodian border. ..."

In an article for Salon, Joe Conason described Hoffman as "a cigar-chomping former Vietnam commander once described as 'the classic body-count guy' who 'wanted hooches destroyed and people killed.'" Hoffmann, he wrote, "first gained notoriety in Vietnam as a strutting, cigar-chewing Navy captain. But it was O'Neill, by now a familiar figure on the Kerry-bashing circuit, who came to Spaeth for assistance." "Until now," Conason added, "Hoffmann has been best known as the commanding officer whose obsession with body counts and 'scorekeeping' may have provoked the February 1969 massacre of Vietnamese civilians at Thanh Phong by a unit led by Bob Kerrey -- the Medal of Honor winner who lost a leg in Nam, became a U.S. senator from Nebraska and now sits on the 9/11 Commission."