Where was the Gridley?

The Instapundit post makes it sound like the Gridley was off the coast of Vietnam. If that's correct, I don't see a problem with his saying he was "in Vietnam." I mean, he was near Vietnam for the occasion of the Vietnam War. He wasn't "in" any other country.

Kerry appears to have trouble with dates, but he doesn't seem to be lying about actually being where he said he was. I am all in favor of strict accuracy, but I'd give him a pass on confusing dates by a couple of months, or putting himself in places for particularly Big Deal occasions like Christmas and MLK's death.

WMDs, however, don't seem to have been in Iraq anywhere near the time we invaded... (Boy, I'm full of cheap shots lately.)

I've heard this before and I'm ready to imagine that he meant it in the theater sense of the term Vietnam. Much as veterans who served "during North Korea," if you will, neither likely nor often served in North Korea per se but in an abundantly logical linguistic sense served in North Korea. Frankly, though, I'm willing to give him a pass because he did go to Vietnam, if not actually then in a literal sense then certainly later in the literal sense.

I imagine that were the literalist edge applied that's been applied to Kerry's applied to Bush's record, we'd see some far more interestig and far less semantic details emerge.

I'm with Kriston on this one. Kerry was "in Vietnam" in the same way that people my grandfathers' age were "in WWI" during their service, even if they never actually made it to the Pacific or Europe before the war ended.

I'm ready to concede that the term "four months," when it refers to anything other than Kerry's swift boat duty or actual combat duty inside Vietnam, is misleading.