Former Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday delivered a fiery response to Fox News host Greg Gutfeld’s disrespectful tweet a day earlier that directed the decorated Vietnam War veteran to “plug your knothole.”
Gutfeld had bashed Kerry on Saturday for criticizing President Donald Trump’s widely condemned decision to skip a planned visit to a World War I cemetery in France because of rain.
“U didn’t stop ISIS, you sent James Taylor. Plug your knothole, Captain Driftwood,” the co-host of Fox News’ “The Five” wrote on Saturday, an apparent reference to Kerry’s decision to send the popular singer-songwriter to a Paris anti-terrorism rally in 2015.
In response, Kerry, who served as a lieutenant in the Navy between 1966 and 1970, reminded Gutfeld of what he and other veterans fought for.
“Happy Veterans Day, Greg,” Kerry wrote. “I’m glad that all of us who served in uniform fought to defend your freedom to be a complete fool on Twitter.”
Gutfeld responded to Kerry’s Veterans Day well wishes with a tweet linking to James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend” on YouTube.
Kerry earned a Silver Star, Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts for his service in the Vietnam War. He recalled his military experience in Every Day Is Extra, a memoir he released in September:
I began my service to country in a war, a bitter war that frayed and nearly shredded the fabric of America. I finished my last tour of service to country in a mission of peace. In the final month of my service as secretary of state, I was back in Vietnam one more time, on the Mekong Delta where the rivers I’d patrolled in combat had become rivers the United States was now protecting from environmental degradation.
Back on the Bay Hap River, where almost forty-eight years before I’d come face-to-face with my own mortality, staring down the business end of a Viet Cong B-40 rocket launcher, I met a man whose mission that day in 1969 was to kill me and my crew. ...
I looked at him and thought, How crazy is this? Years ago, when we were young, we were both heeding the call of our leaders, trying to kill each other. But now we stood there in peace, a peace I had been privileged in some small way to help make real by first making peace at home. If that doesn’t make you an optimist, nothing will.