According to a Chinese traveler, Wang Dayuan, just before 1349 about 70 Tai (Siamese) war boats besieged Temasek for a month but had to withdraw.
In his mind's eye, British troops come surging by the tens of thousands off the war boats massed in the Narrows off Bay Ridge, just as they did on the humid, breezy morning of Aug. 27, 1776.
"We're not going to buy any more war boats if we give them a tax incentive," said Robert S. McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal research group here that has long scrutinized corporate tax practices.
Back in action, Holloway distinguished himself when on 16 April 1945, as flotilla commanding officer of the 28th in HM MTB 409, he attacked a convoy of German E-boats ("Enemy war motor boats") and barges, sinking one of them.
It was fitting that Kerry, the Vietnam War patrol boat commander and 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, came to Vietnam bearing a deal for American patrol boats, five of them, albeit larger than the boats he served in, part of a nearly $20 million package of mostly maritime military aid to Vietnam.
"After the war, each boat returned with about half a dozen tuna every day," he says.
They're sparsely populated, if at all, a legacy of the war, when boat crossings were restricted and electricity was cut.
If the paperwork is not perfect, approval is delayed for a month.Ever since the war, Japanese boat owners have learned to live with the yakuza, gangsters who infest the country's waterfronts and often dictate which firms win which contracts.
In the summer of 2004 the conservative gadfly Jerome R. Corsi shot to the top of the best-seller lists as co-author of "Unfit for Command," the book attacking Senator John Kerry's record on a Vietnam War Swift boat that began the larger damaging campaign against Mr. Kerry's war credentials as he sought the presidency.
