The mainstream media deep freeze on the story of John Kerry’s dishonest holiday(s) in Cambodia is beginning to thaw, with a story by Scott Canon in the Kansas City Star: Kerry’s Cambodian links questioned.

John Kerry’s “reporting for duty” salute at the Democratic National Convention last month emphasized the key biographical boast of his campaign — decorated combat service in Vietnam.

Now his repeated claim that he also weathered combat upriver in Cambodia has drawn harsh skepticism — driven by anti-Kerry veterans who star in a political commercial and book financed by Texas Republicans.

Roy Hoffmann, a retired admiral who was a Navy captain in command of Kerry’s unit at the time, said the candidate’s past statements about spending a Christmas Eve in Cambodia can’t be true.

“I think he just outright lied,” said Hoffman, now aligned with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and one of the officers criticizing Kerry in the ad. “He never was there.”

Over the years, Kerry has referred to spending Christmas or Christmas Eve 1968 in Cambodia and coming under fire. At the time, Cambodia was considered a neutral nation presumably off-limits to U.S. troops.

“I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia,” Kerry said in 1986 at a Senate committee hearing during a debate on U.S. policy toward Central America. “I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared — seared — in me.”

A few years earlier, the Massachusetts senator had talked with the Boston Herald about “the absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops.”

Nixon had been elected by Christmas 1968 but didn’t take office until the next month.