John H wrote:


Thanks, Jik. I think Kerry is keeping his service record hidden with
good reason. I too would like to see the medical records for his three
purple heart wounds. It's sounding more and more like Kerry had a
commander who wanted to inflate the perception of his unit by giving
medals away.

John H


From Miami:

Here you go, dicquehead:

In
Vietnam, Lieutenant John Kerry served aboard 50-foot aluminum boats
known as PCFs (from "patrol craft fast") or "Swift boats" (supposedly an
acronym for "Shallow Water Inshore Fast Tactical Craft"). Despite the
implications contained in the piece quoted above ("that duty wasn't the
worst you could draw"), Swift boat duty was plenty dangerous:

. . . two weeks after [Kerry] arrived in Vietnam, the swift boat
mission changed — and Kerry went from having one of the safest
assignments in the escalating conflict to one of the most dangerous.
Under the newly launched Operation SEALORD, swift boats were charged
with patrolling the narrow waterways of the Mekong Delta to draw fire
and smoke out the enemy. Cruising inlets and coves and canals, swift
boats were especially vulnerable targets.

Originally designed to ferry oil workers to ocean rigs, swift boats
offered flimsy protection. Because bullets could easily penetrate the
hull, sailors hung flak jackets over the sides. The boat's loud engine
invited ambushes. Speed was its saving grace — but that wasn't always an
option in narrow, heavily mined canals.

The swift boat crew typically consisted of a college-educated
skipper, such as Kerry, and five blue-collar sailors averaging 19 years
old. The most vulnerable sailor sat in the "tub" — a squat nest that
rose above the pilot house — and operated a pair of .50-caliber machine
guns. Another gunner was in the rear. Kerry's mission was to wait until
hidden Viet Cong guerrillas started shooting, then order his men to
return fire.

It was not at all unusual that a Swift boat crew member might be wounded
more than once in a relatively short period of time, or that injuries
meriting the award of a Purple Heart might not be serious enough to
require time off from duty. According to a Boston Globe overview of John
Kerry's Vietnam experience:

Under [Navy Admiral Elmo] Zumwalt's command, swift boats would
aggressively engage the enemy. Zumwalt, who died in 2000, calculated in
his autobiography that these men under his command had a 75 percent
chance of being killed or wounded during a typical year.

"There were an awful lot of Purple Hearts — from shrapnel, some of
those might have been M-40 grenades," said George Elliott, Kerry's
commanding officer. "The Purple Hearts were coming down in boxes. Kerry,
he had three Purple Hearts. None of them took him off duty. Not to
belittle it, that was more the rule than the exception."

And according to Douglas Brinkley's history of John Kerry and the
Vietnam War:

As generally understood, the Purple Heart is given to any U.S.
citizen wounded in wartime service to the nation. Giving out Purple
Hearts increased as the United States started sending Swifts up rivers.
Sailors — no longer safe on aircraft carriers or battleships in the Gulf
of Tonkin — were starting to bleed, a lot.

John Kerry was wounded in his first significant combat action, when he
volunteered for a special mission on 2 December 1968:

"It was a half-assed action that hardly qualfied as combat, but it
was my first, and that made it very exciting," [Kerry said]. "Three of
us, two enlisted men and myself, had stayed up all night in a Boston
Whaler [a foam-filled-fiberglass boat] patrolling the shore off a Viet
Cong-infested peninsula north of Cam Ranh . . . Most of the night had
been spent being scared ****less by fisherman whom we would suddenly
creep up on in the darkness. Once, one of the sailors was so startled by
two men who surprised us as we came around a corner ten yards from the
shore that he actually pulled the trigger on his machine gun.
Fortunately for the two men, he had forgotten to switch off the safety .
.. ."

As it turned out, the two men really were just a pair of innocent
fisherman who didn't know where one zone began and the other ended.
Their papers were perfectly in order, if their night's fishing over. The
fear was that they were VC. Allowing them to continue might have
compromised the mission. For the next four hours Kerry's Boston Whaler,
using paddles, brought boatloads of fisherman they found in sampans, all
operating in a curfew zone, back to the Swift. It was tiring work. "We
deposited them with the Swift boat that remained out in the deep water
to give us cover," Kerry continued. "Then, very early in the morning,
around 2:00 or 3:00, while it was still dark, we proceeded up the tiny
inlet between the island and the peninsula to the point designated as
our objective. The jungle closed in on us on both sides. It was scary as
hell. You could hear yourself breathing. We were almost touching the
shore. Suddenly, through the magnified moonlight of the infrared
'starlight scope,' I watched, mesmerized, as a group of sampans glided
in toward the shore. We had been briefed that this was a favorite
crossing area for VC trafficking contraband."

With its motor turned off, Kerry paddled the Boston Whaler out of
the inlet into the beginning of the bay. Simultaneously the Vietnamese
pulled their sampans up onto the beach and began to unload something; he
couldn't tell what, so he decided to illuminate the proceedings with a
flare. The entire sky seemed to explode into daylight. The men from the
sampans bolted erect, stiff with shock for only an instant before they
sprang for cover like a herd of panicked gazelles Kerry had once seen on
TV's Wild Kingdom. "We opened fire," he went on. "The light from the
flares started to fade, the air was full of explosions. My M-16 jammed,
and as I bent down in the boat to grab another gun, a stinging piece of
heat socked into my arm and just seemed to burn like hell. By this time
one of the sailors had started the engine and we ran by the beach,
strafing it. Then it was quiet.

"We stayed quiet and low because we did not want to illuminate
ourselves at that point," Kerry explained. "In the dead of night,
without any knowledge of what kind of force was there, we were not all
about to go crawling on the beach to get our asses shot off. We were
unprotected; we didn't have ammunition, we didn't have cover, we just
weren't prepared for that . . . So we first shot the sampans so that
they were destroyed and whatever was in them was destroyed." Then their
cover boat warned of a possible VC ambush in the small channel they had
to exit through, and Kerry and company departed the area.

The "stinging piece of heat" Kerry felt in his arm had been caused by a
piece of shrapnel, a wound for which he was awarded a Purple Heart. The
injury was not serious — Brinkley notes that Kerry went on a regular
Swift boat patrol the next day with a bandage on his arm, and the Boston
Globe quoted William Schachte, who oversaw the mission and went on to
become a rear admiral, as recalling that "It was not a very serious
wound at all."

Kerry earned his second Purple Heart while returning from a PCF mission
up the Bo De River on 20 February 1969:

One of the mission's support helicopters had been hit by small-arms
fire during the trip up the Bo De and the rest had returned with it to
their base to refuel and get the damage inspected. While there the
pilots found that they wouldn't be able to return to the Swifts for
several more hours. "We therefore had a choice: to wait for what was not
a confirmed return by the helos [and] give any snipers more time to set
up an ambush for our exit or we could take a chance and exit immediately
without any cover," Kerry recorded in his notebook. "We chose the latter."

Just as they moved out onto the Cua Lon, at a junction known for
unfriendliness in the past, kaboom! PCF-94 had taken a rocket-propelled
grenade round off the port side, fired at them from the far left bank.
Kerry felt a piece of hot shrapnel bore into his left leg. With blood
running down the deck, the Swift managed to make an otherwise uneventful
exit into the Gulf of Thailand, where they rendezvoused with a Coast
Guard cutter. The injury Kerry suffered in that action earned his his
second Purple Heart.

Brinkley noted that, as in the previous case, "Kerry's wound was not
serious enough to require time off from duty."

Kerry earned his Silver Star on 28 February 1969, when he beached his
craft and jumped off it with an M-16 rifle in hand to chase and shoot a
guerrilla who was running into position to launch a B-40 rocket at
Kerry's boat. Contrary to the account quoted above, Kerry did not shoot
a "Charlie" who had "fired at the boat and missed," whose "rocket
launcher was empty," and who was "already dead or dying" after being
"knocked down with a .50 caliber round." Kerry's boat had been hit by a
rocket fired by someone else — the guerrilla in question was still armed
with a live B-40 and had only been clipped in the leg; when the
guerrilla got up to run, Kerry assumed he was getting into position to
launch a rocket and shot him:

On Feb. 28, 1969, Kerry's boat received word that a swift boat was
being ambushed. As Kerry raced to the scene, his boat became another
target, as a Viet Cong B-40 rocket blast shattered a window. Kerry could
have ordered his crew to hit the enemy and run. But the skipper had a
more aggressive reaction in mind. Beach the boat, Kerry ordered, and the
craft's bow was quickly rammed upon the shoreline. Out of the bush
appeared a teenager in a loin cloth, clutching a grenade launcher.

An enemy was just feet away, holding a weapon with enough firepower
to blow up the boat. Kerry's forward gunner, [Tommy] Belodeau, shot and
clipped the Viet Cong in the leg. Then Belodeau's gun jammed, according
to other crewmates (Belodeau died in 1997). [Michael] Medeiros tried to
fire at the Viet Cong, but he couldn't get a shot off.

In an interview, Kerry added a chilling detail.

"This guy could have dispatched us in a second, but for . . . I'll
never be able to explain, we were literally face to face, he with his
B-40 rocket and us in our boat, and he didn't pull the trigger. I would
not be here today talking to you if he had," Kerry recalled. "And Tommy
clipped him, and he started going [down.] I thought it was over."

Instead, the guerrilla got up and started running. "We've got to
get him, make sure he doesn't get behind the hut, and then we're in
trouble," Kerry recalled.

So Kerry shot and killed the guerrilla. "I don't have a second's
question about that, nor does anybody who was with me," he said. "He was
running away with a live B-40, and, I thought, poised to turn around and
fire it." Asked whether that meant Kerry shot the guerrilla in the back,
Kerry said, "No, absolutely not. He was hurt, other guys were shooting
from back, side, back. There is no, there is not a scintilla of question
in any person's mind who was there [that] this guy was dangerous, he was
a combatant, he had an armed weapon."

Another member of the crew confirmed Kerry's account for the Boston
Globe and expressed no doubt that Kerry's action had saved both the boat
and its crew:

The crewman with the best view of the action was Frederic Short,
the man in the tub operating the twin guns. Short had not talked to
Kerry for 34 years, until after he was recently contacted by a Globe
reporter. Kerry said he had "totally forgotten" Short was on board that day.

Short had joined Kerry's crew just two weeks earlier, as a
last-minute replacement, and he was as green as the Arkansas grass of
his home. He said he didn't realize that he should have carried an M-16
rifle, figuring the tub's machine guns would be enough. But as Kerry
stood face to face with the guerrilla carrying the rocket, Short
realized his predicament. With the boat beached and the bow tilted up, a
guard rail prevented him from taking aim at the enemy. For a terrifying
moment, the guerrilla looked straight at Short with the rocket.

Short believes the guerrilla didn't fire because he was too close
and needed to be a suitable distance to hit the boat squarely and avoid
ricochet debris. Short tried to protect his skipper.

"I laid in fire with the twin .50s, and he got behind a hootch,"
recalled Short. "I laid 50 rounds in there, and Mr. Kerry went in.
Rounds were coming everywhere. We were getting fire from both sides of
the river. It was a canal. We were receiving fire from the opposite
bank, also, and there was no way I could bring my guns to bear on that."

Short said there is "no doubt" that Kerry saved the boat and crew.
"That was a him-or-us thing, that was a loaded weapon with a shape
charge on it . . . It could pierce a tank. I wouldn't have been here
talking to you. I probably prayed more up that creek than a Southern
Baptist church does in a month."

Charles Gibson, who served on Kerry's boat that day because he was
on a one-week indoctrination course, said Kerry's action was dangerous
but necessary. "Every day you wake up and say, 'How the hell did we get
out of that alive?'" Gibson said. "Kerry was a good leader. He knew what
he was doing."

Although Kerry's superiors were somewhat concerned about the issue of
his leaving his boat unattended, they nonetheless found his actions
courageous and worthy of commendation:

When Kerry returned to his base, his commanding officer, George
Elliott, raised an issue with Kerry: the fine line between whether the
action merited a medal or a court-martial.

"When [Kerry] came back from the well-publicized action where he
beached his boat in middle of ambush and chased a VC around a hootch and
ended his life, when [Kerry] came back and I heard his debrief, I said,
'John, I don't know whether you should be court-martialed or given a
medal, court-martialed for leaving your ship, your post,'" Elliott
recalled in an interview.

"But I ended up writing it up for a Silver Star, which is well
deserved, and I have no regrets or second thoughts at all about that,"
Elliott said. A Silver Star, which the Navy said is its fifth-highest
medal, commends distinctive gallantry in action.

Asked why he had raised the issue of a court-martial, Elliott said
he did so "half tongue-in-cheek, because there was never any question I
wanted him to realize I didn't want him to leave his boat unattended.
That was in context of big-ship Navy — my background. A C.O. [commanding
officer] never leaves his ship in battle or anything else. I realize
this, first of all, it was pretty courageous to turn into an ambush even
though you usually find no more than two or three people there. On the
other hand, on an operation some time later, down on the very tip of the
peninsula, we had lost one boat and several men in a big operation, and
they were hit by a lot more than two or three people."

Elliott stressed that he never questioned Kerry's decision to kill
the Viet Cong, and he appeared in Boston at Kerry's side during the 1996
Senate race to back up that aspect of Kerry's action.

"I don't think they were exactly ready to court-martial him," said
Wade Sanders, who commanded a swift boat that sometimes accompanied
Kerry's vessel, and who later became deputy assistant secretary of the
Navy. "I can only say from the certainty borne of experience that there
must have been some rumbling about, 'What are we going to do with this
guy, he turned his boat,' and I can hear the words, 'He endangered his
crew.' But from our position, the tactic to take is whatever action is
best designed to eliminate the enemy threat, which is what he did."

Indeed, the Silver Star citation makes clear that Kerry's
performance on that day was both extraordinary and risky. "With utter
disregard for his own safety and the enemy rockets," the citation says,
Kerry "again ordered a charge on the enemy, beached his boat only 10
feet from the Viet Cong rocket position and personally led a landing
party ashore in pursuit of the enemy . . . The extraordinary daring and
personal courage of Lt. Kerry in attacking a numerically superior force
in the face of intense fire were responsible for the highly successful
mission."

Kerry was injured yet again on 13 March 1969, in an action for which he
was awarded both a Bronze Star and his third Purple Heart. According to
Kerry's Bronze Star citation (signed by Admiral Zumwalt himself):

Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry was serving as an Officer-in-Charge
of Inshore Patrol Craft 94, one of five boats conducting a Sealords
operation in the Bay Hap River. While exiting the river, a mine
detonated under another Inshore Patrol Craft and almost simultaneously,
another mine detonated wounding Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry in the
right arm. In addition, all units began receiving small arms and
automatic weapons fire from the river banks. When Lieutenant (junior
grade) Kerry discovered he had a man overboard, he returned upriver to
assist. The man in the water was receiving sniper fire from both banks.
Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry directed his gunners to provide
suppressing fire, while from an exposed position on the bow, his arm
bleeding and in pain and with disregard for his personal safety, he
pulled the man aboard. Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry then directed his
boat to return to and assist the other damaged boat to safety.
Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry's calmness, professionalism and great
personal courage under fire were in keeping with the highest traditions
of the United States Naval Service.

According to the Boston Globe, this was the only one of Kerry's three
Purple Heart injuries that caused him to miss any days of service:

Kerry had been wounded three times and received three Purple
Hearts. Asked about the severity of the wounds, Kerry said that one of
them cost him about two days of service, and that the other two did not
interrupt his duty. "Walking wounded," as Kerry put it. A shrapnel wound
in his left arm gave Kerry pain for years. Kerry declined a request from
the Globe to sign a waiver authorizing the release of military documents
that are covered under the Privacy Act and that might shed more light on
the extent of the treatment Kerry needed as a result of the wounds.

Although there was no hard-and-fast rule, U.S. military procedure
generally allowed any serviceman who received three Purple Hearts to
request reassignment away from a combat zone, so Kerry talked to
Commodore Charles F. Horne, an administrative official and commander of
the coastal squadron in which he served. Four days after Kerry took his
third hit of shrapnel, Horne forwarded a request on Kerry's behalf to
the Navy Bureau of Personnel asking that Kerry be reassigned to "duty as
a personal aide in Boston, New York, or Washington, D.C." Soon
afterwards Kerry was transferred to Cam Ranh Bay to await further
orders, and within a month he had been reassigned as a personal aide and
flag lieutenant to Rear Admiral Walter F. Schlech, Jr. with the Military
Sea Transportation Service based in Brooklyn, New York.

Kerry served with Admiral Schlech until the end of 1969, when requested
an early discharge from the Navy in order to run for a Massachusetts
congressional seat. Admiral Schlech approved the request, and on 3
January 1970 Kerry received an honorable discharge, six months early.

Last updated: 19 February 2004

From SNOPES.