Kerry's real Vietnam record

Charles Hurt, Washington Times:

...

"...at the height of the antiwar movement, Mr. Kerry was referring to America's leadership as 'deserters' and 'war criminals,' portraying U.S. soldiers in Vietnam as inhumane killers and inflaming protesters by tearfully tossing away war medals — medals he would admit 13 years later weren't his.

...

"The same record Mr. Kerry wields as evidence of his leadership abilities is also used by his harshest critics, who question the severity of the injuries he used to get sent home early and the five medals he garnered in five months.

" 'If I got three Purple Hearts for three scratches, I'd be embarrassed,' said Ted Sampley, who fought in Vietnam and publishes U.S. Veteran Dispatch. He remembers soldiers turning away awards for minor injuries.

"Mr. Kerry has said none of his Purple Heart injuries, only one of which removed him from the field for two days, was critical.

"After his third Purple Heart, Mr. Kerry requested and was granted permission to return to the United States to work behind a desk in New York.

...

"In Mr. Kerry's first active-duty assignment, he served in the electrical department of the USS Gridley, a guided-missile frigate supporting the Navy's fleet of carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin.

" 'I didn't have any real feel for what the heck was going on [in the war],' Mr. Kerry told the Boston Globe in a story last summer, referring to his time on the Gridley.

"He then became a commander of a Navy swift boat, which at the time were used to transport sailors to ships in the gulf. Two weeks after beginning his new assignment, the safe job he had picked became much more dangerous when the boats began being used in the Mekong Delta to seek out the Viet Cong and block North Vietnamese supply routes.

...

"Questions arose during his 1996 Senate re-election campaign about whether Mr. Kerry deserved the awards, in particular the Silver Star. Accounts of the incident vary, but essentially Mr. Kerry chased down a wounded Viet Cong fighter, killed him and stripped him of the B-40 rocket launcher he had just fired at Mr. Kerry's swift boat.

"The Viet Cong fighter had already been wounded by the boat's machine gunner, according to various reports from eyewitnesses, who had 'laid down 50 rounds' into the hootch where the man had run to hide and from which Mr. Kerry emerged after applying what some described as the 'coup de grace' to the wounded Viet Cong."

If this report is accurate Kerry deserved no metal for this contact witht the enemy, much less a Silver Star. In the Marine Corps, he definitely would not have received a Silver Star for this action. All those reporters who have been pooring over President Bush's National Guard dental records need to run down who recomended Kerry for this citation and find out if there was some political motivation. While they are at it they should look up the requirements for this award and see if his circumstances fit.

Two of his three purple heart awards are also questionable. My experience as executive officer of a Marine rifle company on the DMZ was that purple hearts were rarely awarded for minor wounds . As a general rule you got the award if you were medivaced. The significance of this is that it contradicts Kerry's image of bravery, because it appears he used awards of purple hearts that he did not deserve in order to leave the field of battle.

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