I cut Rassman slack too. He struck me as a pretty naive guy who was seriously being taken advantage of by Kerry's handlers.
I heard Rassman was on the payroll, but it was never verified. I spent time looking at FEC records (line item disbursments) to see if the Kerry Campaign ever paid him, but came up dry (only looked at October records). They may have washed his payments through the DNC as was done with other operatives.
But the guy was constantly on the campaign trail.
As for the Bay Hap stories, there were huge holes. Like the guy who for the AP interview could only remember the firefight being sometime in February, but had lived 30 years near his fallen comrade's tomb which had the specific date on it. He didn't mention the tomb (with the exact date) to the AP reporter, and that kind of disconnect in a Vietnamese village is simply not credible. In "The Village", everyone knows everything about everyone.
And any reporter who accepts the word of a VC supervised by a Communist Party minder is simply gullible beyond belief.