Hey, no problem. Thanks for your research. I'm trying to three things at once and didn't see the date.
Now I'm back to the Swiftvets forum to find the support behind Kerry's debate statement "... because I know what it means to lose people in combat." We seem to be certain that no man under Kerry's direct command lost his life. And grieving for his school friend could have happened if the guy died in a car crash, considering Kerry's remoteness from action on the Gridley.
It has been said that the Swifties of different crews bunked and ate together at the base. So the only way I could see giving Kerry a pass on this is if they lost people in his unit (squadron?) when he was there.
I think they lost quite a few. Also, Kerry was reportedly close with Don Droz, who was reportedly killed a couple weeks after Kerry left. In Kerry style... Droz' daughter (Tracy Tragos) just made a movie... and received an emmy from none other that Dan Rather, according to KansasCity.com.
“Totally, totally surprised,” said an exuberant Tragos by telephone, minutes after receiving the Emmy from newsman Dan Rather. “There were five other amazing films in our category. I was already loosening the straps of my shoes.”I wonder if Lt. Peter Upton was any relation to John Upton, VVAW Regional Coordinator for Missouri and half of Kansas...(snip)
Tragos spent the next two years tracking down men who served alongside Droz in Vietnam, including his fellow swift boat officers John Kerry and William Rood. The film powerfully recreates the events of April 12, 1969, when PCF-43, the boat commanded by Droz was ripped in half by a carefully planned Viet Cong heavy weapons barrage. Droz and corpsman Robert Worthington were killed at the scene; only three out of 15 men aboard the swift boat escaped casualty, according to the account by Lt. Peter Upton that Tragos found on the Web in 2001.