Lurch went to Vietnam to get his "resume" punched . . . nothing more. He made sure he received Purple Hearts for slight or imagined injuries, then staged his "heroic" Silver Star action to be the icing on his panty-waist cake.
Granted, "staged" is my as of yet unproven charge that it's hardly heroic to beach a perfectly-capable boat on a river bank . . . leaving men you're responsible for vulnerable and exposed to enemy fire . . . while you "supposedly" chase after an enemy who's admittedly injured and probably already dead after the hooch he hid in was levelled by a 50-caliber machine gun, and then return to the beached boat with the enemy's weapon and nothing but your word vetting the fact that you are Audie Murphy reincarnated.
Comparing Lurch's staged nonsense to what a real soldier like Kellynla went through is like trying to relive the thrills and chills of a hi-wire artist by listening to a loud-mouthed Carnival Barker.
It's not unproven. It's pretty well known that Kerry led from the back. He wasn't even the one who fired on the VC and mortally wounded him. The story has only recently changed. I wonder A: how much Kerry paid the guy and B: why the discrepancy in the story has never been brought up by any in the media ("B" is obviously rhetorical)