Posted on 05/04/2004 11:09:23 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
The wound that made John Kerry eligible for the first of three Purple Hearts was not severe enough to warrant consideration, according to the physician who treated him in December 1968. Louis Letson, now a retired general practitioner in Alabama, said he has "a very clear memory of an incident which occurred while I was the Medical Officer at Naval Support Facility, Cam Ranh Bay," according to National Review Online editor and columnist Rich Lowry.
Kerry's Purple Heart and the two others he won later allowed him, under Navy regulations, to request and receive leave for the United States after just four months of his 12-month tour of duty.
Letson, according to NRO, says he remembers his brief encounter with Kerry 35 years ago because "some of his crewmen related that Lt. Kerry had told them that he would be the next JFK from Massachusetts."
Yesterday, a group of 18 veterans who served with Kerry in Vietnam held a press conference in which they described him as a self-serving, "loose cannon" who needed constant supervision and came only to launch a political career.
The physician, who says he has no contacts with the Bush campaign or the Republican party, wrote down his recollections in response to questions from his friends.
Letson wrote, on the night of Dec. 2, 1968, Kerry "was on patrol north of Cam Ranh, up near Nha Trang area. The next day he came to sick bay, the medical facility, for treatment of a wound that had occurred that night."
The physician continued:
The story he told was different from what his crewmen had to say about that night. According to Kerry, they had been engaged in a fire fight, receiving small arms fire from on shore. He said that his injury resulted from this enemy action.Some of his crew confided that they did not receive any fire from shore, but that Kerry had fired a mortar round at close range to some rocks on shore. The crewman thought that the injury was caused by a fragment ricocheting from that mortar round when it struck the rocks.
That seemed to fit the injury which I treated.
What I saw was a small piece of metal sticking very superficially in the skin of Kerry's arm. The metal fragment measured about 1 cm. in length and was about 2 or 3 mm in diameter. It certainly did not look like a round from a rifle.
I simply removed the piece of metal by lifting it out of the skin with forceps. I doubt that it penetrated more than 3 or 4 mm. It did not require probing to find it, did not require any anesthesia to remove it, and did not require any sutures to close the wound.
The wound was covered with a bandaid.
Not [sic] other injuries were reported and I do not recall that there was any reported damage to the boat.
Even then the horse-faced, ketchup stained imbecile had his sights set in the sewer with the rest of the bottom-feeding scavengers.
You could have been court-martialed for damaging government property. Or, so the story went.
Actually, I was threated with an article 15, but given that Kerry can get a purple heart for a lesser injury I thought to submit for one as well. It was in the line of duty...there was this major awesome party at a lake in Germany that ended up in events that become a semi-legendary shower scene including some of the unit "hotties".
When I was in Basic Training, we were told that if we got a sunburn bad enough to go on Sick Call, we would be charged with destruction of Government Property.
Nobody knows. Hibbard said at the press conference that Kerry asked him for it and Hibbard said "no". He said he learned later Kerry had received one but he had no idea who authorized it.
Maybe that's why they didn't charge me...I didn't miss any work. I was in much pain for a few days though.
Kerry's World: Father Knows Best
Excerpt:
From the start, Richard Kerry turned his oldest son into his foreign policy protégé. As Newsweek's Evan Thomas has written, "The Kerry dinner table was a nightly foreign-policy seminar. While other boys were eating TV dinners in front of the tube, [John] Kerry was discussing George Kennan's doctrine of containment." His father introduced the adolescent boy to such luminaries as Monnet and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Later, when he was at Yale, John Kerry traded letters with Clementine Churchill, Winston's wife.
As early as prep school, John Kerry showed signs that he shared his father's suspicions about America's cold war foreign policy. In a debate at St. Paul's in the late '50s, he argued that the United States should establish relations with Red China. During his junior year at Yale, he won a speech prize for an oration warning, "It is the specter of Western Imperialism that causes more fear among Africans and Asians than communism, and thus it is self-defeating." And, when he was tapped to deliver a graduation speech in 1966, he used the occasion to condemn U.S. involvement in Vietnam, intoning, "What was an excess of isolationism has become an excess of interventionism."
~snip~
Purple Heart #1 for Kerry was a joke. He suffered more pain getting recent botox injections. Kerry is a first class phony.
Yeah, I heard the same thing. I'd pity the soldier who had such a d*ck CO or PL who would enforce such a thing...
In hindsight, I think it was a Basic Training type thing, reinforcing the idea that your Mama wasn't there to wipe your fevered brow, that the "I feel sick and don't want to train today" attitude would not be tolerated, etc.
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