"Oh, please, please, please, tell me this turns out to be a complete forgery! There is no way sKerry could wiggle his way out of that!"
A couple of weeks ago Travis pointed out that at that time the Navy used standard preprinted forms to fill out most paper work from battle reports, to injury reports to recommendations for commendations.
Kerry apparently took his own typewriter besides his own 8 mm camera. It would have been very easy to take a few of these forms and insert carbon paper and type in whatever he wanted.
Fracus pointed out that, his long time Wade R. Sanders, who was a river boat guy, also, served as an Asst Sec of the Navy. One can only imagine what was done to records under his watch.
In the 1960s and through the 1980s Navy admin ran on triplicated standard forms. The forms were kept in the custody of Navy enlisted yeomen and personellmane (YNs and PNs). This was pre-computer, folks! The way the system worked was that orders, evaluations, citations etc were typed on these standard forms, and signed by commanding officers or other authorized signers.
The copies of the filled-out and signed form were sent by Navy internal mail to other commands and up the chain of command for review and action. Eventually, citations became part of your permanent record, after review by the appropriate higher authorities.
This is where Kerry's personal typewriter may have been very very handy in Viet Nam.
I wonder if he put himself in for his first PH, which went in again after being denied, months later?
I have an example of misuse of bogus Navy forms: I knew a very clever Navy enlisted man during my time in SEAL team in the 1980s. He was assigned to the West Coast SEALs, and didn't want to get an apartment or live in the barracks during 5 or 6 months he would be in San DIego between cruises. He filched a Navy standard form for "orders" assigning him to the Navy Marine Mammal detatchment in San Diego. He made up a bogus name, "Ensign Smith" or whatever. He presented the bogus "orders" to the night staff at the Bachelor Officers' Quarters in San Diego, and was assigned a room. He lived there for 6 months, just keeping a low profile, coming and going in PT gear or civvies.
That's just one example of how Navy standard forms could be misused. I have also heard of "imposters" joining ships' companies by presenting bogus "orders" they created. Some were very gifted nutcases who just wanted to be in the Navy, but for whatever reason couldn't join. By filching Navy standard forms, and filling them out correctly, they were able to jump into the system, as it were. In time they'd get caught because other records didn't exist.
In Kerry's case, he may have "created" some of his own after action reports and valor citations, with his personal typewriter, and misappropriated Navy standard forms.
Kerry dumped 10 lbs. of socks and underwear in order to take his typewriter along in his 90 lb. limited bag duffle bag when he went to war! (I read this in an exerpt from one of the Swiftees...sorry, don't remember which one.)
Hmmm, Sanders came out late this week in Long Beach in support of Kerry's recollections, despite not being on the same boat or on the medal missions.
Check out the following article written by Wade Sanders titled "MEDALS NOT AWARDED". Apparently he is still in the business of getting medals awarded after-the-fact. He was offering free legal services to vets through a San Diego clinic as early as the 1980's (according to a 1988 article in the San Diego Union Tribune).
http://home.planetcomm.net/StableAble17/newsletters/april04_3.html(snip)
This former enlisted man had stood by that officer in the same combat, exposed himself to the same risk, was part of the same team that prevailed, and his officer left him behind with nothing but a Purple Heart. To my mind this is a terrible injustice.
Since I belong to an association of those who served in Navy patrol boats in Vietnam, I decided to see if I could improve the situation. After all, the one mantra that was ingrained into me by my father, and by the traditions of my service, was that my number one responsibility as an officer is to take care of my men (or women, to be contemporarily correct). So, I did a bit of research and discovered that there is no statute of limitations on awards. I found the office in the Pentagon that deals with awards, and I got the guidance I needed. The process is simple. An officer in charge of a unit is fully authorized to recommend any member of his "command" for a military decoration.
Many mechanical typewriters were subtly unique. Unfortunately, carbon paper doesn't convey impressions all that well, and poor scans make things even worse, but I wonder if analysis of physical documents or high-resolution scans thereof would show that some documents were produced by Kerry's typewriter that, logically speaking, should not have been.