There’s a new member…

There’s a new member of the group “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth”. John Kerry.

A previously unnoticed passage in John Kerry’s approved war biography, citing his own journals, appears to contradict the senator’s claim he won his first Purple Heart as a result of an injury sustained under enemy fire.

Kerry, who served as commander of a Navy swift boat, has insisted he was wounded by enemy fire Dec. 2, 1968, when he and two other men took a smaller vessel, a Boston Whaler, on a patrol north of his base at Cam Ranh Bay.

But Douglas Brinkley’s “Tour of Duty,” for which Kerry supplied his journals and letters, indicates that as Kerry set out on a subsequent mission, he had not yet been under enemy fire.

The article cites Douglas Brinkley’s biography of Kerry. Kerry won his first Purple Heart on Dec. 2, 1968, but later on, when Kerry was leaving for a mission on PCF-44, Brinkley writes:

They pulled away from the pier at Cat Lo with spirits high, feeling satisfied with the way things were going for them. They had no lust for battle, but they also were were not afraid. Kerry wrote in his notebook, ‘A cocky feeling of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel because we hadn’t been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven’t been shot at are allowed to be cocky.’

The article goes more into the parsing of the words as well.

Could the “we” to which Kerry referred in his notebook entry have meant only that his crew, rather than Kerry in particular, had not encountered enemy fire?

At least one other PCF-44 crew member was with Kerry during the Boston Whaler incident, Zaldonis, according to the Boston Globe’s account of the story.

RTWT. (Read the whole thing.)

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