Minor scratches.....
nytimes.com
By JOHN KIFNER
Published: February 24, 2004
our thin-hulled swift boats came down the Bay Hap River at the end of another bloody operation. Their mission was to transport American commandos, ethnic Chinese Nung mercenaries and the reluctant South Vietnamese forces known as Ruff Puffs on raids in the Vietcong-controlled Mekong Delta.
Suddenly a mine went off under the lead boat, recalled Del Sandusky, who was a quartermaster first class on another of the boats.
"The boat just flew up in the air," Mr. Sandusky said in a recent telephone interview. "The gunner's mate was tossed off still holding his guns. A firefight started. There were bullets, rockets flying through the air, mortars."
Michael Medeiros, manning the .50-caliber machine gun on the fantail of the same boat, shouted, "Man overboard!"
A Green Beret lieutenant, Jim Rassman, was in the river, ducking underwater as bullets from both shores slapped the river.
"We turned around with the engines screaming against each other — one full astern, the other full forward — and then charged the several hundred yards back into the ambush," Mr. Sandusky's Navy skipper, Lt. j.g. John Kerry, wrote in his war diary. "Everyone on board must have been firing to keep the sniper heads down."
Another explosion had injured Mr. Kerry's right arm. But he ran forward to the bow, reached over with his good arm and pulled Lieutenant Rassman — weighted down with wet clothes, equipment and heavy boots — to safety.
"It was a brave thing to do," Mr. Sandusky said. "We had been in firefights with John before. We already knew he has unfailing instincts. We owe him our lives, and he owes us his. We were a boat crew. We were tight."
There was a strikingly strong bond between Lieutenant Kerry, who has often been portrayed as aristocratic and aloof, and the enlisted sailors on the two swift boats he commanded.
Though some of the men were stunned when their hard-charging commander turned so publicly against the war in 1971, the boat crews Lieutenant Kerry led have now become an integral part of his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Of the nine surviving crewmen, seven, including Mr. Sandusky, have made campaign appearances for Mr. Kerry. Another, Mr. Sandusky said, supports Mr. Kerry but wants nothing to do with politics. The crew has lost touch with the remaining man.
Two of Mr. Kerry's fellow swift boat skippers have also campaigned, and Mr. Rassman, a Republican, stunned the candidate last month when he joined the campaign in Iowa. |
