TH R E E
THE PURPLE HEART HUNTER
by John E. O’Neill and Jerome L. Corsi

“Many took exception to the Purple Hearts awarded to Kerry.
His ‘wounds’ were suspect, so insignificant as to not be worthy
of the award of such a medal. That Kerry would seek the
Purple Heart for such ‘wounds’ is a mockery of the intent of
the Purple Heart and an abridgement of the valor of those to
whom the Purple Heart had been awarded with justification.”
WILLIAM FRANKE
Swift Boat veteran

Anormal tour of duty in Vietnam was at least one year for all personnel.
Many sailors, like Tom Wright (who would later object
to operating with Kerry in Vietnam) and Steven Gardner (the
gunner’s mate who sat behind and above Kerry for most of his Vietnam
stay and came to regard him as incompetent and dishonest),
stayed for longer periods either because of the special needs of the
Navy or because they had volunteered to do so. With very few exceptions
in the history of Swift Boats in Vietnam, everyone served a oneyear
tour unless he was seriously wounded. One exception was John
Kerry, who requested to leave Vietnam after four months, citing an
obscure regulation that permitted release of personnel with three Purple
Hearts. John Kerry is also the only known Swiftee who received
the Purple Heart for a self-inflicted wound.

None of Kerry’s Purple Hearts were for serious injuries. They were
concededly minor scratches at best, resulting in no lost duty time.
Each Purple Heart decoration is very controversial, with considerable
evidence (and in two of the cases, with incontrovertible and conclusive
evidence) that the minor injuries were caused by Kerry’s own
hand and were not the result of hostile fire of any kind. They are a
subject of ridicule within our unit. “I did get cut a few times, but I forgot
to recommend myself for a Purple Heart. Sorry about that,” wrote
John Howland, a boat commander with call sign “Gremlin.”1
Moreover, many Swiftees have now come forth to question Kerry’s
deception. “I was there the entire time Kerry was and witnessed two
of his war ‘wounds.’ I was also present during the action [in which] he
received his Bronze Star. I know what a fraud he is. How can I help?”
wrote Van Odell, a gunner from Kerry’s unit in An Thoi.2 Commander
John Kipp, USN (retired), of Coastal Division 13 also volunteered,
“If there is anything I can do to unmask this charlatan, please let me
know. He brings disgrace to all who served.”

Swiftees have remarked that, if Kerry faked even one of these
awards, he owes the Navy 243 additional days in Vietnam before he
runs for anything. In a unit where terribly wounded personnel like
Shelton White (now an undersea film producer who records specials
for National Geographic) chose to return to duty after three wounds
on the same day, Kerry’s actions were disgraceful. Indeed, many share
the feelings of Admiral Roy Hoffmann, to whom all Swiftees
reported: Kerry simply “bugged out” when the heat was on.
For military personnel no medal or award (with the exception of
the Congressional Medal of Honor) holds the significance of the Purple
Heart. John O’Neill remembers witnessing, as a five-year-old

UNFIT FOR COMMAND
child, the presentation of the Purple Heart to his widowed aunt,
standing with her five children, at a memorial service for his uncle, a
fighter pilot lost in Korea. Many remember the Purple Heart pinned
on the pillows of the badly wounded in military hospitals throughout
the world during America’s wars in defense of freedom. For this reason,
there were those in Coastal Division 11 who turned down Purple
Hearts because, when the medals were offered, these honorable
men felt they did not really deserve them. Veteran Gary Townsend
wrote, “I was on PCF 3 [from] 1969 to 1970 . . . I also turned down a
Purple Heart award (which required seven stitches) offered to me
while in Nam because I thought a little cut was insignificant as to
what others had suffered to get theirs.”3
To cheat by getting a Purple Heart from a self-inflicted wound
would be regarded as befitting the lowest levels of military conduct.
To use such a faked award to leave a combat sector early would be
lower yet. Finally, to make or use faked awards as the basis for running
for president of the United States, while faulting one’s political
opponents for not having similar military decorations, would
represent unbelievable hypocrisy and the truly bottom rung of
human conduct. Anyone engaging in such conduct would be unfit
for even the lowest rank in the Navy, to say nothing of the commander
in chief.

The Purple Heart Adventure
in the Boston Whaler

JOHN KERRY’S STORY
John Kerry’s website presents his first Purple Heart incident in typical
heroic fashion: “December 2, 1968—Kerry experiences first
intense combat; receives first combat related injury.”4

The Purple Heart Hunter
As Kerry described the situation to Brinkley, who recounts the
event in Tour of Duty, he grew bored in his first two weeks in Vietnam
while awaiting the assignment of his own boat. So he volunteered
for a “special mission” on a boat the Navy calls a skimmer but
which Kerry knew as a “Boston whaler.” The craft was a foam-filled
boat, not a PCF Swift Boat. Kerry and two enlisted men were
patrolling that night, as Kerry described it, “the shore off a Viet
Cong–infested peninsula north of Cam Ranh.” Kerry claims that he
and his two crew members spent the night being “scared shitless,”
creeping up in the darkness on fishermen in sampans. They feared
that the fishermen in sampans with no lights might be Viet Cong.
According to Kerry, the action started early in the morning, around
2 or 3 a.m., when it was still dark. Here are Kerry’s words, quoted by

Brinkley:
The jungle closed in on us on both sides. It was scary as hell.
You could hear yourself breathing. We were almost touching the
shore. Suddenly, through the magnified moonlight of the
infrared “starlight scope,” I watched, mesmerized, as a group of
sampans glided in toward the shore. We had been briefed that
this was a favorite crossing area for VC trafficking contraband.5
Kerry reports that he turned off the motor and paddled the Boston
Whaler out of the inlet into the bay. Then he saw the Vietnamese pull
their sampans onto the beach; they began to unload something. Kerry
decided to light a flare to illuminate the area.
The entire sky seemed to explode into daylight. The men from
the sampans bolted erect, stiff with shock for only an instant
before they sprang for cover like a herd of panicked gazelles
[Kerry] had once seen on TV’s “Wild Kingdom.” We opened

UNFIT FOR COMMAND
fire . . . The light from the flares started to fade, the air was full
of explosions. My M-16 jammed, and as I bent down in the boat
to grab another gun, a stinging piece of heat socked into my arm
and just seemed to burn like hell. By this time one of the sailors
had started the engine and we ran by the beach, strafing it. Then
it was quiet.6
That was the entire action. As Kerry explained to Brinkley, he was
not about to go chasing after the Vietnamese running away. “We
stayed quiet and low because we did not want to illuminate ourselves
at this point,” Kerry explains.
In the dead of night, without any knowledge of what kind of
force was there, we were not all about to go crawling on the
beach to get our asses shot off. We were unprotected; we didn’t
have ammunition; we didn’t have cover; we just weren’t prepared
for that. . . . So we first shot the sampans so that they were
destroyed and whatever was in them was destroyed.7
In the introduction of the incident in the book, Kerry said that it
“was a half-assed action that hardly qualified as combat, but it was
my first, and that made it exciting.” Kerry and his crew loaded their
gear in the Swift Boat that was there to cover them, and with the
Boston Whaler in tow, they headed back to Cam Ranh Bay. Brinkley
ends his discussion by quoting Kerry’s summary, an account that
again paints a larger-than-life picture:

“I felt terribly seasoned after this minor skirmish, but since I
couldn’t put my finger on what we had really accomplished or
on what had happened, it was difficult to feel satisfied,” Kerry
recalled. “I never saw where the piece of shrapnel had come