"Weeeeeere was Alston?" I didn't realize he had made a major speech at the convention when I posted the discover of his possible fraud earlier. If they can get the paperwork and prove he wasn't on Kerry's boat, that alone would end him.
Musical Gunners
Shot in the Dark blog
Captain Ed notes a problem with the timeline for one of John Kerry's most articulate supporters:
Bingo! Yachtzee! Alston received his serious wounds in that same exact battle that took Peck out of service. On January 29th, Alston was medevaced out to a hospital with head wounds and no records indicate that he ever returned to the unit. Kerry took command of PCF-94 the next day. Alston never served a day under Kerry's command. In fact, Kerry received a replacement, Fred Short, on 28 February as a replacement for Alston."
And in his speech at the Democrat convention, Alston's time with Kerry was the subject:
"I know him from a small boat in Vietnam, where we fought and bled together, serving our country. There were six of us aboard PCF-94, a 50-foot, twin-engine craft known as a "Swift Boat." We all came from different walks of life, but all of us-including our skipper, John Kerry-volunteered for combat duty. And combat is what we got.
We usually patrolled the narrow waterways of the Mekong delta, flanked on both sides by thick jungle. As our crewmate Gene Thorson put it, we were a traveling bulls-eye. And we often came under sudden attack from the enemy, hidden in the shadows. Machine-gun fire, rocket-propelled grenades, it all came fast and furious, and Lieutenant Kerry had to make quick, life-or-death decisions for the entire boat."
It's seared in his memory. Seared.
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