John Hawkins: One very, very, strong charge that your organization has made that and the mainstream media has scarcely paid attention to, is that John Kerry didn't deserve his first Purple Heart and had to lie to get it. That's quite significant since it allowed him to get out of Vietnam almost a year early. Can you give a concise rundown of your case against John Kerry on that one?
John O'Neill: Yes. Our contention is both his first and third Purple Hearts were fake. He invoked the 3 Purple Heart rule to leave Vietnam 243 days early. None of these involved any injury that required even an hour of hospitalization. None of these involved any kind of real injury.
Now, Purple Heart number one occurred on December 2, 1968. That night he was on a Boston whaler; movement was sighted and they fired. There was no return fire reported by anyone and on the Boston whaler was Lieutenant William Schachte, who later became the Judge Advocate General of The Navy. According to Schachte, Kerry picked up an M-79, fired it, and it hit a nearby rock and it caused the grenade to explode and throw a little bit of bent shrapnel over all of them, a tiny piece of which ended up in Kerry’s arm. So the first witness is Schachte.
Two other people claim to have been on the boat; these are Runyon and Zaladonis. Neither one of them according to both the Boston Kranish biography and Kerry’s own authorized biography saw fire. Runyon apparently has see fire in the last week but has repeatedly been interviewed and said he didn’t see any fire, until last week. Kerry has said he doesn’t know what happened to him. That likewise is in both biographies, The Kranish book and Tour of Duty. So there was no hostile fire and in addition the injury he got was so tiny to involve medical attention. He went to Dr. Letson who has provided an affidavit. Letson simply took a pair of tweezers and a band-aid and put it on and was told that there was no hostile fire, that he wounded himself. The claim is that Dr. Letson didn’t treat him because the sheet is signed by Jess Carreon. Carreon is Dr. Letson’s corpsman or nurse. Finally he went down to the division commander Hibbard....
John Hawkins: One quick question. I notice that the Kerry campaign has been pointing that out, but Kerry has never denied that Letson treated him, has he?
John O'Neill: He has refused to speak about this for the past 6 months.
John Hawkins: Kerry has only said that Letson is not the guy that signed it. Kerry has never come out and said, “He didn’t treat me.”
John O'Neill: It would be impossible to do that because before he released any of his medical records, Dr. Letson went to his Democratic Party Chairman down at Scottsboro, Alabama and provided a statement about exactly this occurrence and about how he treated him by removing the little deal with tweezers and band-aid. So Dr. Letson knew of the exact treatment when there had been no public way to find out about it, as far as I know.
In any event Dr. Letson went down to Commander Grant Hibbard. Grant Hibbard immediately denied any Purple Heart when Kerry applied and asked him to leave his office.
What is very important are the documents that are required for a Purple Heart that are missing here. There is no hostile fire report. There is no casualty report. What Kerry did is wait until everybody left Vietnam that had actual knowledge of the incident, i.e.: Hibbard, Letson, Schachte. When they all left he went to Saigon and somehow secured a Purple Heart on February 28, some 3 months later. He did this in a string of 3 Purple Hearts that he secured within 20 days as he was bailing out of Vietnam.
John Hawkins: Now that puzzles me. I’m not a military guy, but how could Kerry get a Purple Heart under those circumstances? He couldn’t just go up to somebody and say, "I want a Purple Heart." Doesn’t he have to present some kind of evidence?
John O'Neill: I think he took the medical sheet signed by Jess Carreon and said that the paperwork had all been lost and secured a Purple Heart from people who had never conceived that he was lying, but that’s speculation on my part.
John Hawkins: And the man who signed it has passed away?
John O'Neill: He’s dead. What’s clear is that none of the normal records required for a Purple Heart exist and that he waited until everybody left who actually knew that the wound he got was trivial and that he had been turned down by the people that had actual knowledge. |
