Retired doctor makes light of Kerry wound

[Tigermike 3,096]

Retired doctor makes light of Kerry wound

Friday, August 06, 2004

By DAVID BREWER

Times Staff Writer davidb@htimes.com

SCOTTSBORO - A retired family doctor said Thursday he used a Band-Aid to treat the first of three wounds Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry received in the Vietnam War.

Dr. Louis Letson of Scottsboro, who appears in a new 60-second TV ad questioning Kerry's war record, said Kerry came into his office at Cam Rahn Bay on the morning of Dec. 3, 1968, with an injury to his upper arm.

Letson said Kerry told him he and a boat crew of about five enlisted men were on patrol that night when they began receiving small arms fire and he was injured.

But Letson said the crew told a different story after Kerry left the office. "They were kind of amused by the whole thing," he said.

The crew members denied that they had been under enemy fire, Letson said. The crew said it was about 2 a.m. when they thought they saw some people on shore and Kerry fired a M79 grenade launcher.

"He had fired it up close against some rocks on shore when the grenade exploded" and he was hit in the arm by shrapnel, Letson said. "That's what caused the injury. The fragment was not from enemy fire" as Kerry portrayed it, the crew told him.

"The fragment was about the size of a match stick," Letson said. "It was sticking out of his arm. I grabbed it out and put a Band Aid on it. It didn't require an anesthesia or sutures."

Letson is among several swift boat veterans in the TV ad who say Kerry lied about his service, exaggerated his wounds to win war medals and betrayed soldiers with his antiwar protesting after he returned from Vietnam.

Kerry campaign's headquarters in Washington did not return calls for comment.

Letson said the crew said Kerry was not in charge of the boat that night, but was in training and that they were under the command of another lieutenant who was on board that night. He said the crew had joked how Kerry had told them he wanted to be the next JFK.

The late President John F. Kennedy was injured when a Japanese destroyer collided with the small patrol boat (PT-109) he commanded in World War II.

Letson said the base's commanding officer, Lt. Commander Grant "Skip" Hibbard, who now lives in Gulf Breeze, Fla., rejected Kerry's request for a Purple Heart for his injury that night. He said Hibbard told him that Kerry did not deserve the award because the injury was not combat-related. Efforts to reach Hibbard for comment were unsuccessful.

Letson said he is member of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which was organized in April. About 390 swift boat veterans belong to the group, he said.

LINK