Patrick Runyon, one of Kerry's claimed crew honestly admits he "was never trained on one." Runyon said that on the mission with Kerry, he and Zaladonis traded off on running the boat and manning the M-60. William Zaladonis isn't sure he agrees with Runyon about the trade off but claimed to me that he was trained on an M-60 at Swift Boat School in California .

Swift Boat School at Coronado Island off San Diego had no machine gun range. But Zaladonis says his Swift Boat class was taken up to Camp Pendleton to be trained with the M-60 and other light weapons by the Marines. My survey of over 20 attendees during the same time period, both officers and enlisted men, including two Kerry supporters Stephen Hayes and Bill Short, shows that none of them ever went to Camp Pendleton at to train on an M-60 as part of Swift Boat School training. They mainly trained on all weapons offshore.

What about the mission on December 2-3 1968 itself? Schachte reports that after creeping around the shoreline of empty Nha Trang Bay in the dark and finding nothing, he thought he saw movement on shore around 3AM, popped a parachute flare, and fired his M-60 where he saw the movement until it jammed while Kerry fired his M-16. When Kerry's M-16 stopped, Schachte heard the distinctive "POW" of an M-79 grenade launcher. Now they had made such a spectacular son et lumiere announcement of their once secret mission, Schachte decided to get out of there, back to Voss's supporting Swift boat, and home. The mission was a bust. No enemy action, not even the sighting of enemy, with rookie Kerry claiming he had been wounded in the arm and demanding his purple heart.

Kerry and his men describe a magical mystery tour -- that same night and that same time in a parallel universe--- in a traffic-jammed Nha Trang Bay that apparently had scheduled a starlight sampan regatta that evening. According to Kerry in Brinkley "Most of the night had been spent being scared shitless by fishermen whom we would suddenly creep up on out of the darkness..." In Brinkley's summary "For the next four hours Kerry's Boston Whaler, using paddles, brought boatloads of fisherman they found in sampans... back to the Swift. It was tiring work."

"Tiring work?" If you ever tried to paddle an almost 15 foot long Boston Whaler with three in crew, loaded with arms and ammunition, and a bunch of jabbering Vietnamese fishermen crammed onboard, 2 ½ miles out to a Swift boat a number of times in monsoon seas, you would enthusiastically agree and want to shoot the idiot who refused to use the engine.

But wait a minute... . Didn't Kerry point to the phony "photograph of the skimmer being towed behind his Swift boat, insisting that it could barely fit three people, himself and two others"?

How many Vietnamese fishermen can you put on an armed skimmer with a three man crew, and still paddle miles out to a Swift boat without swamping it in a heavy monsoon chop? According my interview with Bill Zaladonis, "three to four." Why do this? According to Zaladonis's interview with Lisa Myers" I assume they were interrogating them -- turning them loose or whatever." Whatever" indeed.  Hibbard recalls no skimmer missions that ever required an interpreter on board a Swift boat, without which interrogation is impossible.

And there's more. After four hours of playing galley slave for the U.S. Navy "Suddenly it was scary as hell," according to Kerry in Brinkley. A group "of five or six sampans" (according to Zaladonis in Myers) glide into Kerry's starlight scope, beach their craft, and once Kerry pops a flare  Brinkley says "they sprang for cover like a herd of panicked gazelles Kerry had once seen on Wild Kingdom."

And the wild rumpus commenced. "The air was full of explosions," Kerry and crew ran like hell strafing the shore as they went, Kerry experiences his wounding, and heads back to the Swift boat and home. Neither of his claimed crew members confirmed any enemy fire; yet they both "assumed" Kerry had been wounded by it. Curioser and curioser.  

Kerry's summary of the mission?  Here is Kerry on "Meet the Press" with Tim Russert:

"We were in combat. We were in a very, very--probably one of the most frightening -- if you ask anybody who was with me, the two guys who were with me, was probably the most frightening night that they had that they were in Vietnam... ."

Kerry in Tour of Duty: "It was a half-assed action that hardly qualified as combat, but it was my first... . ... [A] minor skirmish, but since I couldn't put my finger on what we really accomplished or on what had happened, it was difficult to feel satisfied. "

Kerry in Tour of Duty a la recherche... from his "journal" nine days after "whatever" happened in Na Trang Bay:  "A cocky feeling of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel because we hadn't been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven't been shot at are allowed to be cocky ,"

Take your pick.

Poor Schachte who had had a boring evening ending in a blown mission, somehow in the same time and place in that parallel universe to Kerry's "frightening" magical mystery tour, got debriefed by the Coastal Division 14 commander Hibbard, filed no after action report since there was no enemy action, told Hibbard Kerry wanted a Purple Heart, and hit the sack, mildly disgusted.

Kerry got back in the same time and same place, filed no after action report and neither did Mike Voss, despite an action as described by Kerry that certainly merited one and would have guaranteed him an automatic purple heart with no problems with either Hibbard or Schachte had he filed one. In fact, according to Hibbard, it would have been the only after action report filed on one of Schachte's skimmer missions which weren't as effective as he and Schachte had hoped. Schachte disagrees and is convinced there must have been "one or two."

Kerry reported to Navy doctor Louis Letson the next morning after duty hours began at 8 AM.  Schachte had told him, "No enemy action, no purple heart." Kerry's appeal to Hibbard brought the rejoinder "I have seen rose thorn injuries worse than that. No enemy action, no purple heart." Surely a doctor would be more understanding, not that it mattered. Only Kerry's direct commanders could approve the award.

Kerry lay down on Letson's examination table and told Letson: "We were involved in a fire fight and we received fire from shore." One of the four or five men hanging around the dispensary out of Kerry's sight lowered his head and began to wag an emphatic "no." and stifle a laugh. Letson found ¼ inch fragment sticking out of Kerry's upper arm. It looked like wire about the diameter of a toothpick, he pulled it out with his forceps and flipped it with a tiny "klink" into a steel basin held by his Hospitalman, Jesus Carreon, to the applause of the appreciative audience. Letson was so amused he took a photo of Carreon holding the basin with the ½ inch fragment barely visible in the bottom of it.

As usual, whether Letson prescribed APC pills, ointment for a burn, cut out an ingrown toenail or any other medical action, Carreon dutifully noted in the medical record form Letson's treatment: "3 DEC 1968 U.S. NAVAL SUPPORT FACILITY CAM RANH BAY RVN FPO Shrapnel in left arm above elbow. Shrapnel removed and apply Bacitracin dressing. Ret to duty."

Letson says he slapped a bandaid on the wound. When he looked back in a few minutes later, Carreon was winding layers of gauze over the bandaid achieving quite a dramatic effect. Why? According to Letson "Carreon said Kerry was afraid the bandaid would come off." Tedd Peck was dying to see "the purple heart wound" but Kerry wouldn't show it to him.

Months later, Kerry's commanders...