The post by Captain’s Quarters that documents how Kerry’s own documentation refutes the story of his first Purple Heart that I pointed to yesterday is getting media attention today: an OpEd in the Washington Times:

According to Mr. Kerry’s account of what happened on Dec. 2, 1968, he and his crew were steering a Navy skimmer on patrol in Cam Ranh Bay. Mr. Kerry and his crew came upon a group of Vietnamese unloading cargo on the far shore. Mr. Kerry and his crew opened fire. In the brief moments of action, Mr. Kerry received a shrapnel wound in his arm from an unknown source. What’s missing is any mention that Mr. Kerry’s crew was fired upon. …

But two weeks after Dec. 2, 1968, Mr. Kerry wrote an entry in his journal that raises questions about his own account of that night. Shortly after being wounded, Mr. Kerry was transferred to Cat Lo on the Mekong Delta and assumed his first command of a swift boat. In his biography of Mr. Kerry, “Tour of Duty,” Douglas Brinkley reports on page 189 that soon after Mr. Kerry turned 25 on Dec. 11, 1968, he headed out on his first mission: “[The crew] had no lust for battle, but they also were not afraid. Kerry wrote in his notebook, ‘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’.”

If he had not “been shot at” on Dec. 2, then what occurred could not be considered combat. Nevertheless, the Navy awarded Mr. Kerry his first Purple Heart.