SwiftVets.com

[Hammer2]

The other point to consider Chief is that any of the rounds available at the time had to hit something to detonate.

Where is the BDA for the boat, if it was hit by rocket fire?

If a round impacted in the water, the hull of the boat would have shielded the men except where their bodies extended above the angle between the point of detonation and the area shielded by the hull.

Depending on the distance from the boat, the fragments from the detonation would have ranged from being completely shielded by the hull to striking the upper parts of their bodies.

Draw it on paper with the river surface as one side of a triangle, the point of detonation as the apex and the top edge of the boat hull defining the other side of the triangle. You will see that the area from the top edge of the triangle to the deck of the boat is shaded from fragments. Only body parts extending above the top edge of the triangle are exposed to fragments.

If the height of the hull above waterline can be determined, then the minimum/maximum distances for the round to impact and still expose Kerry to fragments in the thigh can be determined. This can be compared with the characteristics of the B-40 round to determine if this range falls within the hazard area of the round.
_________________
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilence" - Thomas Jefferson
"An armed society is a polite society" - Thomas Jefferson
"The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it won't be needed until someone tries to take it away." -- Thomas Jefferson

[NavyChief]

No need to ask Kerry if he smoked pot. It's right here in a 1996 Boston Globe article:

[Hammer2]

Kinda sounds like "I tried it, but I didn't inhale", dosen't it?
_________________
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilence" - Thomas Jefferson
"An armed society is a polite society" - Thomas Jefferson
"The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it won't be needed until someone tries to take it away." -- Thomas Jefferson

[swiftyvetfan4ever]

Tour of Duty, Douglas Brinkley
Page 267: The Doors were Kerry's favorite band, "and he would blast 'Light My Fire' and 'Love Me Two Times' while patrolling the Delta rivers. … Kerry, however, never touched drugs in Vietnam. 'I like the lyrical intensity of The Doors,' he explained. 'Morrison was a poet, in my opinion. The drug part didn't interest me.' "

Page 407: After the war, Kerry decides to loosen up a little. "Occasionally during his travels around America in 1971, usually with either Julia or a fellow veteran, Kerry had smoked marijuana. … He never smoked pot while at Yale or in the Navy. But during his stint as a leader of VVAW, he occasionally indulged. 'Yeah, I smoked pot when I came home from Vietnam,' Kerry noted in a 2003 interview. 'I didn't mind getting high. I certainly enjoyed it. But I didn't like the out-of-control component. I like being alert. So I tried it a few times, but I didn't touch it after 1972.' "

http://slate.msn.com/id/2096936/

[Hondo]

On 25 Sep 2004, fortdixlover wrote:

[You GottaBeKidding]

My dad was treated for prostate cancer over 10 years ago and he's fine. Prostate cancer is seldom a death sentence. Cheney's heart is probably a more serious health concern than Kerry's prostate cancer.

[Hondo]

YGBK:

No, prostate cancer isn't an automatic death sentence. I'm very glad to hear your dad is still doing well 10+ years after diagnosis.

However, to say it is "seldom a death sentence" may be overstating things. If I remember correctly, prostate cancer is - behind lung cancer - the second leading cause of cancer death among US males.

Unfortunately, happy outcomes with respect to prostate cancer haven't been my family's experience. I've lost 3 relatives to the disease in the last 12 1/2 years. In 2 of the 3 cases, the disease was thought to have been discovered early (in one case, it was discovered after metastasis). If I remember correctly, 7 or 8 years was about the average between first diagnosis and death.

As I understand it, there appears to be two general types of prostate cancer. Late onset prostate cancer is common in men over 70 (I've seen it written that literally more than half of all men 85+ have late onset prostate cancer). This form is generally slow-growing. Most very elderly men are thought to have it at death - but it is so slow-growing that it rarely is the actual cause of death.

Early-onset prostate cancer seems to be distinctly different. It appears to be much more virulent than that found in men 70+. The prognosis is worse the younger you are diagnosed with prostate cancer. Early onset prostate cancer is the form that killed Frank Zappa a few years ago at age 53.

Kerry was either 58 or 59 when first diagnosed. He is therefore young enough to make me wonder which variety of prostate cancer he had.

Since Kerry is running for a rather important and high-stress job, I also don't think quesitons in this area are unreasonable.
_________________
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse."
-- John Stuart Mill

[arymann]

This article in The American Thinker from August 27, 2004, details some of Kerry's known medical problems, including his treatment for prostate cancer and his parasomnia.

http://americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=3789

Sleepless in Cam Ranh Bay
by Daniel Aronstein and Thomas Lifson

Note his reference to Viet Nam!

Excerpt:

[ArmyFlightSurgeon]

Thoughts of an Army flight surgeon, Viet Nam 1968, on the Kerry medical records:
1. The two episodes of pneumonia, 1968 and 1967, are rather unusual for a healthy young male and are often associated with smokers, either tobacco or marijuana (the latter more irritating and more likely to cause bronchitis/pneumonia).
2. 3 December 1968 (1st PH). The shrapnel from the M79 grenade (or, similarly, the M26 hand grenade) are unique in that they are fragments from a steel coil and are like pieces of a coiled spring. Since that is what Dr Letson found, which seems to be the case from his testimony, then it is clear that the wound was self inflicted.
3. 20 February 1969 (2nd PH). The main problem here is that the treating doctor could not say that the foreign body (FB) he saw on the x-ray was a B-40 shrapnel because there is nothing unique about its shape-- certainly not on x-ray. All he could say, or should have said, was that a FB of such and such size and shape was noted in his left thigh. (Just as, say, an ER doctor examining a woman who claims to have been beaten by her husband cannot say in the exam report that she has bruises from his beating-- only that she has bruises consistant with a fist blow, or a baseball bat blow, or whatever, and only the authorities can decide how they occurred.)
4. 13 March 1969 (3rd PH). The medical team on the Coast Guard cutter showed extra care and attention in getting x-rays of Kerry's right forearm to reassure him that there was no fracture there. Therefore, the fact that they did not get x-rays of his left buttock indicates to me that there was NO PENETRATING INJURY, and therefore, no need to get x-rays to look for a FB. (The rice would probably not show up on their x-rays, but metallic shrapnel certainly would).
5. Regarding the non-specific urinary tract infection-- In Viet Nam, if a soldier reported to sick call with urethral irritation and discharge following sexual contact, we would get a smear of the discharge and stain it to look for bacteria (gonorrhea="clap"). If they were seen, treatment was with penicillin (by shot or by mouth). If gonococci were not seen, it was assumed to be an infection from other causes, which we could not determine back then (today we know they are mostly chlamydia). It was found empirically that they responded to tetracycline. So, what we have here is what today we most likely would diagnose as a Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) caused by chlamydia.
Hope this is helpful, your friendly flight surgeon

[Hondo]

[ord33]

NYT has an article which describes Kerry's health in detail, including the schrapnel.

NY Times
October 3, 2004
Shrapnel and Cancer Figure in Kerry's Journey to Health
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
http://tinyurl.com/5q3h9

Link/Long url edited by Moderator