Later that day, Kerry displayed what his superior, Lt. Cmdr. Grant Hibbard, recalled as a "scratch." Kerry asked him to write an official injury report, but Hibbard said he told Kerry to "forget it." Vaguely recalling that he later "took some heat" for turning Kerry down, Hibbard was angered when he learned that Kerry had won a Purple Heart.
Hibbard and other critics cited the incident as a glaring mark against Kerry as an officer and a gentleman. By grubbing for an undeserved honor, they said, Kerry used it to reduce his Vietnam tour. "He fell short," Hibbard said.
Kerry testily denied initially pressing for the award, saying he simply reported the wound. "Later on, I asked where it was or something," he said, but insisted he played no role in obtaining the medal. "It wasn't my decision."
It was the Navy's. The award came from the Naval Support Facility in Saigon -- issued without any evident formal protest at the time from Hibbard, Letson or other commanders. Neither the slightness of Kerry's wound nor its murky origins would have likely disqualified him, said Shelby Jean Kirk, a retired civilian director of the Bureau of Naval Operations awards branch.
The most critical element in an award decision was "action against the enemy." Conflicting battle accounts were not uncommon, and when Navy awards personnel could not make a clear determination, the serviceman often "got the benefit of the doubt," Kirk said.
"The fog of war forced the system to bend to interpretation," said former Navy Cmdr. David L. Riley, author of "Uncommon Valor," a history of the Navy's awards.
A review of injury reports from Kerry's boat units during his tour of duty confirms that pattern. Stacked in the Navy archives in Washington, the records show that in the last three months of Kerry's tour, 46 Swift boat personnel were wounded. Most were hurt by shrapnel, and all but five of the cases earned Purple Hearts.
Injury reports are missing from Kerry's first month -- including his contested Dec. 2 wound. But at least two dozen of the 46 men who were wounded later suffered "light" or "minor" shrapnel injuries. In a similar number of cases, wounds could not be clearly traced to enemy fire.
"All I knew," Kerry said, "was I had a hole in my shirt and a hole in my arm."
Within days, he had his first boat command. Through late January, he led the five-man crew of PCF-44, patrolling between Cam Ranh Bay and An Thoi, a small base on the western rind of the remote Ca Mau.
