Talk:Military career of John Kerry

John Kerry's injury
(copied from Talk:John Kerry 09:13, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

A direct quote by the Dr. who treated Kerry uses the same three words I use: "injury", "superficial" and "small". Rex071404  216.153.214.94 00:07, 29 October 2005 (UTC)


 * I'm all for NPOV and didn't revert your other changes which are okay with me. I think your taking the term "superficial" out of context of the quote. The term "superficial" has various definitions, the top one being "1. Of, affecting, or being on or near the surface: a superficial wound." In other words, a "shallow wound". --Aude 00:18, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

Read Letson's statement again:


 * ''"That seemed to fit the injury which I treated.

What I saw was a small piece of metal sticking very superficially in the skin of Kerry's arm. The metal fragment measured about 1 cm. in length and was about 2 or 3 mm in diameter. It certainly did not look like a round from a rifle.

I simply removed the piece of metal by lifting it out of the skin with forceps. I doubt that it penetrated more than 3 or 4 mm. It did not require probing to find it, did not require any anesthesia to remove it, and did not require any sutures to close the wound.

The wound was covered with a bandaid."''

He uses the word "injury" 1st and "wound" last - so do I.

Now, as to the use of "superficial", I use that as I did because Letson said:
 * "a small piece of metal sticking very superficially in the skin".

He is clealry stating that the injury was superficial.

Using the FACTS providd by Letson, I have assembled a non-POV sentence which uses all four key words and does not distort their meaning:

"Kerry suffered a superficial injury from a small piece of shrapnel in the left arm above the elbow . The shrapnel was removed and the wounded area was treated with bacitracin antibiotic and bandaged."

Other than to re-tweak it as:

"Kerry suffered a superficial injury from a small piece of shrapnel in the left arm above the elbow . The shrapnel was removed and the wound was treated with bacitracin antibiotic and bandaged."

I see no justifications for changing these two sentences. Rex071404  216.153.214.94 00:26, 29 October 2005 (UTC)


 * More than a year ago, we moved this whole area of argument into John Kerry military service controversy. That, of course, doesn't stop Rex, who spent quite a bit of time last summer trying to insert language downplaying Kerry's service, and who is now putting us through the same exercise yet again.


 * I believe we should stick with the long-established approach of giving the basic points here, with disputes left to the "controversy" article. All of Rex's boldfacing can't obscure the existence of a genuine dispute here. Letson says he treated Kerry's wound. The Navy records, however, show that it was someone named Carreon. Letson says oh, well, Carreon was assisting me and I had him sign the paperwork. Carreon is dead and can't come forward to refute Letson's story. Letson also says that, more than thirty years after the event, he still remembers it (down to the fragment's diameter in millimeters!). He doesn't claim to have made any notation about it in the records (or anywhere else, AFAIK). So Letson says he's reporting a decades-old recollection, which contradicts the records and can't now be corroborated, and which just so happens to serve his political ends (Letson appeared in one of the anti-Kerry SBVT ads).


 * The question for us is whether we should get into all of this in the Kerry bio, or leave it to the daughter article. I think we should continue the long-established policy of leaving it to the daughter article. Similarly, the George W. Bush article doesn't mention that several people who were assigned to Bush's unit in the National Guard say they didn't see him at drills. In both these cases, the accumulation of pro-and-con evidence on the military service disputes threatened to overwhelm the bio, so it was moved. It should stay moved. JamesMLane 02:12, 29 October 2005 (UTC)


 * I wholeheartedly agree, I was actually under the impression that the military service controversy page had been merged into this page, with all the detail of his military service on this page. --kizzle 03:01, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

The quote from Dr. Leston and the words he used, are in not and of themselves "controversial". Rather, the "controversy" attaches to those words by various editors here who insist on inserting sentences such as "Kerry's opponents, including the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, have contended that this wound was too minor to merit a Purple Heart and that Kerry used this injury as his first of three to game the system and obtain early release from his Vietnam service. However, Kerry's wound did qualify him for consideration under Naval guidelines for a purple heart, and a subsequent Naval review reiterated their position that the purple heart was correctly given".

Owing to the fact that this text which I edited in...


 * "Kerry suffered a superficial injury from a small piece of shrapnel in the left arm above the elbow . The shrapnel was removed and the wound was treated with bacitracin antibiotic and bandaged."

...uses the EXACT WORDS that Dr. Letson used and because it's also carefully written, it's not in and of itself a controversy. If you insist on calling it such, we'll end up at the point where no text referring to the 1st injury/wound is allowed in, as every variant could be deemed "controversy". See Talk:Stolen_Honor and associate sections on that talk page for related explanations. Rex071404  216.153.214.94 04:24, 29 October 2005 (UTC)


 * Rex, you're treating Letson's every utterance as Holy Writ. There's a controversy over whether he even treated Kerry at all. We can't have a passage in the article that relies on him as an authority without also disclosing to the reader that he's biased and that the Navy's records don't support his claim. There's also the need to avoid giving the false impression that the wound was too small to qualify for a Purple Heart (even on Letson's version of the facts, the award was proper). That's why we should stick to the language that emerged from last year's wrangling, with further details going in the daughter article. JamesMLane 23:08, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

I disagree with James's inferrence that the article has an enforced stasis regarding this section of text. I came up with phrasing which I think is NPOV towards both sides and is in fact, more accurate than what it replaces. Also, there is no credible evidence that Letson is lying about having treated Kerry or is to be disbeleived out of hand due to alleged bias. Also, as I have copiously explained previously, I feel the evidence clearly would support explicitly calling the injury "minor" as in "minor wound", but I am not trying to force that here.

James, other than arguing your point, you have supplied no data or evidence about wounds per se, but I have (see previous talk, above). That evidence, in the form of a wound treatment guide, can now be found here (URL changed recently). The treatment Kerry received (by all accounts) makes clear that he received treatment for a "minor wound". And yet, the text I editing in recently has softened but is still is correct, more accurate (than what you now lobby for), is NPOV and fair to both sides:


 * "Kerry suffered a superficial injury from a small piece of shrapnel in the left arm above the elbow . The shrapnel was removed and the wound was treated with bacitracin antibiotic and bandaged."

James, you are again focusing unduly on the past edit war -won by your side by default, when I got booted for 3rr violations ("we should stick to the language that emerged from last year's wrangling"). This is espcially true, considering that the ArbComm made a specific finding about issues of the campaign intruding into this article. Need I remind you, that it was you (one whom the ArbComm addressed) and your cohorts that made the final decsion about the language you now insist on sticking with.

Plain and simply, I have compromised here and you have not. You need to do better than that or rightly speaking, you are not enagaging in Negotiation or Consensus decision-making.

Suffice it to say, I contend that there is residual POV bias in this article and I further contend that you are arguing against various changes that would remedy this. For these reasons, I am not persuaded by your plea to "stick to the language that emerged".

Again I will repeat: JamesMLane and others here do not have authority to enforce stasis or otherwise "freeze" any section of this article. As for "false impression(s)", the copious amounts of personal minutiae about Kerry detailed in this article do indeed give the false impression that we as readers really ought to be sweet on Kerry, our patootie. The entire article is too hagiographic and is way POV balanced in favor of Kerry.

James's ceaseless efforts to screen out all non-flattering facts, regardless of how tactfully conveyed, does not improve the article. On the other hand, this edit of mine does and I am going to do my best to see to it that the true words of "superficial" and "small" stay in. You are welcome to try incorporating those words into a sentence you'd prefer, but you have not made the case for keeping them out. Rex071404  216.153.214.94 23:47, 29 October 2005 (UTC)


 * I didn't say that there's any such thing as "enforced stasis". Your insinuation to the contrary is utterly ridiculous. A specific prior version of an article may be better or worse than a proposed change. It's always open to discussion. I said that this particular older version was superior and I explained why I thought so.


 * According to you, "there is no credible evidence that Letson is lying about having treated Kerry". The place to address that question is in the daughter article, John Kerry military service controversy. There the reader can be told all the details on both sides. It would be misleading to say that "there's no credible evidence" without mentioning that Letson's name doesn't appear on the official Navy record. In fact, another way to summarize the state of the evidence would be, "Letson's claim to have treated Kerry is unsupported by any other evidence -- nothing in any Navy record, nothing from Kerry, nothing from any other medical officer, nothing from anyone else in the squadron, and no claim by Letson that he made any contemporaneous record of a minor incident that he now claims to remember so well decades later." Of course, it would be biased to write that in the article without also reporting Letson's explanation for why his name doesn't appear. We have to put in all of it or none of it, and I favor putting in none of it, but making it available in the daughter article.


 * You write, "The treatment Kerry received (by all accounts) makes clear that he received treatment for a 'minor wound' . . . ." Bingo, end of discussion. The long-standing version gives the facts about the treatment he received. Several of us explained to you last summer that our job was to give the facts and let the reader draw the inference. If you think the inference is clear, then the only reason for your change is to emphasize a point that suits your POV. I asked you more than a year ago what facts (as opposed to inferences or conclusions or characterizations or opinions) were being kept from the reader by the version everyone else favored. You never answered me then. You still haven't.


 * You write that "the ArbComm made a specific finding about issues of the campaign intruding into this article." Specifically, the ArbCom thought that the main bio article was getting into too much detail about points being argued in the campaign. One of those points was the SBVT attack on Kerry's war record. The way to avoid getting into too much detail is to move all this stuff (Letson says this, the records say that, etc.) to the daughter article. It's odd that you invoke the ArbCom when you're the one trying to add detail about this campaign issue to the main bio article.


 * You continue to act as if the principles of negotiation and consensus mean that you must be "given something". That's not so. Suppose another editor comes along and says that, because Kerry's ancestry was Jewish, his bid for the Presidency was part of the international Jewish conspiracy. The new editor has a whole bunch of edits he wants to make that flow from that thesis. The rest of us think that the article should give notable facts about Kerry, and it already includes the Judaism of his paternal grandparents, which we think is enough. The new editor persists. He adds anti-Semitic material to several sections. He complains when someone reverts him. When two different people "gang up" to revert him, he complains even more loudly. Are we required to say that, in the interest of compromise, we must allow at least one little bit of anti-Semitic propaganda and/or conspiracy theories into the article? No, we're not. If all of his proposed edits are bad, then all should be reverted. Each edit is to be judged on its own merit.


 * Finally, your charge that I have made "ceaseless efforts to screen out all non-flattering facts" is simply false. There's plenty of negative stuff in this article that I've never tried to eliminate or even soften. What I have tried to do, not ceaselessly but as much as I've had time for, is to keep the article free of unencylopedic passages. You tend to write quite a few such passages. Furthermore, your edits, whether unencyclopedic or not, are always or almost always adverse to Kerry, whom you plainly despise. Dealing with your constant assault tends to skew my edits. If there were someone here acting the way you do, who had already incurred several different penalties for misconduct, and who was acting disruptively while trying to make pro-Kerry edits, then I'd be spending more time fighting with that person, and my edits would look anti-Kerry. I suggest that you lay off the ad hominem arguments and confine yourself to addressing the merits of specific edits. JamesMLane 00:52, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

James, thank you for your well reasoned and polite response. Though I disagree with some of your points, I appreciate that you are dialogging. As for the section under discussion, as of today, here is how it reads:


 * ====First Purple Heart====
 * During the night of December 2, 1968 and early morning of December 3, Kerry was in charge of a small boat operating in and around a peninsula north of Cam Ranh Bay together with a Swift boat (PCF-60). Kerry's boat surprised a group of men unloading sampans at a river crossing, who began to run. When the men refused to obey an order to stop running, Kerry and his crew of two enlisted men opened fire, destroyed the sampans, and took off. During this encounter, Kerry suffered a wound from a small piece of shrapnel in the left arm above the elbow. Dr. Louis Letson described the injury in detail:


 * "What I saw was a small piece of metal sticking very superficially in the skin of Kerry's arm. The metal fragment measured about 1 cm. in length and was about 2 or 3 mm in diameter. It certainly did not look like a round from a rifle.


 * I simply removed the piece of metal by lifting it out of the skin with forceps. I doubt that it penetrated more than 3 or 4 mm. It did not require probing to find it, did not require any anesthesia to remove it, and did not require any sutures to close the wound" -


 * The shrapnel was removed and the wounded area was treated with bacitracin antibiotic and bandaged. Kerry returned to duty the next day on a regular Swift boat patrol. Kerry was later awarded his first Purple Heart for this injury.


 * Kerry's opponents, including the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, have contended that this wound was too minor to merit a Purple Heart and that Kerry used this injury as his first of three to game the system and obtain early release from his Vietnam service. However, Kerry's wound did qualify him for consideration under Naval guidelines for a Purple Heart, and a subsequent Naval review reiterated their position that Kerry's award was correctly given

As it stands now, this section is fair to both points of view and there is no need to chop this apart towards shunting details to any subsidiary "controversy page". In brief, it outlines the core of this issue in a NPOV manner, with details that are accurate enough to be fair to both views.

Are you willing to accept this section as it is now, or not? If not, then please tell me line by line, why not. Thanks. Rex071404  216.153.214.94 03:19, 30 October 2005 (UTC)


 * No, this version is unacceptable. It gives extensive attention to Letson's statements without noting that he's not mentioned in the Navy records. This version thus impliedly accepts that Letson is being truthful about having treated Kerry. Also, it goes into too much detail, delving into exactly the sort of dispute that led to the creation of the daughter article. When you found it convenient, you have inveighed against having too much detail:
 * "Oh and since Gamaliel want to stuff the past ArbComm issues in my face, let's not forget what one of the key ArbComm findings was 'User Rex071404 and others including the complaining witnesses, Neutrality, Wolfman, and JamesMLane have in the heat of the US Presidential election focused on the article John Kerry and carried the issues of the campaign into the encyclopedia article in detail.'."
 * Therefore, to the extent we have an outside opinion on this subject, from the ArbCom, it is that we should all take care to avoid cluttering this article with details that were being bandied about during the campaign.


 * I see nothing wrong with the version that was essentially stable for more than a year:
 * "During the night of December 2, 1968 and early morning of December 3, Kerry was in charge of a small boat operating in and around a peninsula north of Cam Ranh Bay together with a Swift boat (PCF-60). Kerry's boat surprised a group of men unloading sampans at a river crossing, who began to run. When the men refused to obey an order to stop running, Kerry and his crew of two enlisted men opened fire, destroyed the sampans, and took off. During this encounter, Kerry suffered a shrapnel wound in the left arm above the elbow. The shrapnel was removed and the wound was treated with bacitracin antibiotic and bandaged. Kerry returned to duty the next day on a regular Swift boat patrol. Kerry was awarded his first Purple Heart for this injury."
 * If we were to lengthen that paragraph by adding material related to the dispute, we would certainly have to try to be fair to both sides. That goal would rule out presenting Letson as if he were an unquestioned eyewitness. Therefore, we'd have to amend your version by making it even longer and even more detailed. Some editors have expressed concern that the article is already too long; one way we manage its length is to leave the back-and-forth about SBVT's charges to the daughter article. What you've done is to add a lot of unnecessary detail to the military service section, and then removed it on the grounds that it makes the article too long, thus leaving the main bio bereft of any information about one of the most important aspects of Kerry's life. JamesMLane 09:07, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

You have got to be kidding. I have been trying to trim this article for weeks and have been block at every turn. Even the smallest minutiae is re-inserted (ie: "favorite cookies"). The spin-off I did makes perfect sense. This discussion regarding 1st injury/Letson needs to move to: Talk:John Kerry's military service and I am copying it there now. Rex071404  216.153.214.94 09:13, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

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