Oh good heavens:

National Review's Byron York has tracked down Louis Letson, the physician who treated Kerry for the wound that led to his first, disputed Purple Heart. Letson, in writing, describes the examination:

"I have a very clear memory of an incident which occurred while I was the Medical Officer at Naval Support Facility, Cam Ranh Bay.

John Kerry was a (jg), the OinC [officer in charge] or skipper of a Swift boat, newly arrived in Vietnam. On the night of December 2 [1968], he was on patrol north of Cam Ranh, up near Nha Trang area. The next day he came to sick bay, the medical facility, for treatment of a wound that had occurred that night.

The story he told was different from what his crewmen had to say about that night. According to Kerry, they had been engaged in a fire fight, receiving small arms fire from on shore. He said that his injury resulted from this enemy action.

Some of his crew confided that they did not receive any fire from shore, but that Kerry had fired a mortar round at close range to some rocks on shore. The crewman thought that the injury was caused by a fragment ricocheting from that mortar round when it struck the rocks.

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.

Kerry fired a mortar at some rocks he was close to? Brilliant. What was he, bored?

Look. We all do stupid, self-damaging things. It happens. We're not always as brilliant as we'd like to think. Home videos prove this.

But to apply for a purple heart? On that basis?

A bandaid?

Really now.