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A few months ago on TV, Senator John Kerry, you angrily asked a detractor “Are you questioning my patriotism?” He responded that he was not, but I sure am. Rather than deciding which power tie you should wear each day, I feel you should be in an orange jumpsuit in a federal penitentiary for treason. You betrayed all my fellow Vietnam veterans, our POW’s, our loyal Montagnard allies (at the cost of many of their lives), and you betrayed me. Your entire political career was launched when you spoke before Congress in 1971, using eloquent testimony written by Bobby Kennedy’s...

SCOTTSBORO - A retired family doctor said Thursday he used a Band-Aid to treat the first of three wounds Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry received in the Vietnam War. Dr. Louis Letson of Scottsboro, who appears in a new 60-second TV ad questioning Kerry's war record, said Kerry came into his office at Cam Rahn Bay on the morning of Dec. 3, 1968, with an injury to his upper arm. Letson said Kerry told him he and a boat crew of about five enlisted men were on patrol that night when they began receiving small arms fire and he was...

<p>WASHINGTON - A former Navy doctor who says he treated Sen. John Kerry for the wound that led to his first Purple Heart in Vietnam said Tuesday that several of Kerry's crewmates told him at the time that the injury did not occur in battle. Dr. Louis Letson, a retired Alabama physician who was medical officer at the Naval Support Facility at Cam Ranh Bay, said the crew's "confided" story contradicted Kerry's own report in December 1968 that he was wounded during a river firefight between his Swift boat and Vietcong gunmen ashore.</p>

WASHINGTON — A former Navy doctor who says he treated Sen. John F. Kerry for the wound that led to his first Purple Heart in Vietnam said Monday that several of Kerry’s crewmates told him at the time that the injury did not occur in battle. Dr. Louis Letson, a retired Alabama physician who served as medical officer at the Naval Support Facility at Cam Ranh Bay, said the crew’s “confided” story contradicted Kerry’s own report in December 1968 that he was wounded during a river firefight between his Swift boat and Vietcong gunmen ashore. The doctor’s account surfaced Tuesday...

WASHINGTON — A former Navy doctor who says he treated Sen. John F. Kerry for the wound that led to his first Purple Heart in Vietnam said Tuesday that several of Kerry's crewmates told medical personnel at the time that the injury did not occur in battle.

Some critics of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry have questioned the circumstances surrounding the first of three Purple Hearts Kerry won in Vietnam. Those critics, among them some of Kerry's fellow veterans, have suggested that a wound suffered by Kerry in December 1968 may have made him technically eligible for a Purple Heart but was not severe enough to warrant serious consideration, even for a decoration that was handed out by the thousands. Whatever the case, Kerry was awarded the Purple Heart, and, along with two others he won later, it allowed him to request to leave Vietnam before his...

The Navy medic who treated Sen. John Kerry after he sustained his first battlefield wound in Vietnam said Tuesday that he thought that the injury had been inadvertently self-inflicted - raising new questions about why Kerry sought a Purple Heart after the incident. Contacted by National Review Online, Dr. Louis Letson recalled that Kerry insisted during treatment that he was injured by enemy fire while his swift boat was patrolling the Mekong Delta on Dec. 2, 1968. However, "some of his crew confided that they did not receive any fire from shore," the Navy doc told NRO. Instead, his...