Do you have any pets that have made an impact on you personally?
When I was serving on a swiftboat in Vietnam, my crewmates and I had a dog we called VC. We all took care of him, and he stayed with us and loved riding on the swiftboat deck. I think he provided all of us with a link to home and a few moments of peace and tranquility during a dangerous time. One day as our swiftboat was heading up a river, a mine exploded hard under our boat. After picking ourselves up, we discovered VC was MIA. Several minutes of frantic search followed after which we thought we'd lost him. We were relieved when another boat called asking if we were missing a dog. It turns out VC was catapulted from the deck of our boat and landed confused, but unhurt, on the deck of another boat in our patrol.
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Comments about this BS tail...
Everyone knew Kerry was a pet lover, but this is the first we've heard of his having served in Vietnam."
I read the questionnaire, and the story is full of holes.
This is the first I have heard of Kerry having a dog in Viet Nam, not that he couldn't have. It just seems to be too coincidental that he first mentions it in a questionnaire to the Humane Society. Who knew?
So lets see what I believe.
First, a mine exploded 'hard under our boat'. Why didn't unlucky Kerry get wounded a fourth time? That was a regular occurrence where he was concerned. Why didn't anyone else get hurt? The explosion was hard enough to catapult a dog so far away that Kerry and crew searched for several minutes without finding him.
Finally another boat 'called' (so far away that they had to use a radio) and asked about a missing dog. If the other boat was in CTF-115, Kerry's squadron, they would have known the dog belonged on Kerry's boat and would have said they had found it or something similar.
If the dog were catapulted off of the boat to another one in a realistic sense, the boats would have had to be running way too close together, and they would have yelled at Kerry immediately, not called minutes later, that they had the dog, if Kerry couldn't see it already. Realistically, they would not have been running side by side and that close together, and should have been running in trail, at least if they thought like grunts do, so they wouldn't mask each others fire to the side.
Another thing, Swift boats had thin hulls if I'm not mistaken. It shouldn't have taken much of a mine to put a hole in it, which Kerry doesn't mention or didn't notice since he was looking in the water for a dog rather than looking for holes in his boat or checking to see who was hurt or looking for ambushers who might show up, drawn to the sound.
Maybe this is a fish story, not a dog story.
The Democrats ran on 'Honesty' and I told 'em at the time they would never get anywhere. It was too radical for politics. The Republicans ran on 'Common Sense' and the returns showed that there were 8 million more people in the United States who had 'Common Sense' enough not to believe that there was 'Honesty' in politics." --Will Rogers
