Bunker Mulligan "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." ~Mark Twain

I got this email from a friend, a former B-58 Hustler crew member:

From a Humane Society questionnaire answered by John F Kerry :
Quote: 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.

This can’t be believed, can it?

Kerry’s boat was “heading up a river”, which means the boat was moving. I assume Naval doctrine in those days called for ships to maintain a minimum distance from one another in order to minimize damage and casualties in the event one ship draws hostile fire, hits a mine, etc. How far away from Kerry’s boat was this other boat – 20 yards, 50 yards, 100 yards? Even if they weren’t strictly adhering to doctrine, there ought to have been some separation; there’s no reason I can think why one boat would be running upriver with another boat tied to its stern.

So, we have Kerry claiming that his ship hit a mine that generated enough explosive energy to propel this dog (the weight of the dog is unknown, so I can’t do the physics calculation… hey, I’m not a physics major so I couldn’t do the calcs even if I knew the weight of the dog) some 40 yards or so through the air, without hurting the dog? Unlikely.

Now, what are the odds of the dog being catapulted from Kerry’s moving boat and landing on another moving boat? It must have been the perfect combination of launch angle, distance, explosive force, trajectory and the like for that to have happened. I know for a fact that this is no easy thing to do: think how hard it is to win that silly carnival frog game – and that’s from a stationary platform. Maybe this happens in the movies, but not in real life. Wait a minute, in the remake of Starsky & Hutch, they tried launching a car into the air trying to land it on a moving boat. They failed miserably. So, I take it back, it doesn’t even happen in the movies.

And, Kerry’s account refers only to “picking ourselves up” after the explosion. There’s an explosion so forceful that it launches the dog into near earth orbit and all Kerry and his crew have to do is ‘pick themselves up’? Again, I’m no physics major, but wouldn’t it reasonable to think that an explosion with that much force wouldn’t have seriously damaged the boat? What about his crew – granted they’re all likely to have been bigger than the dog, and perhaps better able to absorb the shock, but none of them were hurt, knocked out, knocked overboard?