Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to It sure sounds like it though.

Grenades are very indiscriminate, Mary Anne

Seriously, you can hurt yourself with your own grenade as easily as hurting someone else. That's a self-inflicted wound and it happens quite often. It's no different from being hit by a richocheting bullet. Purely an accident, but self-inflicted just the same. It's a far cry from someone deliberately injuring themself to get out of combat.

From what everyone from the Swiftboat vets on down has said, it appears Kerry's first Purple Heart came as the result of fragments from his own grenade. In his book, "Tour of Duty", there's a reference from a date about a week later where he said that they "had not yet been under fire." If true, then his first Purple Heart was unearned because it didn't happen in combat. Any wound, even a self-inflicted one, during combat does qualify for a Purple Heart. No wound outside of combat qualifies, otherwise people would be getting them for training accidents.

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