Rusty loved both his careers and commented often that he was fortunate in that he went from taking care of the young kids USAF to taking care of the old kids the residents of his nursing homes. Everyone who knew Rusty knew his passion in life was helping others. Rusty attended St. He loved woodworking, playing golf with his children and grandchildren and spending time with his family. Also the family wishes to thank family and friends for their on-going prayers and support. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
Sign in. Privacy Policy. Password recovery. Recover your password. In an interview with The Post, Hibbard stood by his remarks but declined to elaborate on them. Kerry told Brinkley for his book that he and a crew were patrolling an enemy area north of Cam Ranh Bay when they set off a flare and startled Viet Cong drug smugglers. The Kerry campaign provided a copy of a Navy medical report saying he received treatment for the wound the next day. Ret to Duty. Everyone put their life on the line, and everyone said, 'There [but] for the grace of God go I.
In an interview, Brinkley said Kerry "was not medal-hunting. Within a month, he was assigned a new crew and was skippering the PCF on the Mekong Delta, where he faced the most combat and received most of his citations. In February , he took shrapnel in his left leg, earning his second Purple Heart. The next month, he killed the Viet Cong who was holding the rocket launcher -- for which he earned the Silver Star.
During Kerry's bid for re-election to the Senate in , the media raised questions about whether the enemy was down and wounded when Kerry killed him. For the first time in 27 years, the men of PCF gathered that year in Boston to help defend their former skipper and credit him with saving their lives that day.
They said this was the situation: They were ferrying troops up a river when they started taking fire. Kerry ordered his boat turned to face the bank and charge the enemy. As they approached the bank, the Viet Cong jumped up and began running away from their boat. Several of the crew believe the Viet Cong had been wounded; they all believe that he could have been trying to get far enough from their boat so he could fire a rocket at it. Kerry, they said, chased him down and eliminated a grave potential threat.
In March , Kerry was wounded again, this time taking shrapnel in the buttocks and right forearm when a mine exploded near his boat. Under fire from the riverbank, Kerry gave orders to get out of the area. But in the getaway, Kerry realized that he had lost a man overboard -- Rassman, whom Kerry had been transporting out of the area. He ordered the boat back.
Kerry directed his gunners to provide suppressing fire," says the citation for Kerry's Bronze Star, which he earned on this mission, along with his third Purple Heart, "while from an exposed position on the bow, his arm bleeding and in pain, with disregard for his personal safety, he pulled the man aboard. Rassman nominated Kerry for the Silver Star -- and to this day, he is perplexed that it was downgraded to the Bronze.
That was stupid. Rassman had not seen Kerry for 35 years when he called the campaign in January and offered to work a phone bank. Within a day, the campaign flew him to Iowa and had him talking to voters and the media in Iowa. By the end of March , four months into his assignment, Kerry had "moved to a place that was very clear and deep opposition," he said.
He had also lost a number of friends to the war, but his thinking about the war went beyond his grief. A long list of realities hit me in the face," Kerry said. With three Purple Hearts to his name, he was allowed to leave Vietnam. Returning stateside, he served as a personal aide to an admiral at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
He wanted to speak out about what he saw and what he knew, he said, but felt he could not do so in uniform. Seven months later, he requested early release from duty to run for Congress, and by January Kerry was released. The two started dating. She caught on fairly quickly that Romano was an addict, and she put pressure on him to stop. Meanwhile, he started work — construction and house painting and other temporary jobs — and he started taking art classes at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.
He got a job there designing promotional posters for bands who played at the student union. After a few quit-and-relapse cycles, he began to wean himself off opium, and within about a month he was clean. Mike Romano was one of the lucky ones. Or was he? White House researchers continued to investigate the drug problem among returning soldiers, and a puzzle started to emerge. Following up with the troops who returned home, the investigators called them eight to twelve months after their return to ask about their ongoing drug use.
During the war, 50 percent of soldiers had been casual users, and 20 percent had become seriously addicted, meaning that they used drugs more than once a week for an extended period of time and experienced withdrawal symptoms chills, cramps, pain if they tried to stop. But when investigators conducted follow-up, what they found blew their minds. Only 1 percent of the vets were still addicted to drugs. That was essentially the same rate as existed before the war.
The feared, drug-fueled social catastrophe had not occurred. What had happened? People are incredibly sensitive to the environment and the culture — to the norms and expectations of the communities they are in. We all want to wear the right clothes, to say the right things, to frequent the right places. Because we instinctively try to fit in with our peer group, behavior is contagious, sometimes in surprising ways. Imagine that your job was to design an environment that would extinguish drug addiction.
You could take drug-addicted U. S soldiers, drop them into this environment, and feel confident that the forces within it would act powerfully to help them beat their habits.
Think of this environment as an antidrug theme park, and assume that you can spend as much as you want to construct it. What would your theme park look like? And you would provide rich environmental cues — sights, songs, food, clothes, and homes — that remind the former soldiers of their prewar, drug-free identities.
When Romano relocated to Milwaukee, his environment changed, and the new environment changed him. As the Romano story shows, one of the subtle ways in which our environment acts on us is by reinforcing or deterring our habits.
But of course we also have plenty of good habits: jogging, praying, brushing our teeth. Why are habits so important? They are, in essence, behavioral autopilot. They allow lots of good behaviors to happen without the Rider taking charge. This makes sense — our habits are essentially stitched into our environment. Research bears this out. According to one study of people making changes in their lives, 36 percent of the successful changes were associated with a move to a new location, and only 13 percent of unsuccessful changes involved a move.
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