"You know, I shot that guy," Bellodeau said, in response to an earlier Globe account that credited Kerry for his heroism.

"He jumped up, he looked right at me, I looked at him," the Kerry shipmate explained. "You could tell he was trying to decide whether to shoot or not. I expected the guy on Kerry's boat with the twin 50s to blast him, but he couldn't depress the guns far enough. We were up on the bank."

Only after the enemy soldier was wounded, said Bellodeau, did Kerry leap from the boat onto the beach and pursue him around the back of a nearby hut, where Kerry finished him off.

Bellodeau's account is particularly damaging because he was actually a member of Kerry's Swift Boat crew - the group of Vietnam veterans the Kerry campaign has repeatedly offered up to respond to criticism of his war record by other Swift Boaters who were on different boats.

Kerry's Silver Star citation credits him alone for taking down the Viet Cong soldier, making no mention whatsoever of Bellodeau.

"An enemy soldier sprang up from his position not 10 feet from Swift Boat 94 and fled," the combat award reads. "Without hesitation Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry leaped ashore, pursued the man behind a hootch and killed him, capturing a B-40 rocket launcher with a round in the chamber."

And Kerry has done nothing to incorporate Bellodeau's role in subsequent accounts of the encounter with the enemy fighter.

In a 1996 interview, Kerry makes no mention of the first shot whatsoever.

"It was either going to be him or it was going to be us. It was that simple. I don't know why it wasn't us - I mean, to this day. He had a rocket pointed right at our boat. He stood up out of a hole, and none of us saw him until he was standing in front of us, aiming a rocket right at us, and, for whatever reason, he didn't pull the trigger - he turned and ran."

When pressed for more details, the top Democrat said: "I just won't talk about all of it. I don't and can't. The things that really turned me I've never told anybody. Nobody would understand."

Editor's note: