Disabled sailor tackles regatta

“I WAS strangled in Hawaii in late March 1974, on my way to Vietnam. My assailant was a former Green Beret I was interviewing in my hotel room. He left me for dead.”

Kerry Gruson, 60, a news assistant in the Miami Bureau of The New York Times, survived the attack but remains profoundly disabled as a result of the encounter.

More than 30 years later, she uses a wheelchair or walker to get around slowly. Her voice is unnaturally soft; her hands shake and she needs a battery of medicines to enable her body to function. But, while her body doesn’t work as it should, her mind is as alert as ever.

“That accidental encounter with a crazed Vietnam veteran left us both victims of the war,” says Kerry, who plans to sail in the ACCBank Cork Week, which starts on Saturday.

A graduate of Harvard, she has worked as a journalist for 38 years, mostly with The New York Times where her father, Sydney, was vice-chairman. She was 26 when she was attacked.

“I don’t remember the attack and I don’t remember stumbling out of my Waikiki hotel room, which is initially what saved my life. Later, my mother, who is also a journalist, pieced together some of the details of what I have come to refer to as my ‘accident’. She said a policeman saw me weaving down the boulevard, stumbling from one tree to the next. Thinking I was on a bad drug trip, he took me to Honolulu’s main hospital.”

Kerry survived not only to tell the tale but to rebuild her life.

Two years ago, she was the only disabled American sailor among 8,500 from all over the world competing in Cowes Week in the south of England, off the Isle of Wight. This year, she is heading for Cork Week.

She uses a Tackmaster2, a device that allows her to operate on the tiller unimpeded and enables Kerry to “tack” (change direction) while still having the option to sit on either side of the boat.

Kerry, who suffers from anoxia, started sailing in 1991 at Shake-A-Leg Miami, a non-profit organisation. She now teaches at the facility, which caters for people with disabilities and disadvantaged youth. The organisation helps children and adults with physical, developmental and economic challenges, liberating them from the realm of imagination into experience.

Despite her fragility, Kerry remains upbeat: “Sometimes I still feel that fate has dealt me an undeserved raw deal. But then I think that, in a way, I am lucky that so many of my problems are diagnosed and known and thus capable of being solved.

“I know, too, that if, by some miracle, I suddenly regained all my abilities, my life would still not be gloriously free of trouble.”