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.