He was joined by crew members of a Navy gunboat he commanded during the that war.

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He was a gunboat officer on the Mekong Delta, earning the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts.

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Forty-one passengers drowned after the vessel, filled with people trying to flee Fidel Castro's regime, was rammed by a Cuban gunboat.

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Kerry served as a gunboat officer on the Mekong Delta, earning the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts.

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"It is the worst kind of 19th century gunboat diplomacy, " he said.

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Several ASEAN nations dispute ownership of islands with China, and China's preparedness to assert its claims with aggressive warnings and even a bit of gunboat diplomacy has worried smaller neighbours, notably Vietnam and the Philippines.

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The fourth kind of empire, suggests Mr Darwin, was a more informal one in places such as Argentina and Egypt where British influence was exercised through commerce, investment and shrewd diplomacy (occasionally of the gunboat kind).

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Talk about gunboat diplomacy!

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As well as providing food, communication and the occasional excitement when a Colombian gunboat looking for drug smugglers sails by, the river affords the best way to cool off in the heat so long as thoughts of little organisms that swim up the urethra can be set aside.

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Sometimes those controversies date back to before I was born. (Laughter.) And sometimes I feel as if in some of these discussions or at least the press reports we're caught in a time warp, going back to the 1950s and gunboat diplomacy and Yanquis and the Cold War, and this and that and the other.

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