pp. 63-64 Operation RAW (acronym for Rapid American Withdrawal--letters spelled war backwards), Labor Day weekend 1970, "performance of guerrilla theater on a stage nearly 100 miles long." This was the march from Morristown, NJ to Valley Forge, PA. The next two major demonstrations were the Winter Soldier Investigation and Dewey Canyon III.
"Senators George McGovern, Edmund Muskie and Congressmen John Conyers,Jr., Paul O'Dwyer, and Allard Lowenstein had all endorsed the action. But the biggest coup of all was getting Jane Fonda to agree to address the rally in Valley Forge."
A crowd of 10,000 was expected. The crowd was actually 1000. The VFW staged a counter demonstration. Mark Lane, Kennedy assassination researcher, warned the VFW they wouldn't stand a chance trying to stop the demonstration, and threatened that the Vietnam vets would kill them if they tried.
"Jane Fonda stood on the bed of an old green pickup truck to address the assembly at Valley Forge. In place of the usual political bunting, the vets had hung black zippered canvas bags, which resembled body bags, over the edge of the makeshift speakers' platform; on each of the bags was stenciled the words: 'YOUR SON?' To great cheers--more than she would ever hear from American veterans again--she began: 'This is not my country right or wrong. It's my country, but what is wrong must be changed. I can't escape the belief that My Lai was not an isolated incident but rather a way of life for many of our military.'"...
"She'd spent the last couple of years getting an intense political education from the likes of Mark Lane, a Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist, and Huey P. Newton, one of the most dynamic and brilliant leaders of the Black Panthers. Echoing Newton, she told reporters at Valley Forge that 'any black militant in this country who isn't armed is a fool' and that she doubted 'if change can be non-violent.'"
Fonda's speech was followed by Mark Lane, vet Bob Hoffman, actor Donald Sutherland, Allard Lowenstein, and Rev. James Bevell of the Southern Leadership Conference who asked people to join him on a march to the United Nations, to present the secretary general with a petition charging the United States with genocide in Southeast Asia.
pp. 70-71: "But by all accounts, the man who most stirred the vets was one of their own, Lieutenant (j.g.) John Forbes Kerry, a Silver Star winner who had gotten an early discharge to run for Congress from his native Fourth District in Massachusetts."
"Kerry had had an action-filled tour as a swift-boat commander in Vietnam, where he was severely wounded in an ambush, gaining three Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star, in addition to the Silver Star, which by all rights should have been a Navy Cross. But Admiral Elmo 'Bud' Zumwalt Jr. had intercepted the paperwork for Kerry's Navy Cross and changed it to a lesser award so that he could approve it himself (the Navy Cross requires congressional approval) and pin it on Kerry a few days later, as an 'impact award,' to boost morale."
"Kerry could not help but sense the irony of his being a war hero, since he had not wanted to fight in the war at all. Before Vietnam, he had led a life of privilege. His father, a lawyer, had worked in the foreign service, and John had been schooled at St. Paul's and Yale, with summers in Europe. Exceedingly tall and rangy, Kerry was a good athlete, and at Yale he had distinguished himself as an orator; in fact, he delivered the senior oration at his graduation in 1966, criticizing the draft and the war. He had been planning to pursue his graduate studies abroad when he received a notice from his draft board that he would soon be called. Though he questioned the policy behind the war, he did not see either jail or exile as a reasonable alternative for himself; besides, he says he 'believed very strongly in the code of service to one's country.' So he enlisted in the Navy, to see for himself what was going on and at the same time to stay out of combat. To that end, he volunteered for assignment on one of the swift boats--short, fast aluminum craft that were used for patrol duty off the Vietnam coast. Two weeks before he arrived in Vietnam, the Navy began changing the deployment of the boats, sending them up the rivers instead to ferret out pockets of Viet Cong that were guarding the waterways for their own use. Still, Kerry shrugs off the attribution of heroism. In the action of February 1966 for which he was awarded the Silver Star, he maintains that he simply got tired of being ambushed. 'The riverbank just erupted with small weapons fire,' he recalls. 'We were caught in it. So I turned all the boats right into it and we charged the riverbank--beached right in the positions, ran ashore, and ran right over the ambush. Then I took one boat upstream with me, and we took [were hit by] a B-40 rocket on the boat, and I guess I just got pissed off again, and I went straight into the rocket position. I wanted to see some of the enemy and fight 'em. So we did, and we beat the hell out of 'em. We went into this village and captured a lot of weapons and people and VC flags.'"
"Stationed in New York a few months later, in the spring of 1969, Kerry, showing the same gumption, went directly to Admiral Walter F. Schlech Jr. to request the early discharge. Before he had gone to Vietnam, he had spent hours debating the value of the war and the help we were allegedly giving the Vietnamese people, but once in combat 'the answers hit [him] pretty hard, right in the face.' He was appalled by 'the lack of strategy, the stupidity of many of the missions, the apparent lack of political will by this country to pursue [the war], the lack of a commitment to the men who were fighting in the field, [and] the absurdity of some of the losses that we were incurring,' as well as 'the corruption within the [South Vietnamese] government.' 'Everything added up,' he says in hindsight, explaining how 'this kid coming back from nowhere,' who 'wasn't known from Adam,' suddenly found it in his heart to run for Congress in order 'to make an antiwar statement.' Schlech, who disagreed with Kerry's position on the war, agreed to set him free from the Navy. 'To his enormous credit,' remembers Kerry, 'he understood where I was coming from, and he said, 'That's a fair request. You've served honorably, and you've done your duty, and I think you have a right to exercise your judgment.' Kerry's discharge came through on January 1, 1970."
"Kerry never did run for Congress that fall, but it wasn't because he got cold feet. His immediate target was the incumbent Democrat from the Fourth District, Philip Philbin, who had been consistently hawkish about the war. Kerry had felt that a highly decorated Vietnam vet such as himself running against Philbin would 'make clear the need to take action...lend to the debate and help in the process of ending the war.' But a coalition of antiwar forces had already come up with a redoubtable opponent to defeat Philbin in the Democratic primary, Father Robert F. Drinan, S. J., the dean of Boston College Law School and a widely known critic of the war. Kerry immediately pulled out of the race to make way for Drinan, and eventually became chairman of Drinan's campaign."
"While working for Drinan, Kerry, who was still 'so anxious to tell the story...just burning with this anger' to make the public aware of 'what was going on,' began speaking about his war experiences to various civic groups...."
p. 72: "That day at Valley Forge, Kerry told the cheering crowd: 'We are here because we above all others have earned the right to criticize the war on Southeast Asia. We are here to say that it is not patriotism to ask Americans to die for a mistake, and that it is not patriotic to allow a president to talk about not being the first president to lose a war, and using us as pawns in that game.'"
Note in the passage from pp. 70-71 the difference in the story about the medals (which by all rights should have been a Navy Cross. But...), and the description of the battle. My single quotes are direct quotes in the book from Kerry. Kerry is listed in the acknowledgements as one of many who gave personal interviews to the author. The whole section I quoted is footnoted as from interviews with John Forbes Kerry. The interviews took place in late 1988 and early 1989.
There's much much more in the book. The book includes the original upside-down flag pic of the six vets that appears on the cover of "The New Soldier." The original is attributed to George Butler. There is also the pic of a uniformed and beribboned Kerry walking with Ted Kennedy. The caption reads, "Senator Ted Kennedy and John Kerry discuss the Supreme Court injunction against Vietnam veterans sleeping on the Mall and whether the vets ought to risk violating it, Washington, D.C., April 21, 1971." Photo by Sheldon Ramsdell. On page 565 is a pic of the VVAW marching on the Capitol. "Photo courtesy of the VVAW Archive."
Hmmm, they have an archive!
Note that Kerry's interviews with the author late in 1988 and early in 1989 were the basis for these passages.