John Kerry enlisted in the Navy in February of 1966, months before he graduated from Yale. In December of 1967 Ensign Kerry was assigned to the guided-missile frigate USS Gridley; after five months of service in the Pacific, with a brief stop in Vietnam, he returned to the United States and underwent training to command a Swift boat, a small craft deployed in Vietnam's rivers. In June of 1968 Kerry was promoted to the rank of lieutenant (junior grade), and by the end of that year he was back in Vietnam, where he commanded, over time, two Swift boats. He received the Purple Heart three times for wounds suffered in action, and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Navy's Silver Star for gallantry in action. Kerry was discharged from the Navy in January of 1970, and soon became one of the most prominent spokesmen for the antiwar movement.
The following excerpts are drawn from Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War.
An Incomprehensible Moment
On the afternoon of February 26, 1968, the twenty four-year-old Ensign John Kerry was on watch on the bridge of the USS Gridley. His ship had just left Midway Island en route to the Philippines as part of a convoy that also included the USS Turner Joy, made famous by the August 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident. The Gridley's executive officer approached Kerry and asked if he had a friend named Pershing. There could be only one reason for the question, and Kerry did not want to hear it. His stomach went hollow, and he slumped onto a railing for balance. "I knew immediately it was all over but even when I read the telegram it took moments to sink in," Kerry wrote to his parents of the instant he learned—from his future wife Julia ("Judy") Thorne—that his close college friend Dick Pershing was dead. "Then I just ... cried—a pathetic and very empty kind of crying that turned into anger and bitterness. I have never felt so void of feeling before—so numb."
The dashing twenty-five-year-old Pershing, a second lieutenant with the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division, had been killed in combat on February 17 near the hamlet of Hung Nhon, 400 miles north of Saigon. His platoon had been slogging through mud in search of a lost comrade when the ambush occurred. "Shift over to the left!" Pershing was said to have shouted as he tried to wave his men away from the danger. Just then a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into a dike a few feet in front of him, hurling Pershing into the air, his body torn apart by grenade fragments. He died instantly. The charmer of John Kerry's circle had become a statistic: another American soldier had given his life for his country.
Pershing's death brought out a profound sadness in Kerry. Memories of his liveliest friend kept flashing through his mind, especially of the boyish mischievousness that bordered on irresponsibility and had so perfectly balanced Kerry's serious leanings at Yale. In the pursuit of fun, nothing had been off-limits to Dick Pershing. Yet when it had come time for Pershing to serve, the life of the party had offered himself unhesitatingly. By the time he got to Vietnam, Pershing had remade himself into the perfect paratrooper, rock-solid in body and stalwart in spirit. And now he was gone—and for what? "Pershing's death was just one more major-league souring for John, of figuring out what the hell Vietnam was all about," explains David Thorne, another Yale classmate (and Julia's twin brother), who was still in Navy training off the coast of San Diego when he got the news. "Why did Dick have to die for this? That's what John wanted to know."
Kerry blamed the Johnson Administration. The very week Pershing was killed, General Earle G. Wheeler, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made his eleventh inspection tour of South Vietnam. Kerry suspected that Wheeler would return with the same message as always, telling the American people that their great nation was winning another war, and write up some overoptimistic reports for the White House. What Wheeler wouldn't mention was that 543 U.S. soldiers had been killed the week Pershing died. Nor would he note the 2,457 wounded.
It pleased Kerry, later, to learn that Dick Pershing had been buried next to his legendary grandfather, the World War I U.S. Army general John "Black Jack" Pershing, in a scenic spot in Arlington National Cemetery. That seemed right. It spoke of a great continuum of duty, honor, and country. But Kerry also could not help feeling that some in the Pentagon were doing their servicemen a lethal injustice by sending a new wave of young people to die in a conflict that at least a few in the Defense Department did not believe could be won—as Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara's resignation in November of 1967 clearly indicated.
Once the fact of Pershing's death had sunk in, Kerry, as he tended to do, poured out his feelings on paper. "With the loss of Persh something has gone out of me," he wrote to his parents at the end of February. "Persh was an unbelievable spark in all of us and we took for granted that we would always be together—go crashing through life in our unconquerable fashion as one entity. Now that is gone in one incomprehensible moment. Time will never heal this—it may alleviate—but it will never heal."
In a similar but even more passionate vein Kerry expressed his anguish in a letter to Judy Thorne.
There are so many ways this letter could become a bitter diatribe and go rambling off into irrational nothings. I don't know really where to begin—everything is so hollow and ridiculous, so stilted and so empty. I have never in my life been so alone with something like this before. I feel so bitter and angry and everywhere around me there is nothing but violence and war and gross insensitivity. I am really very frightened to be honest because when the news sunk in I had no alternatives but to carry on in the face of trivia that forced me to build a horrible protective screen around myself. Something that has never happened to my feelings before. I could not even allow myself the right to think about what was happening as much as everything inside me wanted to. I was standing watch on the bridge when the executive officer called me over and after an ominous pause asked if I had a friend called Pershing. I just stood there frozen and then read your telegram knowing already in my heart the Godawful wasteful stupid thing that had happened ...
Right now everything that is superficial and emotional wants to give up and just feel sorry but I can't. I am involved in something that keeps pushing on regardless of the individual and which even with what has happened must, I know deep, deep down inside me, be coped with rationally and with strength. I do feel strong and despite emptiness and waste, I still have hope and confidence. There is a beast in me that keeps pushing me on saying Johnny you can't let go because of this—Johnny you find some sense from this—Johnny you are too strong to stop now—something keeps me going harder than before. Judy, if I do nothing else in my life I will never stop trying to bring to people the conviction of how wasteful and asinine is a human expenditure of this kind. I don't mean this in an all-consuming world saving fashion. I just mean that my own effort must be entire and thorough and that it must do what it can to help make this a better world to live in. I have not lost faith—on the contrary—I have gained a conviction and desire greater than ever before—and now, a sense of inevitability—a weighty fatalism that takes worry out of the small actions of late and makes the personal much more important.
The world I am part of out there is so very different from anything you, I, or our close friends can imagine. It is filled with primitive survival, with destruction of an endless always seemingly pointless nature and forces one to grow up in a fast—no holds barred fashion. In the small time I have been gone, does it seem strange to say that I feel as though I have seen several years experience go by. Wherever we go we see B-52's flying overhead going and returning from strikes on the Guam-Vietnam route. Two aircraft carriers are now in port to reload ammunition, rest the crew, and repair airplanes and the talk is of pilots lost and [air] strikes that were successful for the number of lives taken or unsuccessful for the number of lives lost—both the same and both creating the same hole and sorrow for some unsuspecting person somewhere. Small boats tear around the harbor practicing maneuvers, we train nearly every day for any eventuality. Everything is hot and fast—there is no joking like there was back in California. No matter where one is—no matter what job—you do not and cannot forget that you are at war and that the danger is ever present—that anyone could at some time for the same stupid irrational something that stole Persh be gone tomorrow.
snip
As he walked along the Danang waterfront, Kerry was startled to see Maoist graffiti spray-painted on walls, and shocked by the gruesome sight of a pile of dead Vietcong awaiting mass burial. "The thoughts of what must have taken place turned my stomach," he wrote in a letter to his parents. For 2,000 years the Vietnamese had been warding off invaders—Chinese, French, Japanese—and now he was one of the latest wave, one of what the novelists Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer had called Ugly Americans in their 1958 book set amid the conflict in Southeast Asia. Kerry had read history books about how Vietnam's would-be conquerors had always been vanquished in the end, and it seemed to him inevitable that his own nation was next in line to lose. The first U.S. Marines had landed at Danang in March of 1965, and now, some three years later, the United States was already losing its grip. Kerry watched the local peasants matter-of-factly going about their business of cultivating rice as deadly explosions of U.S. ordnance echoed off the nearby Marble Mountains. His letter to his parents continued,
Every so often, there would be an open field where there were a few huts and people working in it with their pant trousers rolled up and their large hats covering up expressionless faces. How could these people really believe we are helpin them? It seemed so utterly crazy—the idea of all this modern equipment fighting for an ideal that meant everything to those who were fighting but that could so obviously mean nothing to those ... whom the fighting was supposedly for. I know it is easy to be emotional but I can't help getting the feeling that their faces seemed to say go away and let us alone.
The main theme throughout Kerry's correspondence from Vietnam during that visit was how disturbing it felt to be an unwelcome soldier in a foreign land. What he found difficult to handle was the hostile stares at his uniform. One woman he met, who worked for the Red Cross, told him that more than a thousand Vietcong were living among them in Danang. Exaggerated or not, such reports made Kerry nervous, as he wrote home:
Wherever I went and young Vietnamese men would look at me I grew scared. There really was no way to tell who was who. You could be in a room with one and not know whether he was really a Charlie or not. It became easy to sense the distrust that must exist in the outlying areas. How could one really fight in the fields and know whether at any time the men beside you were not going to turn tail and train their guns on you. Whom did you begin to trust and where did you draw the line. Another ludicrous aspect of the war.
snip
The commander of the PRU that Kerry's boat had been assigned to support boasted that five of his men had been decorated for bravery by Ho Chi Minh himself. Now, for money, they were shooting their former comrades-in-arms, local peasants, and anyone who broke curfew or trespassed. This policy of recruiting a mercenary army of proven traitors and vicious criminals instilled deep doubts in Kerry about the eventual success of the United States in Vietnam. The outright encouragement of enemy defections to the ARVN caused great resentment among many South Vietnamese army regulars, who were envious of the money lavished on the defectors by the U.S. government. Why should the regulars fight, if enemy deserters came out so far ahead? What's more, the regulars never knew if the defectors could be trusted—many defectors, in fact, later returned to the Vietcong. If "Vietnamization"—the phasing out of U.S. forces as their responsibilities were turned over to the South Vietnamese—meant stacking the army with enemy sympathizers, it hardly seemed likely that the South Vietnamese would ever be able to sustain, much less win, the war on their own.
Kerry wondered about all of this as he and his crew helped the mostly ex-Vietcong of the PRU land in a supposed guerrilla stronghold on his Swift's opening night in the riverine war. After the PRU had disappeared into the dense mangrove trees lining the bank, Kerry beached his boat on the mud, just a few hundred yards downstream from where the unit had landed. "There we sat silently, waiting to help if called upon," he wrote later in his war notes. "Hours passed slowly by. Then, late at night, a red flare shot into the sky from the PRU's position. It meant 'Emergency Extraction'—get the PRU's out as fast as possible." Two patrol boat river craft (PBRs) that were anchored close by also sprang into action. Before Kerry and his crew could get their Swift off the mud, "the PBRs had disappeared up a small estuary." The skipper of one was on the radio shouting to headquarters, "Emergency Extraction requested—moving in now—Emergency Extraction requested."
The Swift boat's young lieutenant had scant idea what he and his men were supposed to do. "The disorganization was incredible," Kerry wrote in his war notes. "We had never worked with the PBR's before. The Operation Order given to us that morning contained no contingencies for Swift boats." Kerry's Swift came under fire, but the crew couldn't tell from where. In the rush to get out of there, the boat ran aground. Finally the PBRs reappeared. Kerry's account of that night's events continued.
They had a sampan in tow and were moving very slowly, confident that the shooting was over for the evening. [Boatswain's Mate Stephen W.] Hatch nursed the Swift alongside the PBR. I jumped aboard to talk with the Chief Petty Officer in charge. "What happened?" "The PRU's were patrolling through the area when they came on a hut with two people in it. Man and a woman. PRU's went in and found the woman writing a letter to her VC boyfriend. So they took 'em into custody. As they were comin back they spotted a sampan with four people in it. They took 'em under fire and that's it." It seemed like an every day occurrence to him. "Were the people killed?" I ventured timidly. "Hell yes. PRU's don't miss when they shoot."
"But the people in the sampan didn't fire or anything?" Just shooting them seemed incredible.
The Chief talked on. "Doesn't matter. They shouldn'a been there. Besides, one of the PRU's says they had guns but that the sampan tipped over and the guns were lost in the water."
Then, Kerry wrote, he looked over at the young woman they had detained, "who was squatting in the rear of the PBR."
She was defiant. She sat very calmly, watching the movements of the men who had just blown four of her countrymen to bits. She glared at me. I wondered about her boyfriend who was fighting us somewhere else. The PBR crew said that the men in the sampan got what they had coming to them but I felt a certain sense of guilt, shame, sorrow, remorse—something inexplicable about the way they were shot and about the predicament of the girl. I wanted to touch her and tell her that it was going to be all right but I didn't really know that it would be. Besides, she wouldn't have accepted my gesture with anything but scorn. I looked away and did nothing at all which was really all I could do. I hated all of us for the situation which stripped people of their self respect.
Kerry returned to his boat, and as it moved out to the Soi Rap River, he looked back and saw the PRU mercenaries talking animatedly, no doubt discussing the lucrative killing they had just done.
One of them mimicked the expression and the position that one of the dead had assumed at the instant he had become one of the dead. It had been easy. No shot had been fired at them. Besides, the dead didn't matter at all. They were now just four more casualties of war. The United States would now pay each of the PRU's X number of dollars for the people they had killed. And the total body count was now four higher than before.
http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:YR7eNCE4jvoJ:www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/12/brinkley.htm+Elmo+R.+Zumwalt,+Jr,+john+kerry&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
True, and we suffered the consequences of our own mistakes..
But, we and the country didn't deserve the consequences of hair brained women putting Clinton and Gore in office.....
Most men had the likes of Clinton/Gore figured out by the time we had second grade recess fights with the phonies exactly like those two frauds....
Women fell in love with the cute smile and biting his lower lip........and the lips of the woman he raped.
Face it -- Women are suckers for a cute liar!
Semper Fi
That's suppose to be about girly boy Kerry? Sounds like mega propaganda to me. According to many posts here by his commander, he was a fruit cake they wanted to get rid of. He killed anyone that moved. Three medals for boo boo's , and he got out easy. 2 scratches and a bruise and he was home free. I'll bet the real hero's from Nam will be pissed when they see his military records after all the lies he's been telling. I would be!