Reply #99: independentsforkerry.org [View All]

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Kerry enlisted in the Navy after his graduation from Yale in 1966, volunteering for action in Vietnam.

Duty called, Kerry maintains - it was as simple as that. "It wasn't as if John went there gung-ho," his younger brothers Cameron, told me. "He wasn't burning to go fight in that war." After Officer Candidate School, the twenty-four-year-old lieutenant junior grade, offered himself up for Operation Sea Lords, an effort to control the rivers of the Mekong Delta via constant and often improvised, "swift boat" patrols gunning up and down the Mekong River and its tributaries. As a skipper, "John Kerry always went for the throat," recalls former crewmate Del Sandusky. "He wanted to be in the middle of the war, wherever it was." In February 1969, a Viet Cong on the shore of the Bay Hap River ambushed Kerry's boat with a B-40 rocket, blowing out the windows. Kerry turned the gunboat toward the fire and thumped it into the bank. Ten feet from shore, the VC popped up with rocket launcher aimed at the boat; rather than firing, though, he turned and fled into the mangroves. Kerry leapt from the gunboat's bow, chased him behind a hooch, and killed him. Two weeks later, on the same river, an under water mine exploded beside Kerry's boat, wounding his arm and catapulting one of has crewmen into the water. The riverbanks exploded with machine gun fire, and snipers took potshots at the man splashing in the river. Kerry turned the boat back upriver, straight into enemy fire, and with a bleeding arm he pulled the man back aboard: "It didn't matter to us that he wanted to get into the shit." Sandusky says. "We knew he would always get us out of it."

Several weeks later Lieutenant (j.g.) John Kerry boarded a civilian flight home. His four months in-country had yielded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts (two arm wounds and a bullet in the leg), but something else, too: dead friends, disillusionments, and uneasy doubts about the war from which he was returning. On the long flight across the Pacific Kerry was jolted from sleep by a nightmare - one of a thousand such dreams that would place him back in his gunboat on a Jungle river at night, diving to the deck during an ambush, screaming, "Down, down, get down, move," nightmares that even decades later would send him bolting from his bed and crashing into furniture. On that plane home, passengers shifted gingerly away from the uniformed officer, averting their eyes from his. Something is wrong with me, Kerry thought. But it wasn't just him.

AND THEN COMES THE AFTER. It's never far from him, the war. At one point, I ask him if it's like Chekhov's old playwriting adage: If there's a gun onstage in the first act, it must go off in the third. "No, not like that." he says quietly, but the gun always seems to appear, as unpredictably as the nightmares that still dog his sleep (though less frequently now, he says). In Boston, Kerry and I are discussing has poetry, a longtime and private avocation. He begins buoyantly, "I don't claim to be a poet at all; I just like the expression, the form of it," he tells me. "I like Pablo Neruda, who's a great romantic. I like all the Romantics: Percy Shelly and Byron and Keats. I like Kipling; I like to mimic some of that doggerelish stuff. Oh gosh, obviously Yeats. I used to read poetry on airplanes - to get the images, you know? When I was in high school we formed a poetry group. I don't even know if we had a name, though it was not the Dead Poets Society." It's a joke, but then Kerry slows, and for a moment he seems to amble away somewhere inside his mind, to a place friends and family say he often returns. "One of them," he says, "was a buddy who was killed in Vietnam, Peter Johnson," and the buoyancy is gone. It wasn't a joke after all.

Peter Johnson, Dickie Pershing, Don Droz, Robert Worthington...it was with those ghosts in mind that a twenty-seven-year-old John Kerry, in April 1971, wearing his Navy fatigues, took a seat before the senate Foreign Relations Committee. Behind him in the gallery, a longer-haired and scragglier contingent of fellow veterans jostled for space, craining their necks for a better view. In the preceding days, more than three thousand such veterans - organized under the banner of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and with Kerry as their spokesman - had marched on the Capitol, many in wheelchairs, many on crutches, clamoring for an end to the war from which they'd returned. Kerry, a telegenic speaker with unimpeachable war-hero credentials, had been tapped to give public voice to those nightmares.