Douglas Brinkley - Tour of Duty

T his book tells the story of one young Americans Vietnam War odyssey. It is not meant to be a biography of John Kerry or an authoritative history of that era. Everybody who fought in Southeast Asia has his or her own highly personalized story to tell. The same is true of the concerned citizens who took to the streets to protest the war. While hundreds of primary and secondary sources were drawn upon and more than one hundred people were interviewed for this book, the narrative is based largely on journals and correspondence Kerry kept while on his tours of duty. He provided me complete and unrestricted access to these documents and permission to use them as I saw fit. He also granted me twelve hours worth of interviews at his home in Boston and office in Washington, D.C. He, however, exerted no editorial control on the manuscript.

E very public life has its point of origin. For the twenty-seven-year-old John Kerry, that dramatic moment came two years after he shipped out of the rivers of South Vietnam, in a committee hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. For it was in that grand, high-ceilinged chamber that the young Navy veteran posed what he saw as the fundamental question about the Vietnam War to the senators on the Foreign Relations Committee and beyond them to the nation at large: How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

And John Kerry was among the lucky ones who did not die, and who came back whole. The 1966 graduate of Yale University had enlisted in the Navy because it had seemed the right thing to do at the time. Following Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island, and specialized training in San Francisco and San Diego, Kerry had been assigned to the guided-missile frigate U.S.S. Gridley, aboard which he visited Vietnam for the first time in March 1968. His job as ensign was to make sure the Gridley stayed perfectly maintained, but it was tedious duty and Kerry was in quest of more adventure, independence, and responsibility. He wanted to get out of the Black Shoe Navy and have a command of his own. So he applied for Swift boat school at the Navys training facility in Coronado, California, and after it, he returned to Vietnam in November 1968, this time as a lieutenant (junior grade) in charge of his own patrol craft fast These boats, each manned by a junior officer and five enlisted men, had become the vanguard in the gambit of Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., the new commander of U.S. Naval Forces, Vietnam, to forestall Viet Cong infiltration into South Vietnams Mekong Delta and Ca Mau Peninsula.

Between December 1968 and March 1969, Kerry led PCF-44and when that boat got shot up, another Swift, PCF-94on scores of dangerous raids up the rivers and canals of South Vietnams Mekong Delta, including the dangerous territories along the Cambodian border. In the process the young skipper was wounded three times. Between his second and third Purple Hearts, on February 28, 1969, Kerry beached his boat in the center of an ambush and killed a Viet Cong sniper armed with a B-40 rocket-propelled grenade launcher, thereby winning the prestigious Silver Star for valor in combat. Two weeks later, despite an injury to his right arm, the young lieutenant went back to save a drowning colleague under fire, this time earning a Bronze Star for bravery as well as his last Purple Heart. Any way one looked at it, John Kerry returned home in April 1969 a genuine war hero. But I had my arms and legs, he pointed out. Many of them I was speaking for did not.

Kerry was one of more than a thousand American veterans who descended upon Washington for five days of antiwar protests late in April 1971. The demonstration was dubbed Dewey Canyon III, in mocking reference to the Nixon administrations Operation Dewey Canyon I and II efforts against Hanois supply lines from Laos in 1969 and 1971. Most of the protesters belonged to Vietnam Veterans Against the War an organization headquartered in New York that claimed upward of eleven thousand members nationwide. Those veterans who made it to the nations capital for the rally were bitter. None had tried to dodge the draft, filed for conscientious-objector status, or joined the National Guard. No one could question their patriotism. Phillip Lavoie of North Dighton, Massachusetts, for example, arrived wearing his olive-drab fatigues and forearm crutches; he had lost both his legs in Vietnam to a land mine that exploded beneath him while he was on a reconnaissance mission. Lavoie would tell Associated Press reporter Brooks Jackson that he had come to participate in the mass protest against U.S. policies in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia because he cared about America. I love this country, man, Lavoie had explained. Like, wow, its really beautiful. But were not fighting for democracy over there. Were fighting so some people in this country can have more money.

Robert Muller, a former Marine Corps first lieutenant, likewise had come to the nonviolent protest in his wheelchair out of love for his country. Like all the veterans congregating in Washington, D.C., he was a survivor, an antiwar warrior in the apt phrase of Robert Jay Lifton, the Yale University professor of psychiatry. The Nixon White House was afraid of Muller and the other veterans because they refused to have amnesia about what had occurred in the rice paddies, elephant grass, mangrove thickets, and murky rivers of Vietnam. I got shot through the chest, Muller explained. The bullet went through both lungs and severed the spinal cord. And I was immediately rendered paraplegic, from the fifth thoracic vertebra down. I was conscious for maybe ten seconds after I was hit, and my first thought was, Im hit. I dont fucking believe it. Im hit! That was the first thing that went through my head. The second thing was, My girl. And my family.