Sitting duck in the Mekong: John Kerry's war years

Washington Monthly, April, 2004 by James M. Perry

Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War By Douglas Brinkley William Morrow, $25.95

If there is one main reason Democratic primary enters have flocked to Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), it is the belief--greatly encouraged by his campaign--that his valiant service in Vietnam will give him the stature necessary to defeat President George W. Bush in November. Between now and then, however, the country will wrestle with two big questions about Kerry's Vietnam experience.

First, why exactly did he choose to fight? Why would someone who publicly professed (as Kerry did as a college student) great skepticism about the war, volunteer--not only to serve, but also to take on one of the Navy's most hazardous assignments, engaging the Viet Cong in the Mekong Delta." And why, once in theater, did he fight with such boldness that he earned a chest full of medals and the admiration of his more gung-ho colleagues?

In his new book, popular historian Douglas Brinkley provides a wealth of material to intensify this debate. He has mined Kerry's wartime correspondence; interviewed friends, family, fellow veterans, and the senator himself; and woven together a fascinating (and flattering) tale of Kerry's Vietnam years. Yet, the book provides no definitive answer to these questions; Kerry's motives and reasons, then as now, remain complex.

The second big question is why, after having fought the war so energetically, did he go on to protest it with equal vigor? Here, the book gives a much clearer answer: Kerry's Vietnam experience fully confirmed his earlier suspicions. The particular combat missions his superiors sent him on were--like the war as a whole--ill-conceived, bloody, and pointless.

"I have been thinking a lot about Vietnam and the reasoning of the uncommitted soldiers," Navy Ensign John Forbes Kerry wrote his parents early in 1968. "How one can oppose the war and still fight it?"

Kerry at the time was serving in the Pacific aboard the destroyer USS Gridley. A few days after writing this to his parents, he learned that his best friend, Dick Pershing, grandson of famed World War I general "Black Jack" Pershing, had been killed in combat in Vietnam. Kerry was devastated, writing to Julia Thorne, who would become his first wife, that he was prepared to do everything he could "to bring to people the conviction of how wasteful and asinine is a human expenditure of this kind."

Yet instead of rounding out his service in the relative safety of the Gridley, Kerry volunteered to command one of the little boats called Swifts, and so went face-to-face with the Viet Cong. The Navy didn't offer many assignments more dangerous than that.

Why did he do it?

Much of what moved him was straightforward patriotism--"[H]e came to realize that now, more than ever, he had to perform his own duty to his country," Brinkley argues, "even if it meant dying in the waters off South Vietnam." Kerry also felt a surge of fury over Pershing's death. The enemy had killed his friend, "and he was ready to kill them if he had to," Brinkley says.

But there were yet other reasons. Kerry, notes Brinkley, was a "qualified risk-taker ... He enjoyed 'extreme' sports before they had the name: downhill racing, surfing, parasailing, full-impact ice hockey, motorcycle riding, you name it," and also felt, Brinkley believes, "inexplicably drawn to combat." Like many a young man, he wanted to know how he would react under fire. But what most comes across in Brinkley's telling is Kerry's abiding intellectual curiosity. He wanted to know everything he could about war generally, and the Vietnam conflict in particular. He read voraciously, everything from Erich Maria Remarque's World War I trench warfare novel, All Quiet on the Western Front to the latest Vietnam dispatches from journalists like Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam. He kept a detailed diary of time in the service, often tape-recording his thoughts and observations, with some idea of eventually writing a book about his experiences.

Like his hero, John F. Kennedy, the Brahmin-born Kerry had a passion for small craft, having learned the art of sailing as a teenager along the Cape Cod coast. (Indeed, during his senior year in high school, while dating Jacqueline Kennedy's half sister, Kerry spent a memorable afternoon watching the America's Cup race with the president aboard the Kennedy family yacht.) Swift boats bore more than a passing resemblance to the PT boats Kennedy had piloted in World War II. "Although built a generation apart, both crafts were speedy and versatile," writes Brinkley. "Either could afford the young officer in charge a chance to test his seafaring mettle, without too much supervision--to be of the U.S. Navy, but also apart from it." Upon seeing a Swift boat for the first time, in Danang harbor, Kerry admitted in a letter to his parents, "I thought jealously of my own desires to have one."

The parallels between Kerry and Kennedy--both of them JFKs, both Ivy Leaguers, both senators from Massachusetts, both Navy combat heroes--are indeed eerie. But seemingly small differences between the crafts they commanded suggest big differences between the wars they fought. Kennedy's now-legendary wooden-hulled PT-109 was designed and built with a specific purpose: to torpedo and sink enemy ships, the larger the better. The aluminum-hulled Swift boats, by contrast, were designed and built in a hurry by a company that specialized in water taxis for offshore oil rigs. They were eventually used for combat purposes, for which--despite due addition of three .50-caliber machine guns--they had never been