Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  The Gulf of Tonkin—both the incident and the congressional resolution—had been in the headlines just a few weeks before I came back to New Haven for early soccer practice in late August of ’64. But I didn’t dwell on it. I had a season to get ready for, friends to catch up with and a long list of extracurricular activities. Besides, it was a presidential election year. Lyndon Johnson was poised for a historic landslide against Barry Goldwater, and Johnson’s words on the evening news were crystal clear: “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”

  By the spring of ’65 he was doing exactly that—and my circle of close friends had decisions to make in a hurry. Suddenly, the draft had meaning for all of us. Our lives were thrown topsy-turvy. A whole lot of guys who hadn’t considered the immediacy of military service now confronted that choice. I was one of them—a distracted student who had thought about journalism or business or possibly the Foreign Service—and suddenly I had decisions to ponder. Graduate school, study abroad? There were options and each of us thought about them, but ultimately, many of us came back to a shared belief: We were kids of World War II parents. We’d been Cold War teenagers. We believed in the ethos of the age, of President Kennedy’s challenge, put forward in his 1961 inaugural address, to “pay any price, bear any burden.”

  But first, with my stash of encyclopedia earnings from the summer before, David Thorne and I decided we would go to London, pick up a cheap set of wheels and drive where whim and fancy took us. We had already planned to visit Spain, which neither of us had been to, but we also had the specific notion of taking in the Festival of Saint Fermín in Pamplona. I wanted to tune into the nostalgia of The Sun Also Rises, go to some of the places Hemingway had described and see how they measured up. I had read a lot about the running of the bulls. Experiencing a few bullfights would satisfy a lot of curiosity, an excursion into a different, romantic slice of life. With responsibility looming ahead, we reasoned that soon we might not have similar opportunities to be quite so footloose. So off we went.

  Once we arrived in London we embarked on a search for the perfect ride. David had the brilliant idea of trying to find a retired London taxi and make that our traveling home. There was something magical about the look and sound, and the spacious passenger area would make it perfect for piling in people and stuff. Besides, how many London cabs have ever been seen outside London? The idea was appealing to our wallet and our vanity.

  With a few phone calls and several cabbie conversations, we found the London graveyard for taxis. Spread out before us in a remote London suburb was this huge lot of black cabs supposedly in their final resting place. The lot master thought we were nuts, but he helped us pick out a beast with soul and an engine that worked.

  We tooled around London for a couple of days, waving off people who tried to hail us. We wanted to get to Le Mans for the “24 Hours,” the world’s oldest sports car endurance race, then in its forty-second year and still going strong today. One night around midnight, realizing we had some ground to cover to make the race, we looked at each other and simultaneously decided we had to get out of London immediately. Our further adventures needed to begin.

  I remember driving out of Knightsbridge and Mayfair almost precisely at midnight. David drove the leg from London to Dover while I slept curled up on the comfortable back seat of the cab. To this day I remember the smell of leather and the gurgling chugging of the engine. We had made a reservation on the first ferry of the morning. It was a blustery day, with a roiling, churning sea—a classic channel crossing. Literally, as fast as the ferry cleared the breakwater, the motion of the boat became so violent and so irregular that myriads of people were queuing up for the loos in order to throw up. The whole ferry became an upchuck disaster zone. David and I were both seasoned sailors so we luckily avoided seasickness, but the stench of vomit and the pools of puke covering the floor in and near the toilets were enough to inspire abandoning ship. I have never before or after seen so many people throwing up at one time.

  Arrival at Le Havre in France did not come too soon. From there we drove directly to Le Mans, listened to the deafening roar of engines well into the night and early morning, and then drove quietly to Les Essarts, where we intended to stay for a few days before heading south to Pamplona and the Costa del Sol of Spain. We set up a deck chair next to the driver’s seat in the cab and it became the seat of choice. It was a luxury to sit with feet extended out onto the left fender, reading a book or watching the countryside roll by in the open air. I was reading a Winston Churchill biography, which prompted us to detour slightly to take in the invasion beaches of Normandy en route to Les Essarts.

  David had never been to these beaches. I had been privileged to go several times, beginning with the visits with my family when we first came to Europe.

  The cemetery on the Omaha Beach bluff, a patch of deeded American land in France, is sacred. The story of D-Day is one of an extraordinary gift of freedom and sacrifice. It takes my breath away. I would soon learn what it is like to be shot at, even to know you will be shot at well before the ambush takes place, but to this day I am convinced that the unknown element of a shot that comes from a mangrove or bunker on a river in Vietnam is light-years away from the experience of knowing that at any moment a door will drop on a tiny boat and half the people—perhaps all—who are with you will be dead in seconds. Think about it. Think about what it’s like to see a whole Higgins boat, a landing craft, next to you blown up as you approach the beach. Think about the huge bluffs ahead of you in the haze of smoke from weapons seemingly everywhere, with gigantic concrete fortresses, each filled with machine guns, mortars and artillery. Think about being pinned down and trying to find cover where it is nearly nonexistent. Still, those guys on that beach pushed on, up the bluff, over the hill and painstakingly, ultimately, on to Berlin. Almost 2,500 Americans died on Omaha and Utah Beaches and in the paratroop drops behind the lines just on D-Day alone. David and I moved quietly among the crosses and Stars of David, in total awe of what that small piece of America means to all of us.

  Next stop was Les Essarts. Within days of our arrival the taxi had acquired a name—Baxer. It was derived from the hit song “The Name Game,” which had come out the year before. “Taxi” produced “Taxi, Taxi, bo-baxi, banana-fana fo-faxi, fee-fi-mo-maxi—Taxi!” “Baxi” became “Baxer.” And, yes, we were slightly nuts, but we were as untethered as we’d imagined and hoped we’d be at the outset of this exotic adventure.

  Baxer gained an immediate, strong following at Les Essarts. On one occasion, about ten cousins piled in the back on the floor, the jump seats and the bench seat. We were like the clown car in the circus, and before long we were a circus—pointless jokes, laughing hysterically, being generally obnoxious. We were happily cruising along when Baxer decided to stop and freeze in the middle of the road. The emergency brake wire had snapped, engaging the brake in a locked on position. Baxer just plain wasn’t moving anywhere. Traffic started to pile up behind, in front and beside us since we were in the middle of a major intersection.

  Pandemonium ensued. Cousins piled out trying desperately to manage the emotions of stymied drivers who had gotten out of their cars and were surrounding Baxer and us. Epithets were flying. I left the task of responding to the angry motorists to the cousins who spoke perfect French. One cousin was out in the middle of the street trying to direct traffic around us, her arms waving in one direction and then the next, looking more like a cheerleader than a traffic cop. Whatever she was doing contributed mightily to the chaos.

  During this circus going on around us, we discovered two huge proboscises protruding beneath Baxer’s chassis. Needless to say, despite the fact that whatever was down there was sort of tubular in shape, someone immediately joked about Baxer’s big balls. We found a way to lower them, which lifted the rear wheels off the ground. Then we were able to get under the car and free the emergency brake. We pushed Baxer to the sid
e of the road, where the brake was repaired; exactly how, I have no memory. We avoided bodily harm by hordes of extremely upset French drivers wondering what kind of British assholes had upset their day. All in all, a great adventure, and we avoided American culpability by hiding behind Baxer’s classic British body.

  From Les Essarts, with a few stops along the way, we drove south to the Pyrenees and on to Pamplona, where David and I would see if Hemingway was right about the bulls, the bullfights and the fiesta. How many people have made that same voyage, I don’t know, but I am sure that nobody had more fun.

  The Festival of Saint Fermín began in medieval times and included bullfights even then. Running with the bulls started around the seventeenth century, and the first bullring was built in the middle of the nineteenth century. There were always foreigners taking part in the festivities, but the main attraction became hugely popular after Hemingway discovered the fiesta. Ever since the publication of The Sun Also Rises, the more modern festival has steadily developed into the extravaganza it is today.

  When David and I arrived in 1965, the fiesta still held much of its original charm. I think we were up most of the night, eating, drinking and carousing with people we had never met before. There were students, the young and old, tourists from all over Europe, the United States and Canada, and, of course, loads of Spaniards who delighted in this centuries-old celebration.

  The spirit was contagious—and exhausting. In the wee hours of the morning we decided for sure we would run with the bulls. We found our way to the beginning of the run, where hundreds of young guys were decked out in their white pants and shirts with red bandannas. David and I were conspicuous for our blue jeans and denim shirts and lack of bandannas.

  The bulls were due to be released from their pen at 7:00 a.m. We originally positioned ourselves at the beginning of the narrow street heading toward the bullring, but then we felt we wouldn’t get the full run so we moved closer to the paddock where they release the bulls. We thought that because we were training for our senior-year soccer season, we were both in good shape and could outrun any bulls. Little did we know what was in store for us.

  A rocket flare was fired into the air warning of the release of the bulls. There was a stir among the runners, with some starting to take off. I remember saying to David not to go yet because we’d get too far ahead. Right then, a second flare went off signaling the release of all the bulls from the pen. We started running. I turned around and saw these muscular black bulls charging up the hill. I yelled at David to run for his life. I thought we were surely going to die.

  I glanced back several times while running at full speed, only to see that I was definitely not going to outrun these monsters. I began checking exit strategies. Several doorways were already crammed with people. Nowhere to go. I had lost track of David and was certain I was imminently going to be gored, so I leaped for the next doorway, bounced off the bodies already jammed in it and fell to the sidewalk. As I looked at the horde of four-legged beasts hurling toward me, I curled up into the smallest fetal ball I could and waited for the worst.

  Lo and behold, the bulls were not yet isolated or distracted, and they were so fixated on rushing along that they jumped right over me. I looked up to see the entire herd had gone past. David was off to the right of me on the other side of the street. He had succeeded in getting crunched with other bodies into a doorway, protecting himself and his camera. Not wanting to miss out on getting into the bullring, I got up and immediately started sprinting after them—an entirely new twist on running with the bulls. In fact, at one point, I grabbed the tail of one of the oxen released to guide the bulls, and I got pulled along. I was the last person to make it into the ring when they shut the doors behind me.

  When the bulls run into the ring, they run straight through and into a corral where they will await the bullfights that evening. Meanwhile, the bullring fills up with the runners, who await the subsequent release of small bulls or cows who charge through the crowd, throwing anyone in their way up in the air to the delight of the spectators. David made it into the arena with a second wave of runners after the bulls were in the corral. We were standing there comparing notes when a small bull with tennis balls on its horns was released into the melee. It charged full speed into the arena. We watched while one person got pummeled with a direct hit. He flew across the bullring and lay motionless on the ground. We watched people tossed above the crowd, one after the other, to descend to a crescendo of olés and cheers. At one point I had a near miss but brushed against the passing bull and got covered in bullshit—a probably worthy metaphor for the whole scene. It was great fun, assuming you were not among the injured.

  We were young and on an adventure. There is no good rationale for wanting to do such a dangerous thing. It’s emotional and romantic and, yes, there are other adjectives, but of course there’s always a potential consequence of daring to do something risky. But that’s life . . . there are plenty of things we choose to do that don’t make sense. This obviously was one of those escapades. To this day, I am glad we did it, but I have no intention of recommending it to my grandchildren.

  The best was yet to come. After changing out of our putrid clothing, we explored Pamplona, ate a great lunch of paella with an appropriate amount of wine. Then we joined the throngs heading to the bullring for the evening fights. It was a first for me, and I was curious. I had read a lot but never seen a live fight. Bullfighting today is controversial. Some traditional sites have banned it—Barcelona for one—only to have courts overrule the decision. I was fascinated by bullfighting and wanted to understand the various primal forces that were at play in the course of this no-holds-barred public display of man against beast. Could the artistry of the matador be so powerful that it superseded or rendered inconsequential any bloodlust in the spectators? I cannot deny I find aspects of the ritual—the courage, the grace and the metaphors—all intriguing, but I understand the dissenters. On this evening, in this particular place, however, there were no dissenters. The arena was jammed. The excitement level at a fever pitch.

  I believe the matador was Manuel Cano Ruiz—El Pireo. He enthralled the crowd, putting on a display of elegance and abandon that kept our hearts in our throats, the olés rising in the dusk with increasing intensity. The whole stadium swayed with every pass, a low-throated olé growing into a massive shout of approval for bull and man. Together, bull and matador performed pass after pass as if choreographed. The courage and daring of each matched the other. At one point, El Pireo was down on his knees, drawing the bull between him and the wall of the arena, with not a millimeter margin of error. His passes were each closer than the last, each performed with the elegance of a ballet, with bull and matador both executing their moves with determination. In the end, you could almost say there was a level of mutual respect.

  When the fight was over the arena exploded in thunderous applause. Seat cushions were thrown from every level, piling up in the arena. Live chickens, roses, hats—all found their way to the sandy ground. Nothing was spared. Then, unsatiated, the crowd itself spilled into the arena, placed the matador on its shoulders, and proceeded to march him to a series of bars, where he was serenaded with drinks raised on high. It was an evening of complete abandon.

  I don’t know who lasts for seven days at the festival, but I know we didn’t. We decamped and headed for the Costa del Sol and its beaches, sun, water and no threat of bulls. After a few welcome days of genuine R&R, we headed back to Les Essarts via the most scenic, restful route we could find. There we settled in for a period, until David drove Baxer to the Thorne home in Italy. Within a few days Julia came from Italy to visit Les Essarts for the first time. We shared an extraordinary time exploring Brittany, enjoying the routine of Les Essarts and visiting the local markets. Too quickly the days of August slipped by. Julia flew back to Rome. I headed back to the States to spend some time with my family, then off to Yale for senior year.

  CHAPTER 3

  Raising My Right Hand
r />   MY FATHER WAS one of the very first cadets in 1939 who volunteered to fly in Europe. Even though tuberculosis kept him from combat, I still cherished the creased black-and-white photo of him in his Army Air Corps aviator gear and loved the story of my mother volunteering as a nurse to treat the refugees at Montparnasse before the Nazis rolled into the city. At Yale in 1965, my friends and I were still definitively the children of the Greatest Generation. They, and their times, passed on to us, almost unconsciously but inescapably, a sense of responsibility. We shared their idealism about service, duty and country. But we were only just beginning to focus on Vietnam. In the fall of 1965, we had questions but not objections. For all the back-and-forth in long discussions that went on most nights, for any flirtations with graduate school or studying abroad or time spent parsing the implications of the draft, when it came right down to it, my friends David Thorne, Dick Pershing—the grandson of General Black Jack Pershing, who had served as the commander of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I—Danny Barbiero and others felt compelled to serve.

  In my limited exposure to the war while at Yale, two men in particular influenced me. As I have mentioned, my roommate Harvey Bundy was the nephew of McGeorge and Bill Bundy—two standouts among President Kennedy’s “best and the brightest.” The Bundys were often hard to tell apart, with their round faces, slicked hair and thick glasses, but that’s where the comparisons ended.