Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  I’d met McGeorge in Washington, D.C., when Harvey and I went there to secure speakers for the Yale Political Union. He insisted we call him “Mac,” even though he was a famous presidential advisor who had lunch with the president every Tuesday. For all his serious public demeanor, he was pretty laid-back and funny in our meeting. As he showed us the Oval Office, he joked about our standing in the center of power. We also saw his office with his desk stacked high with papers and cables, evidence of what many called a “miniature State Department” run out of his cramped space in the bowels of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Mac was a man of enormous intellect—and he knew it. When he was an undergraduate at Yale, he wrote on an English test that the question was silly, answered his own question instead and still passed.

  Bill was no intellectual slouch but a little harder to get to know. He kept up the same buttoned-down appearance as Mac. He could famously dance the Charleston and do a brilliant imitation of his colleagues. The only thing you didn’t want to get wrong in front of Bill was politics. He was a Democrat down to his toes. When a newspaper once mixed up the Bundy brothers’ politics, Bill called and demanded a correction.

  While serving as assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, he visited Yale to deliver a speech. Afterward, he hung out in our room and drank a few beers with us. We grilled him about his perceptions of Vietnam. Nothing is more important, he said. Vietnam is the domino theory in action. He also told us that we were critical to this effort. The United States needed its young men to go serve abroad in the armed forces. “This is the thing to do, boys,” he said. “We need you.” Both Bundys left us with a personal sense of responsibility to serve.

  The question I was wrestling with wasn’t so much whether to serve, but which service. I have vivid memories of a few recent graduates returning for a weekend to visit with friends or take in a hockey game. I asked them about the choices they made. Each said the same thing: “Look, you’re better off choosing the service you want to go into than just getting drafted.” I’d always loved the ocean, ships and boats of almost any kind. I had been around the sea all my life. The die was cast. In the early fall of 1965, during the first semester of my senior year, I decided to apply to Officer Candidate School. Given the draft, getting into OCS had become more competitive. It felt like applying to college all over again but with even more paperwork. Happily, I was accepted. On February 18, 1966, I raised my right hand and took the oath to enlist in the U.S. Naval Reserve.

  As senior year chugged along, Vietnam crept more and more into our conversations—as a question, as an issue and, for many of us, a possible destination. Draft cards were now being burned on campuses. Midterms brought headlines about the Battle of Ia Drang Valley. We wondered how both sides could claim victory when American firepower was so dominant. As we headed into Christmas, in order to give diplomacy a chance, President Johnson announced a temporary halt to Operation Rolling Thunder—our sustained aerial bombardment of North Vietnam.

  As for me, I was heeding the words of Mark Twain, who said, “Never let school get in the way of an education.” I took those words to heart, even as we crept collectively closer to graduation, when we would exchange our mortarboards for helmets. I was consumed by a wonderful distraction: flying an airplane, practicing takeoffs and landings out at Tweed Airport, three miles outside New Haven.

  I had grown up on stories about my father in the Army Air Corps. When I first arrived at Yale in ’62, I learned that as World War I broke out, a group of students formed the first Yale flying club and volunteered to become America’s first naval aviation unit. They were our eyes in the skies, scouting enemy troop movements, locating mines, tracking submarines. On November 14, 1916, the Yale Daily News said they were doing the “work of the pioneer.” Because they believed they had a responsibility to country, some gave their lives to a cause bigger than any of them as individuals.

  Inspired by these early pioneers, by my father and by my friend and classmate Fred Smith, the future founder of FedEx, who already had his pilot’s license, I asked my parents for flying lessons as a graduation present. After a little hemming and hawing, they agreed. I think I made it hard for my father to say no. Getting a license required forty hours of instruction, a combination of learning landings and takeoffs, regulations, and cross-country and instrument flying. I loved every minute of it. The precision, the navigating, the test of crosswinds and landings—they all combined to appeal to boyish interests in all things with an engine and controls. I hate to say it, but the premise of the gift—graduation—was almost sidetracked by the gift itself. I wasn’t studying hard and wound up graduating with the worst one-year record of my four years.

  As if learning to fly wasn’t time-consuming enough, I spent a lot of time with my friends in one of Yale’s so-called secret societies, called Skull and Bones, and in the spring of senior year, I was inspired to play lacrosse, which I had last played at St. Paul’s and which I loved. I reported for spring practice as a walk-on and managed to make the team. It turned out we were one of the top teams in the country, beating Maryland, Johns Hopkins, UVA, UNC Chapel Hill and Army. We were ranked nationally until we lost a couple of key games, one of which I still remember for the goal I missed and the shot I failed to block. It’s amazing how more than a half century later you can remember every move and the agony of losing an important game.

  During the lull after final exams, David Thorne, Persh and I took a few days to decompress, sailing around Buzzards Bay and Nantucket Sound in my father’s thirty-nine-foot Concordia yawl. Lending it to us was a generous gesture, ratifying the notion that with graduation from college comes greater responsibility. Whether it meant that or was simply acquiescence to my pestering I never learned, but those few days were memorable. We sailed into Hadley’s Harbor at Naushon Island, where we anchored for the night. Because it was late May, few if any summer residents were on the island. Most houses were still shut for the winter. But we nevertheless conducted a vital raid on Mansion House, a big gray clapboard home that sits in a dominant position on a hill above the harbor. After dark, we snuck up to the house, climbed up on the roof above the front porch, found an unlocked window and proceeded to slip inside. Our objective was the “hat room” on the first floor, where General Black Jack Pershing, a friend of Cameron Forbes, had spent time recuperating and writing his report to the nation at the conclusion of World War I. When he completed his report, he left behind his hat, which now sits in a glass box. Dick was elated to touch this piece of his grandfather’s history. I was delighted to be able to show it to him, even if it meant breaking and entering to make it happen. We sailed on from there to Nantucket and then drove back to New Haven.

  The week before graduation, the size of the change about to consume us hit me with newfound clarity and even urgency. Months before, a committee had selected me to be the Class Day speaker based on my hastily written, clichéd, claptrap address of the kind usually associated with graduation exercises. I wasn’t excited about what I was about to share with my classmates. However, during the last week between final exams and graduation festivities, a certain reality started to sink in for all of us. About nine or ten of us, including Pershing and Thorne, had disappeared to an island in the St. Lawrence Seaway for a final fling at a rustic retreat—no electricity in the cabins, swimming in the river, a fair amount of beer, poker, lots of swaggering stories and trash talk.

  I remember looking around the table while it sank in that a number of us were about to be scattered to the different branches of the military, others off to graduate school of one kind or another. We started talking about the war. I was struck by how we were unable to articulate what American foreign policy was—even as we were about to become the pointed end of its spear. If you had told us as freshmen that four years later we were going to be carrying a gun and fighting the communists, we would have assumed that we’d be fighting in Havana or back in Europe countering the Red Army. Vietnam? How did that happen? How had two hundred thousand Ame
rican troops ended up supplanting the French in the jungles of what we still remembered as Indochina? And at some point, I realized I couldn’t go through with a run-of-the-mill speech on Class Day, when so much needed probing, poking and parsing. I stayed up in the cabin, furiously writing. My mind was roiling. I was conflicted but unsure of all the reasons why. I had lots of questions.

  At Class Day in the yard on the Old Campus on a beautiful, sunny afternoon, I posed some of those questions in my speech, even though I didn’t yet have all the answers. I concluded with a blanket statement summarizing the revolution to come: “We have not really lost the desire to serve. We question the very roots of what we are serving.”

  Later that afternoon, at each of our individual colleges, Yale handed us our diplomas. Our real education was about to begin.

  • • •

  I WAS DOG-TIRED—AND perhaps slightly hungover—when I got out of the car in Newport, Rhode Island, to report for Officer Candidate School. It was the morning after Harvey Bundy’s wedding, August 21, 1966, a little more than two months after graduation. I sleepwalked up to the induction center in my civilian clothes—my white shirt totally wrinkled, with open collar, no tie. I was immediately yelled at to “button those buttons!”

  This was the first of many seemingly arbitrary orders to come. I had little time to worry about how stupid my dress shirt looked buttoned up to the chin without a tie. I was in for a far more humiliating introduction to military life. Minutes later, I sat in the barber chair watching my hair being shaved off—all my hair. I could see scars I didn’t know I had. It was about a ninety-second haircut, and I was the baldest I’ve been since the day I was born. I do not have a head that was made for no hair. Thank God they didn’t have selfies in those days. If some think I look like a pterodactyl now, they should have seen me then. What a coming-down-to-earth moment, but I thought, What the hell, everyone else looks pretty ridiculous too.

  We all went through the supply lines, where we were issued a uniform, shoes and boots—or “boonies,” as we called them. I benefited enormously from the “mustangs,” the guys in my OCS class who had served as enlisted men. The mustangs taught me how to spit shine my shoes. I was stunned by how interminable rubbing with cloth, polish and water built up a gloss that made boots look like patent leather. They also taught me how to make my bunk the Navy way. We’d use a dollar bill to measure the fold over the sheet. No wrinkles. I mean, this had to be a bed you could bounce a quarter on, with the corners carefully tucked. It was all somewhat fascinating. Then we marched. Hup, two, three, four! Fall in, fall out. We marched everywhere at OCS. Even when you were alone, you had to march and turn square corners.

  Although I could have done without the shorn head, I otherwise took to military life. I was in Quebec Company 702, living in the World War II wooden barracks at Newport Naval Station. Everyone seemed to become a caricature of every character I’d seen in the movies, including a lot of guys who were serious and rigid, clean-cut and ready to go. Others had trouble getting things right. We were all just trying to get by, but we learned quickly that no one prospered unless everyone prospered. One of the great lessons of the service is that no one does well or right by doing alone. Teamwork is everything. It probably sounds corny, but it felt good to be part of a time-honored tradition, doing the same things, learning the same things, literally following in the footsteps in the same buildings and classes as the guys who won World War II.

  I enjoyed the new subjects—engineering, the steam cycle, navigation, naval history, military protocol—and learning basic tools of the trade about ships, flag signals and Morse code. We had contests with the other companies and spectacular relay races. It was a combination of indoctrination, psychological preparation, hazing, initiation and equalizing. It was breaking things down to build them up. Every movie you ever saw on boot camp got it right. At OCS the only reward for a good training session was more training. Despite two bouts of pneumonia, on December 16, 1966, I received my commission and I proudly walked out of the ceremony, received my first salute from the chief petty officer who trained us, gave him the traditional dollar for that honor and then set out for home to prepare for shipping out to my first duty station. After a family-filled, delicious Christmas Day lunch at Groton House, I headed to Treasure Island, California, a raw ensign who at least understood that what I had really earned was the right to learn how to be a good officer.

  My father planned to drive me from Hamilton to Logan Airport in Boston. Shortly after we set out, his car broke down. We limped into a gas station on historic, overly developed Route 1. We were running late. It looked like I was going to miss my plane. A guy was filling up next to us. I asked him, “Hey, man, can you drop me off at Logan?” Pa and I said our goodbyes right there at the gas station, impromptu and too hurried, as I made my way to the airport and flew to San Francisco with high hopes and a great sense of adventure. I was a twenty-three-year-old kid going off to duty on a ship. What was there not to be excited about? My father was more somber. He wouldn’t say it, but I knew he didn’t believe in the war. He didn’t see an end in sight. For the first time in my life, I could see that the sadness behind his eyes had something to do with me. He hugged me and off I went.

  When I got to Treasure Island Naval Station, it really hit me: “Holy cow, how am I this lucky? Is this for real?” Here I was on an island in San Francisco Bay, living in a place called the “bachelor officer quarters” with a room looking out at the profile of San Francisco with all its allures and, beyond it, the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge. The city was incandescent. The Summer of Love and kaleidoscope dancing were kicking into gear and, before I departed, were in full blossom.

  On January 3, 1967, I started Damage Control School in an old World War II wooden building on the island. It seems almost oxymoronic to say that studying damage control was a lot of fun, but it was. What a strange contradiction: I was training by day for something that could get me killed, and by evening I was enjoying the nightlife of San Francisco, far away from thoughts of danger or war.

  On day one I met another Massachusetts native assigned to the same program, a delightful guy with a thick mixed Boston-New York accent and a passion for talking politics. Paul Nace and I became fast friends, hanging out together both in and out of classes. We feasted on the sights, frequented Italian restaurants near Fisherman’s Wharf, replete with checkered tablecloths and endless supplies of wine. We took in the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore and heard them play some of my favorites, “He Was a Friend of Mine” and “Stage Banter.” Neither of us could believe that our early lives in the Navy were in fact what the Navy was all about. Perhaps someone had made a mistake, and we pinched ourselves to make sure the pleasure of our beginning days on active duty as young ensigns—the lowest officer rank in the Navy—was real.

  While at Treasure Island, Paul and I would occasionally rent a plane down the peninsula near Palo Alto. We would fly out to the beach or take friends sightseeing. Increasingly, the war was becoming a constant hum in the background of American life. I had developed a healthy skepticism about what was unfolding, but in early 1967, I wasn’t yet against the war. I was thinking about it in policy terms, reading Bernard Fall’s 1963 book, The Two Viet-Nams, and his more recent book from 1966, Viet-Nam Witness, 1953–66, and a lot of Graham Greene. I was particularly struck by the war reports from David Halberstam. They sounded grim. One account he’d written stayed with me for years to come: “The pessimism of the Saigon press corps was of the most reluctant kind: many of us came to love Vietnam, we saw our friends dying all around us, and we would have liked nothing better than to believe the war was going well and that it would eventually be won. But it was impossible for us to believe those things without denying the evidence of our own senses. . . . And so we had no alternative but to report the truth. . . .” It resonated as credible.

  I had no idea what Vietnam had in store for my generation, but I had my hopes. I hoped that the political differences would be resolved withou
t the war becoming even more intense. I felt a sense of curiosity and anticipation as a young person who thought about war in the context of World War II. Here I was in uniform training to fight. Guys were getting shot out of the skies and ambushed on the ground, and many of America’s finest were coming home in body bags. I felt a generic sense of risk, but as with a lot of young people, I was comfortable cloaking myself in a veneer of invincibility. And duty on a ship on the gun line was further removed than other assignments. The risk and the war still seemed far away.

  Each day at school, we’d put on our work uniform of khaki pants and shirts and drill down on the do’s and don’ts of damage control. A prime early focus was firefighting. Fire on a ship at sea is no joke. Fuel, ammo and other flammable items are everywhere. There’s no place to run, no fire department to call—we were the fire department. So, in training, we put on fireproof clothing, an oxygen breathing apparatus—a diver’s air tank—and a mask and then, when a wood and diesel fire was started, we manned incredibly powerful fire hoses to put it out. Holding one of the hoses was like trying to hold on to an agitated python. It was jarring to crawl through smoke and experience just how blinding and suffocating it could be. It was also intriguing to learn the practical realities of an electrical fire versus a chemical fire versus an oil-based or fuel fire. We took this part of schooling seriously. The training gave me eternal respect for firefighters because we learned firsthand how extraordinarily dangerous and physically demanding their jobs are.

  Our instructors hammered into us warnings about the immediate threat of fire at sea. As if to underline the lesson, the aircraft carrier Forrestal caught fire in the Gulf of Tonkin in July, not long after we left Treasure Island. A young naval aviator, Lieutenant (JG) John McCain, had to scramble out of his aircraft to avoid the inferno. Front pages across the country showed a crippled carrier—one of the most imposing ships ever built—trailing smoke, with its iron flank ripped open and crumpled like paper. Hundreds of young men had died in the flames. Even as it steamed into harbor a few days later, the sailors had to rush below from time to time to put out fires caused by smoldering mattresses in the ship’s mangled stern.