Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  Yes, the threat of fire was real. It may not have been something I foresaw in the context of fighting the Vietnamese, but it was critical training for any naval officer. I was glad to get it under my belt.

  There were lighter moments too. In a certain phase of training we learned how to patch a hole in the side of a ship. We’d climb down into a damage control training simulator—a pretend destroyer engine room—and respond to the loudspeakers blaring: “Battle stations! All hands man your battle stations!” The simulator would fill up with water, bells would go off, and a guy on a loudspeaker would shout, “We’ve been hit, we’ve been hit—there is a major hole in the side. Patch it up now.” The water poured in like a river. Before we could catch our breath, it came up to our waists. Paul and I would look at each other: “How the hell did we get here?” We went from checkered tablecloths, Italian wine and good food in the evenings to being half up to our necks in water trying to stuff a mattress in a hole to keep an artificial ship from sinking in a swimming pool. After a particularly tedious day of training, one glance and we agreed, “Let’s get back to the Old Spaghetti Factory.” I think the point of this exercise was to show everyone how hard and scary it can be trying to patch a hole, which to my recollection no one ever did adequately. We were laughing most of the time and then enjoying a great night in San Francisco.

  Later in the spring of 1967, after damage control, Paul and I reported for nuclear, biological and chemical training, also on Treasure Island. NBC School is serious business, but my buddies and I still managed to laugh our way through some of it. We really couldn’t believe some of the scenarios thrown at us, threatening as they were. I’m sure the instructors weren’t thrilled, but Paul and I weren’t the only ones who thought we were tilting at windmills. We were going to Vietnam to fight guerrillas on the ground. As far as we knew, the Viet Cong didn’t have a Navy threatening the United States, but we were learning to patch up a ship after a torpedo strike. We shouldn’t have been so dismissive. The skills we were learning were important for any officer serving at sea, but we were a wee bit cynical about dreary training routines. It was easier to get through the day cracking jokes.

  The most realistic exercise in NBC School was donning chemical suits and being exposed to a whiff of CS gas, essentially similar to tear gas. Our throats burned like crazy. It was hard to breathe. Our eyes welled up. The instructors didn’t expose us for long. They weren’t trying to hurt us, just help us understand the effects. Message received loud and clear by everyone. We also learned how to measure radioactivity. I was fascinated to learn about nuclear attacks, the dimensions of throw weights, areas of damage and how you calculate the size and potential effect of mushroom clouds.

  In the early summer of 1967, the Summer of Love, Paul’s and my idyllic stay in San Francisco came to a close. Paul had to report to his ship, a landing ship tank (LST) that was going to deploy to Vietnam. I had more training. Paul and I said a sad farewell, pledging to reconnect when we got back to Massachusetts.

  • • •

  ON JUNE 8, 1967, I began my official tour of duty on USS Gridley. It was an introduction to hands-on responsibility. The first thing I noticed when I stepped aboard was how big and clean it was. The Gridley was a DDG, a new guided missile destroyer and a state-of-the-art ship. I was lucky compared with David Thorne, who had reported for duty aboard USS Maddox of Gulf of Tonkin fame. It was a destroyer built in 1943, long enough ago that we used to call it (not so affectionately) “The Shitbox.” Long Beach was home port for Gridley and Maddox, which were in the same squadron. Both our ships, and we individually, were slated for more training before deploying to the gun line off the coast of Vietnam.

  David’s quarters were incredibly cramped, but while in port he was permitted to find an apartment in town, which he did promptly. I was blessed. My quarters were spacious for a combat vessel. I shared it with a married lieutenant who lived onshore, leaving me the quarters until we went to sea.

  I took my Gridley responsibilities seriously. One of the most important lessons learned in OCS is that you don’t walk in as the new kid with a pair of bars on your shoulder and start ordering people around. I’ve seen so many guys screw up, thinking that just because they’re an officer, they’re automatically in charge. Wrong. The bars represent an opportunity to learn how to be an officer. Some guys don’t see it that way, and folks resent the hell out of them. The sergeants in the Marines, and the chief petty officers in the Navy, are the guys who know the ropes. You just have a college degree and four months of OCS; you really don’t know anything, especially compared with chief petty officers twice your age who have been in the Navy for twenty years. To be successful, listen to them.

  I may not have appreciated it as much at the time, but the military was giving me a great education in leadership. I learned about accountability and self-measurement, as well as punctuality, despite my near tardiness on the first day of OCS. I learned about the importance of leading, not by telling people what to do, but showing them by example. It’s easy to come up with a long list of lessons I absorbed, but these lessons shaped my views on leadership in fundamental ways.

  From the first day I stepped aboard Gridley, I was focused on becoming qualified to take the “con”—that is, to drive the ship. I spent weeks learning where everything was located and memorizing manuals about propulsion, communications and shipboard procedures. When we went to sea for training exercises, I looked forward to being assigned responsibilities as the junior officer on the bridge. I watched, listened and learned. Once you’re qualified to drive the ship, you can take the con and you’re responsible for making sure the ship is going where it’s supposed to until you’re relieved. Of course, you’re not alone. There are layers of responsibility. If you have any doubts, you first check with the officer of the deck, your immediate superior and the officer to whom the captain has delegated the full authority to run the ship. If he has doubts, he’ll call the captain and say, “Sir, I need you to check this out.” You have a team supporting you. You’ve got a navigator, a Combat Information Center and an engine room. But you learn how to manage it all—and you learn when you need to ask for advice and when you don’t. Even if you’re qualified to drive the ship, you’re not qualified to be officer of the deck (OOD). But, as OOD, from the moment you say, “I relieve you, sir,” and the other guy responds, “I stand relieved,” and salutes, you’re in charge. I’d been around boats all my life. I couldn’t wait to qualify.

  I also learned in those early days on Gridley that this was not the type of seagoing experience I wanted for all four years. Gridley was 510 feet long with some 380 men and officers on board. I started out as first lieutenant, the officer-in-charge of the division responsible for the ship’s appearance and everything that happens on deck—principally the docking lines, the lifeboats, the paint job, anchoring. I was also—no surprise—the damage control officer and flight officer responsible for helo operations on the fantail (the rear end of the ship). It was challenging at first, but the size and routine quickly made me restless to be on a smaller vessel with less formality and more responsibility. That’s one of the reasons I later put in for Swift boats. Patrol Craft, Fast (PCF) vessels and their smaller cousin the Patrol Boat, River (PBR) were the only boats where I could be in command as a lieutenant (junior grade). I wanted command responsibilities and also a measure of independence different from big-ship naval routine. I also wanted to see up close what the war was really all about. As I wrote to the chief of naval personnel more than six months later, on February 10, 1968: “I request duty in Vietnam. My billet preference is ‘Swift’ [Shallow Water Inshore Fast Tactical] boats with a second choice of Patrol Officer in a PBR Squadron. . . . I consider the opportunity to serve in Vietnam as an extremely important part of being in the armed forces and believe that my request is in the best interests of the Navy.”

  While we were training to go to the war, the war was increasingly coming home to America. Protests were growing. Later that summer,
President Johnson visited Century City in Los Angeles. David and I were curious what the reaction to his visit might be, given the increasing public agitation about the war. Navy tradition frowns on talk of politics in the wardroom. Nobody was debating Vietnam on Gridley, but among friends, on quiet evenings out with fellow junior officers or nonmilitary friends, there were whispers. I remember one guy on Gridley who’d been in Da Nang, a port in the northern part of South Vietnam, as harbormaster. He told me that we were on a fool’s errand and we’d be lucky to come out of there alive.

  It was the summer of liberation, of Ken Kesey, Haight-Ashbury. My friends all shared a sense that something big was happening. You could feel it in the air. Protests were increasing. I wanted to see for myself what the anti-war movement was all about. We were in uniform, after all, removed from the real street currents surrounding the Vietnam issue. Neither David nor I wanted to get caught up in a protest. But we were also curious and beginning to question the fundamental premises of the war we were about to be part of. We decided to go and observe the people who had gathered to protest LBJ’s appearance. Late in the afternoon, we arrived at the Century Plaza Hotel. The first thing we saw was a bunch of folks peacefully chanting. All that changed when the speeches began. H. Rap Brown, an outspoken Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee leader, put it starkly: “I can’t believe Lyndon Johnson is more humane than Hitler,” he roared. “Hitler gassed people to death. Lyndon Johnson bombs them to death.” David and I looked at each other with a mutual sense of foreboding.

  The crowd started to get restless. The police moved in hard. What began as a peaceful movement turned chaotic as Los Angeles cops broke it up and whacked the crap out of people. The crowd was shouting, “Gestapo!” Organizers stood on the flatbed of a truck urging the crowd to link arms so the police couldn’t break their ranks. David and I had the same instinct: “Let’s get the hell out of here.” So we bolted, but the entire scene stayed with me.

  It jolted me. Here I was about to deploy, and here was my country increasingly tearing itself apart over the war.

  • • •

  WHEN WE SET out from San Diego in February 1968, I was full of anticipation for the adventure. We sailed away from the California coast in a four-ship group—one frigate, Gridley, and three destroyers—steaming in formation to Pearl Harbor. Just getting one or two nights away from the coast was magical. In all our training runs we had stayed pretty close to California. Now we were cranking up speed, heading west across the Pacific Ocean, honking along with the ship plowing through rolling waves as the sunset lit us up in bursts of crimson and orange. We created an enormous wake. I stood on the fantail feeling the ship vibrate and churn beneath my feet, watching the ocean race by at a pretty good clip.

  We were the squadron flagship for this convoy, so we took the lead position in a diamond formation. Standing on the bridge on a 535-foot Navy frigate moving at over 20 knots; sensing the harmony of ship, ocean and sky; feeling the ship shudder as it rises and falls with the waves; and watching the sun set into the horizon and looking for a green flash is a pretty damn good moment. It’s why people go to sea and never get over it, why, as John Masefield wrote, men “must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide, / Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied.”

  I had previously developed a good sense of relative motion on the ocean. Sailing had taught me about winds, storms and squalls. Ducking beneath the stern of a competitor sailboat in a race taught me a lot about measuring distance, speed and time. It all came in handy as I learned the ropes. I also learned that it can get tedious when you’re steaming steadily in one direction. But a ship to the right and the left and then one behind will keep you on your toes. The challenge in convoy is holding the proper distance between ships. It’s particularly difficult at night when all you can see are dim lights outlining the shapes of the ships. I loved that part of the job. It was a lot of fun, a constant challenge. It felt like being part of the World War II documentary TV series Victory at Sea, with its triumphant music and the dramatic pictures of convoys with sea pouring over the bows and spray flying through the air, lights on the bridge flashing Morse code as they signal each other. If you’d asked me as a teenager what I thought military service would look like, this was it.

  A few days later we pulled into Pearl Harbor, where the history of the “Day of Infamy” surrounds you. As we glided slowly through the channel, battleship row and the memorial to USS Arizona off to our left, and the lush Hawaiian hills in the direction of the first planes of the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941, I was moved by our proximity to such a gigantic moment of history. I couldn’t take in enough fast enough. A number of World War II–era buildings on the airfield, including the tower building, were still standing. I made sure to visit as many of the historical sites as possible. We spent several laid-back days in Pearl Harbor, during which I explored the whole island in a rented Jeep, had a few umbrella drinks in tourist traps and surfed briefly at Waikiki. Then we departed again.

  I had assumed additional duty as the ship’s public affairs officer, so as we steamed farther west, the captain suggested I share some history with the crew as we passed key battle sites. Particularly as we went by Midway and through Leyte Gulf, I gave short one- to two-minute summaries over the ship’s loudspeaker describing two key battles of World War II so everyone could share in the significance of the moment. I thank my parents for always reminding us how closely connected we were to the past. They instilled in me a love of history for all it teaches us about the present.

  • • •

  HISTORY, HOWEVER, HAS a painful way of catching up to us when we least expect it. In February, after departing Pearl Harbor and shortly after we steamed past Midway, the executive officer approached me with an ashen look on his face and asked me to sit down. I could tell immediately that the news was bad. “Do you know a guy named Dick Pershing?” he asked. I knew right away what had happened and everything went black all around me. It was a punch to the gut as I read the telegram:

  “Richard Pershing . . . killed due to wounds received while on a combat mission when his unit came under hostile small-arms and rocket attack while searching for remains of a missing member of his unit.”

  I was excused and walked off the bridge and cried. The shock and disbelief were overwhelming. I tried everything I could to get a helicopter or plane to take me back home, but there was no way to make it happen. David Thorne and I, both on duty stations, missed the funeral. I felt more empty and alone than I ever had in my entire life.

  When I wrote home, I didn’t hold back. I was desperately sad. I just didn’t believe life was meant to be this cruel and senseless. With the loss of Persh, something changed in me and, I dare say, I think in all those who knew him really well. He was so much a part of our shared life at Yale. He was an unbelievable spark for all of us who were close to him. He was irreverent—fun-loving and fun-making. He was always ready to test the limits of institutional expectations. At that age we all took for granted that we would always be together, crashing through life with confidence and perhaps even bravado. We’d grown up together, gone to middle school together at Fessenden. Never a serious student, Dick knew better than anyone how to push the boundaries of just getting by, but he did so with a charm and self-awareness that negated judgments about the irresponsibility of his choices. He lived large and clearly had a glorious time doing so. To all his friends, including me, this gifted natural athlete was invincible. Now he was gone.

  Persh’s death increased my skepticism about the war. Right or wrong, it made more immediate and sensitive the growing doubts about the truth of what we were being told. It was a blow to whatever idealism about the war remained in me. Suddenly there was a personal cost none of us in our little world had paid thus far. I wrote a letter to my parents that clearly reflected anger: “If I did nothing more, it will be to give every effort we can to somehow make this a better world to live in and to end once and for all this willingne
ss to expend ourselves in this stupid, endless self-destruction.” As big and perhaps grandiose as that may sound today, it was a twenty-four-year-old’s honest reaction to the sudden death of one of his closest friends.

  At the same time, the home front was increasingly waking up. Tet brought about a sea change in American attitudes. The spectacular attacks in more than one hundred cities and hamlets and even the U.S. Embassy in Saigon stunned the American people. We all watched the drama on television: broadcasts of Viet Cong rockets and mortars pounding cities across the country; U.S. troops fighting to protect the embassy and its breached walls; the wounded being ferried away on stretchers. It all played out across our screens. The U.S. and South Vietnamese armies ultimately declared Tet an allied victory, but psychologically and politically, it was a disaster. The offensive undermined confidence in our approach and knocked all of us on our heels. For President Johnson and the Army commander in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, the remedy was simply to throw another million troops in theater. They knew they had the numbers; whether they had the strategy was another question.

  I didn’t focus on America’s chances at this point. The war was happening and I had a job to do. I had previously always imagined that we’d succeed because we were the United States of America. There was no way to know how simplistic that conviction was until I got on the ground and could see and feel the deceptions—the free-fire zones, the difficulty of separating Viet Cong from the general population, the brutal nature of guerrilla warfare, the weakness and demoralization of South Vietnam’s army and the corruption of its government. I very quickly realized that we—like the French and others before us—had, to use a trite but true phrase, bitten off more than we could chew. This wasn’t some set-piece war where an army could move tanks around and come in with airpower. It was a very different animal, which is why the concept of “winning hearts and minds” became such a burning, telltale description of the challenge. I began to feel that much of what we were doing led directly not to winning hearts and minds but alienating them. We had a body-count mentality, and the Vietnamese civilian population was paying the price. Three years after the Tet Offensive, in 1971, I would protest the war, but even then I had no idea about the extent of the lying, the falsification of reports, the exaggerations and field deceptions. It wasn’t until I read Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, more than twenty years after I served, that I realized how deep the rot had already gone and how early it had begun.