by John Kerry
• • •
AFTER CROSSING THE Pacific we spent a few days in harbor at Subic Bay, Philippines. It was a unique sailors’ port. Suffice it to say the stories are legendary. From there we steamed into the Gulf of Tonkin, where we spent a couple of months operating with the aircraft carriers from which our Navy and Marine pilots were bombing North Vietnam. It was from one of these carriers that John McCain had taken off for his ill-fated mission on October 26, 1967, when he was shot down over Hanoi. Our job was to provide missile protection for the carriers and to act as plane guard—a ship that follows steadily five hundred yards back in the wake of the carriers, prepared to pick up a pilot if there is a failed catapult or a crash on takeoff or landing. Whether at night without any lights or day, during all flight operations, we were on station behind the carrier. The roar of the engines at night when you could barely see in the pitch dark was as deep and majestic as the full-throated roar of a lion in the jungle, primal and exhilarating. It was the one time I sometimes wondered if I should have signed up for flight at OCS. My father’s advice that flying would become a job and not a passion had kept me from signing up—that and the prospect of a six-year hitch.
In March, after a couple of months in the Gulf of Tonkin, we were dispatched to Da Nang. We went there for in-person briefings that I was never privy to, but, as first lieutenant in charge of the gig, the captain’s boat, I was delighted to be able to get ashore when we ferried the captain and the doctor in.
My first order of business was to make a phone call. I hadn’t been ashore since Persh died, so I had zero direct communication with anyone about him or anything else. I wanted to try to reach Julia on the Military Auxiliary Radio System—the MARS telephone system. I stood in line for thirty minutes and got to talk with Julia for about two. It was a more than frustrating exercise—well intended, but the connection was terrible and the brevity made me miserable for what I was missing. Besides, it was harder than hell to talk on a line that sounded like you were talking into a tin can on the moon and the whole world was listening.
I also knew my roommate Danny Barbiero was serving in a Marine detachment somewhere in the vicinity—or so I thought. I hoped to be able to find him, though it was a long shot at best. Da Nang was a huge Marine base.
But in a “finding a needle in a haystack” moment, Danny happened to be in the very communication hut we connected to: I found him serving as the communications officer for his Marine unit near Quang Tri, north of Da Nang. He was stunned. It was an amazing moment. When we said goodbye at Yale, we didn’t know when or where we’d see each other again, but on this first day of my being on the ground in Vietnam, it was so good to hear a familiar, friendly voice. After the call, I was about to go back to the ship when I suddenly wondered if my eyes were deceiving me: twenty yards away, a bunch of Viet Cong bodies were stacked like a woodpile. It was a shock. The dead bodies I had seen before—at a wake, at a funeral, in a casket laid out in their Sunday best—were nothing like this: cold, stiff, distorted, heaped one on top of the other. Where the hell was I?
The day in Da Nang sparked my curiosity. I’d been onshore for a few hours, but just that brief visit made me want to know more about what it was like to really be there, to feel the currents of daily life for the Vietnamese and see what was working and what wasn’t. I felt a palpable energy in the Marine hut, on the street, in the coming and going of troops and support personnel. I was intrigued and from that moment looked forward to returning as a Swift boat skipper.
We returned to our repetitious plane guard duty in the Gulf of Tonkin, occasionally running missiles out on the launchers when North Vietnamese MiGs approached too close to our shoot zone. But they always turned back at the last moment after playing a dangerous game of chicken.
On April 4, 1968, we learned Martin Luther King Jr. had been gunned down in Memphis. I still remember talking with my father about Dr. King’s speech in Detroit, Michigan, in June 1963, known later as his original “I Have a Dream” speech. He’d used an interesting word—“maladjusted.” My father pointed out that the term was normally used in a negative sense to describe someone who didn’t fit in with society. But Dr. King directed that term right back at himself. He said he was proud to be maladjusted because he could never live comfortably amid racial discrimination, religious bigotry, unreasoning hate and the self-defeating effects of violence. I thought of those words on the day I learned of Dr. King’s death. I thought about what it meant to be “maladjusted” to violence and about my duties to the country as an officer in the Navy. I didn’t have any answers. But I started to feel the importance of applying the same sense of conscience—the same guts, the same determination—to ask the right questions.
Toward the end of April, we were relieved from plane guard duty in order to represent the United States at the Coral Sea celebration in New Zealand. First we pulled into Subic Bay to provision. The captain was so insistent the ship be painted for the visit to Wellington that my entire division was denied liberty in order to remain on board, day and night, with buckets of paint everywhere. Needless to say, two solid months at sea and no liberty did not sit well with the crew. Ultimately, after getting bruised and beaten in the ancient ceremony of crossing the equator at sea, when “pollywogs”—as the uninitiated are called—are transformed into “shellbacks,” we enjoyed a spectacular long weekend visit in Wellington. It was the best liberty of my time on Gridley. I still have the sheepskin rugs I bought in the lush New Zealand countryside. Then we started the long trek back to California.
As we approached the coastline off Long Beach after this first tour of duty, on the night of June 5, I was working late with the public affairs team as we picked up the first crackling radio reports on the California primary. I listened to Bobby Kennedy’s victory speech from the Ambassador Hotel. For a moment, it felt like the dreams of his brother Jack might be ascendant once more. Then the frenzy of .22-caliber handgun shots changed everything once again. We docked in the early morning. I could see David and Julia standing among the well-wishers and families assembled to welcome us home. When David caught my eye he made a finger-gun signal with shrugged shoulders and a roll of the eyes, as if to say, “Oh my God—another incomprehensible moment—things are crazy.” I thought, Jesus Christ, I just left Vietnam, where there’s a lot of madness and killing. And here I am coming home to the United States and it’s the same over here. David, Julia and I spent days holed up in David’s apartment, watching the drama of mourning and burial play out on TV much as it had at Yale when the president had been murdered. I will never forget the crack in Ted Kennedy’s voice when he talked of “my brother,” reminding us of the words (from George Bernard Shaw) by which RFK had lived: “Some men see things as they are and ask why? I dream things that never were and ask, why not?”
During the passage back to the States I had received my orders for Swift boats. I was delighted, and within days of returning, I separated from Gridley, taking time for leave before reporting in August to Coronado Amphibious Base for Swift boat training. I went home to Boston for a few days of R&R.
Curious about the political currents, I bought a ticket to a Eugene McCarthy rally at Fenway Park. I wanted to see and feel what his campaign was all about. I’d been away for enough time in such a completely different world that I felt strangely disconnected from everything at home—particularly the politics of 1968. I knew there was some bitterness between the McCarthy and Kennedy camps, but I had no feel for where the race was after Bobby’s assassination. McCarthy was now carrying the anti-war flag by himself. I wondered whether he could be a legitimate threat to Vice President Humphrey, who had still not separated from Johnson on the war. None of this, I thought, was being properly analyzed. The day before the rally, all the press could discuss was whether McCarthy would be able to fill the Red Sox’s ballpark. Volunteers lined the streets of Boston, hawking one-dollar tickets less than twenty-four hours beforehand, to make sure he did.
When I arrived on the night of the
rally, it was bedlam. Young people packed Kenmore Square. An improvised dance hall was hopping. Kids who had gone “clean for Gene” were wearing “Eugene” neckties and shoving petitions such as “Food for Biafra” into any hand that would take them. The warm night, the pleasant breeze, the music, the masses of young people—it all felt like I was back in San Francisco.
Fenway was packed. People crouched in the aisles. Thousands stood in the parking lot, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of the closed-circuit televisions that McCarthy’s staff had jury-rigged as thousands of supporters streamed up Brookline Avenue. Some even hung from the billboards to take in the scene.
Many spoke, but Pete Seeger sang. He took the stage and belted out, “Tonight, you and I have a war to stop,” and the audience lost it, singing “If I Had a Hammer” with him by the end. Forty thousand voices joined as one. You could hear the sing-along all the way across the Charles River in Cambridge. Alan Arkin and Leonard Bernstein spoke, and the cheering began again. It started a full three minutes before McCarthy took the stage. “We want Gene,” the people roared. And they got him.
McCarthy entered like royalty. He stepped out from the shadows below the center field bleachers flanked by Boston policemen on horseback. The crowd exploded as he approached second base, where the stage was set up. McCarthy wasn’t exactly an inspirational speaker. His voice was flat. He rarely got excited. His message, however, was crystal clear. He wanted America to become “an America of confidence, an America which trusts its own judgment.” At one point, a police horse reared and whinnied and the microphone caught it. “Even the horse approves, I think,” McCarthy said to laughter. When he turned to Vietnam, he called it a “holy war” and accused the Johnson administration, which was then engaged in talks with the South Vietnamese government, of following a doctrine of “infallibility.” They were too busy suppressing “heresy” to make the right decision. “We must undertake to pass a judgment on the war in midcourse,” he said under the glare of the floodlights. “To say we think what we are doing is unwise, even to admit it was wrong.”
I suddenly felt out of place among my peers. I used to pass through their number without issue in San Francisco and at Yale. Now I was a sailor. More than that—I was heading to the war, to Vietnam, and while I had reached a point of seriously questioning the war, I didn’t yet know the things I would soon learn that would make me furious. I had reservations. I was increasingly hearing things that fed doubts. I sensed that the war represented a profound failure of leadership, and I could certainly see that our country was coming apart at the seams. But I needed to know more to be convinced of how we stitch it back together.
• • •
IN LATE JULY 1968, five officers and crews arrived at the U.S. Navy Amphibious Base in Coronado, California, for four months of training prior to deploying to Operation Market Time in Vietnam. I rented a beachfront apartment on Mission Beach, a few miles away on the Pacific Ocean, south of La Jolla. Each day I would ride my bicycle to the Coronado training base accompanied by a new friend, an intelligence officer named Giles Whitcomb, who was assigned to the language school with the rest of us. Giles found an apartment farther south down the beach, but each day we would rendezvous near the amusement park and practice our Vietnamese as we rode through the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, a convenient shortcut to the ferry to Coronado. We must have been quite a sight—two Navy officers in our khaki uniforms on French racing bikes, riding through a bunch of Marine recruits doing their push-ups and marching from one evolution to another, while we were working on the daily lesson in Vietnamese.
In off-hours we were free to make the most of San Diego: surf on the beach, visit the famous Hotel del Coronado, where Some Like It Hot was filmed, and go to dances at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot. During our classroom studies we learned everything about Swifts—their engines, communications procedure, armament—and most important, we met the crews that we’d be teamed with in ’Nam. It was great to finally get on a Swift boat; these stubby, fifty-foot-long, aluminum-hulled gunboats were about to become our home away from home. The boats were not designed for the job. They were created as water taxis for the offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. But when it became apparent some new vessel was needed for shallow-water work along the Vietnamese coast, the boats were snatched up by the Navy.
Each boat was manned by a crew of six men. One officer, usually a lieutenant (junior grade), was the officer-in-charge, or OINC. The boats were armed with twin .50-caliber machine guns on top of the pilothouse and a single .50-caliber machine gun on top of the 81mm marine mortar on the stern. Supplementing these were several M-79 grenade launchers, M-16 rifles, antipersonnel and concussion grenades, .38-caliber revolvers, a riot gun and any other weapon that the men could beg, borrow or steal. The boats were powerful, driven by two 480-horsepower diesel engines, but because of the amount of ammunition carried on board, they seldom attained speeds over 25 knots, a little less than 29 mph. There were accommodations for four men—two up forward under the pilothouse and two in the main cabin. A small stove and icebox provided a fairly rudimentary several-days-away-from-base capability.
It was a good feeling when we first sortied, initially under the watchful eye of experienced Navy petty officers and then alone. It was satisfying to be in command—exactly what I had anticipated. Everyone on board seemed to enjoy the independence, the more relaxed atmosphere and the responsibility that came with it. We familiarized ourselves with various maneuvers in San Diego Harbor, then went out to sea before taking overnight trips, where we boned up on our navigation skills and, for the first time, shot the mortars and machine guns.
Before any of us could depart for Vietnam, we were required to pass the SERE course—survival, evasion, resistance and escape training. It was a combination of survival training and a mock prisoner-of-war experience. Here’s the drill: We gathered on a Sunday evening at the base in Coronado, wearing full uniform and jacket, with a big Ka-Bar knife dangling at our sides. We rallied on the beach near the hotel, after being dropped off in buses up near the North Island Naval Air Station. At dusk the instructors gave us a lecture on how to find a fish or clams or catch a seagull. Then we marched off, looking for food. After the stark realization that there was no food to be found on this well-combed beach, we bedded down in the rocks, freezing, and tried to sleep. At about 4:00 a.m., after waking up to no food, we took off in buses to go to a place in the desert called Warner Springs, where the main SERE training was held. Once there, we spent the next four days in the desert doing two things and two things only: walking around listening to instructors and surviving. The instructors even taught us how to catch and skin a rabbit. One night, someone did produce a rabbit. I think it was bought and provided for the demo purposes, but never mind—one rabbit, properly skinned and gutted, was plunked into a pot of steaming water over a warm fire. That unlucky Bugs Bunny provided soup for the whole group and it tasted great.
The vast majority who made it to Thursday were rewarded with escape and evasion drills. There are two teams of instructors at SERE—a Blue Team and a Red Team. The Blue Team are the good guys who tell you what to do, how to find food and how to evade, resist and escape. The Red Team are the enemy—big, fit, well fed and well rested. Early in the morning on Thursday, the Blue Team gathered everyone into a defined area, with a dried-up streambed on one side and sage brush and trees on the other. We were lined up at the far end of the terrain and told we had a certain number of minutes to get to home base, three miles away. If you managed to get there within the allotted time, you had a choice between enjoying a sandwich or an orange—not both—and a half hour of respite. To make things more interesting, they released the Red Team enemy troops into the area after ten minutes, so you had to get camouflaged fast, move and pick a route to evade these guys, all dressed in uniforms with red epaulets to look like the Soviets or Chinese Communists or North Vietnamese army regulars. They knew how to play their role. They were serious, mean-spirited guys—at least for th
e moment—who were out to get us. When captured, you were transported to a prisoner-of-war camp nearby in the desert. There you were put to the test of the Code of Conduct—your name, rank, serial number and endurance for the next twenty-four hours. Everything was evaluated. No sweet talk, no hand-holding.
Because I used to play a lot of capture the flag on Naushon and I hunted, I felt relatively experienced at camouflage, movement and stealth. Since we were operating as individuals, not teams, I thought it was important to outmaneuver the Reds by controlling my environment as much as possible. That meant moving quickly away from the crowd and going it alone. At one point, I heard the enemy troops draw close. I crunched up in my best Pamplona fetal ball again, playing dead in a bush. I can still see one guy’s boots walking four feet away from me. I didn’t move. I became part of the environment, and they didn’t see me—or they gave me a break for effort and pretended. What I was most terrified of was meeting a rattlesnake crawling through the rocks and brush.
