by John Kerry
Around me I could hear some other guys getting captured, but I managed to make it to home base. There were four or five other men already there enjoying their reward. I chose the orange. I turned out to be the only officer and therefore in charge. We were relaxing, joking around about the whole exercise, when a Jeep came rolling up at the end of half an hour. A bunch of guys got out dressed in their enemy uniforms and feeling their oats. They got rough with one of the enlisted men. My job was to stand up and protect him—so I said something stupid but mandatory: “Hey, listen, I’m the senior officer here and you’re not allowed to do that.” Next thing you know, I’m coldcocked, lying facedown in the sand with a foot on my back and a rifle on my neck, and the officer says, “Shut the hell up.” They then proceeded to waterboard the poor guy to extract information. Soon we were put in the back of Jeeps and taken to the prison camp, where we were ordered to strip completely. They took our clothes, substituting prison uniforms for them, and assigned us to a tent bungalow with a bunch of other guys.
Around lunchtime, we were all taken out to dig a hole six feet deep and then immediately fill it back in. Meanwhile, an airplane flew over us sounding an air-raid signal. Everyone scurried back into the hut. Throughout the exercise, the instructors were tough, smacking us around, picking people off one by one for interrogation. Everyone got called, so I waited my turn. Amazingly, even knowing this was only an exercise and it would end in twenty-four hours, some guys turned and came out wearing enemy uniforms and started bossing the rest of us around. I never found out whether that was a trick, but it had its effect. Some folks just did not make it, however. They flunked out during interrogation or just couldn’t handle the isolation.
When it was my turn, I went into a dark room with a guy sitting at a desk. He asked me what my unit was. I gave my name, rank and serial number. At one point, I smirked, which was a huge mistake. Obviously, I was not sufficiently in role. I was promptly slammed on the ground and told to do push-ups till I caved. Then they put me alone in a “tiger cage,” a narrow box. I couldn’t move right or left, up or down—and I stayed like that for forty-five minutes, my head and face crammed down into my knees, my back inches from the lid of the box. I get claustrophobic and had to work major mind games to get through it. I get the willies just recalling it now. I pushed my mind to visualize sailing or skiing—nice things, but then I realized, Whoa, there aren’t any nice things. I’m in a fucking box. I can’t move, and my back is hurting. I’m bent over and I can’t breathe. Had the ordeal lasted much longer, I felt sure I would have gone crazy. Every five minutes, the guards came by and knocked and asked me if I was all right. With no more than a grunt, I acknowledged that I was and hung in there. Then they put me in a bigger box with multiple people all crammed into a tiny space, arms and legs crisscrossing each other, heads jammed into someone else. The togetherness thing wasn’t half as bad as being in a box alone. Actually I was one of the lucky ones. I’m told other guys got put in a coffin.
So we went through this grueling process for what seemed an interminable time, with the guards trying all the time to break you, in part by playing one of us against the others. During the night I tried to escape over a roof and then over the fence, because escape would win you a sandwich and another respite, but I never made it beyond the roof. When it became clear to me this was not a good route, I backed off the roof and slid into my hut. So the night went. There were a few successful escapes. Then at some point late the next morning they lined us all up in the courtyard facing north. A siren went off. We were ordered to turn around, and there, beautiful and liberating, was the American flag flying in the sun. I was surprised by how welcome and even emotional a moment it was. We knew we’d survived. The weeklong ordeal was over. We were bused back to the base at Coronado. I raced home to the beach apartment to enjoy the best meal and longest, most welcome shower I’d ever had.
I learned something about myself in SERE training. I didn’t want to get captured, especially by the Viet Cong, because I felt sure they’d skin me alive. And when it came to resisting torture, I knew I would do my best, but I had had a taste of how tough it would be over time to keep the code. The experience of just twenty-four hours taught most of us that ultimately—certainly for most people—there probably is a breaking point. I admire beyond belief what John McCain and the other POWs put up with to survive—all that solitude and pain just to stay alive. But one of the great lessons of that period was the limitations of the code itself. As a result of the Vietnam experience, the official prohibitions against torture became even stronger. At the time that we were about to deploy to Vietnam, we had learned you do what you can. If your mind is strong and your body half strong, you might make it through, but what was reinforced in me at SERE training was that I did not want to be taken alive. Soon, in combat on the rivers of the Mekong Delta, something else was reinforced in me: I would do everything in my power to keep my crew and myself alive.
In the last weeks before I was to leave for Vietnam, Julia came out to California. We luxuriated in a soft journey by car up the coast of California—Highway 1—one of the great roads anywhere. Julia and I had loved the quiet intimacy of the 1967 movie Two for the Road, where Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney drive through the South of France. We meandered through extraordinary California countryside, sometimes aimlessly, sometimes purposefully, but never rushed and always free to change our minds and do something else. It was idyllic, stopping where we wanted to, visiting Hearst Castle, Carmel, ultimately San Francisco. Somewhere along the way, Julia turned to me and started talking about getting married. It just happened—not a proposal, but a natural segue from our conversation. Before either of us fully digested what was happening, we had decided we were going to get married. In San Francisco we stayed at the Mark Hopkins, splurging on a suite, knowing departure day was around the corner. As I think back on those special days, it seemed in certain ways that time stood still—only it didn’t. Everything seemed to be in slow motion except the clock. We made our farewell after calling our parents to tell them we were going to get married when I came back, but we wanted to keep it quiet because of what had happened to Dick Pershing, who had been engaged when he died. We were superstitious.
CHAPTER 4
War
“GOOD LUCK, SUCKER,” an anonymous soldier smugly proclaimed.
“You’re in for a year of fucking hell,” said another dismissively.
We had landed to refuel at an air base outside Tokyo after the long flight from Tacoma, taking us to Vietnam. Barrier fences in the terminal separated the line of troops heading to war from those going home. The men leaving looked tired and haunted, their eyes sunken into their sockets, worn-out souls.
They were greeting us with a warning we chalked up to gallows humor.
I arrived in Vietnam in time for Thanksgiving. Ironically, as we were on approach to Cam Ranh Bay, descending through the clouds, a huge rainbow extended its bow down onto the airport itself, striking me as one mocking display too many by Mother Nature. It was impossible to conjure up any notion of a pot of gold waiting in Vietnam. When the aircraft door opened and we disembarked, a blast of warm, moist wind of the monsoon season blew across the runway. It had just been raining.
The airport was clogged with camouflaged Air Force planes. A battalion of Vietnamese Rangers disembarked from a C-130 near us, their dark faces and tiny bodies straining under packs almost as big as they were.
In the distance was a field high on a hill. My first instinct was to think how great it would be to explore it. It looked peaceful, but the illusion of tranquillity was shattered by the reality that we were now in a war zone. Just about any Vietnamese could be a Viet Cong ready to kill you. We were entering an unknown world, which I later learned was in some ways unknowable.
A truck arrived to transport us to the Swift boat headquarters. As we drove through the sprawling Army/Air Force base, it struck me that only Americans could have built such a facility in a time of war. The various buildin
gs stretched for miles along a vast white beach, with row upon row of wooden barracks and a PX that would put Macy’s to shame, with a sauna and massage parlor, enlisted men and officers’ clubs, and most any service imaginable. For an instant, I wondered where the war was.
We arrived at the Swift boat base. I presented my orders, learning to my initial disappointment I was to be assigned to Coastal Division 14 (CosDiv 14) right at Cam Ranh itself. CosDiv 14 was commonly referred to as the “Fun in the Sun and Surf Division,” tucked away from the real life of Vietnam. I had anticipated something more than Cam Ranh’s reputation promised. I asked the administrative officer of the squadron if I could instead go to Cat Lo, at the mouth of the Saigon River, or to Da Nang.
“The names were drawn from a hat and it’s decided. You’re staying here,” he told me.
We met with the squadron commander, Commodore Charles Horne. He was young, energetic and enthusiastic. You couldn’t miss the captured gun mounted like a stuffed swordfish on the wall above him. He called each of us “skipper,” an unfamiliar but flattering title, especially to us new kids on the block who had not yet been assigned a boat. We listened attentively while the commodore expounded on Operation Sealords, a joint operation between the United States and South Vietnam to disrupt enemy supply lines from the North.
A week passed. I began to settle in. I lived in a single room, a luxury in Vietnam. Showers were fifteen yards from the barracks. Water was plentiful. Beer was available at the officers’ club. The beach was beautiful, the water warm. Most important, my mail arrived on time. I received the tape my mother sent of the entire Harvard-Yale game, which the Crimson famously chronicled with the headline “Harvard Beats Yale, 29 to 29.” Harvard had come from two touchdowns behind to tie the game with about a minute and a half on the clock. It was painful to listen to: college seemed such a world away from Vietnam.
Each morning, a truckload of Vietnamese, crowded together like cattle, pulled into the base, their faces peering through the slats on the sides of the truck. Out of the back would pour chattering women and wizened old men who did all the service work, from cleaning the barracks to maintaining the roads. The women would take our uniforms home to wash and iron them for a price. I often looked for some expression that would tell me how these people felt, cleaning up behind us as we waged war in their countryside, but they never gave away their thoughts.
I was told that the officers’ club was the best in Vietnam. Folklore informed us that nurses from Saigon used to be flown in for wild parties. Finally, one of the enlisted men got so angry at missing the fun, he wrote his mother, who wrote her congressman. The parties stopped. USO shows still came through, including one starring Chinese girls bumping and grinding in a sloppy, unchoreographed way, out of sync with everything around us.
Some sat comfortably at the officers’ club swapping stories of their patrols. A few expressed doubts about the mission or the war itself, stating curtly, “Can’t see how anything over here is worth getting shot at for.” I don’t think I met anyone who wasn’t obsessively focused on counting the days until he went on R&R or went home. Short-timers would count the days out loud: “Only twenty-nine more days in this shithole.” The bar was a good place to pick up stories of close calls on patrol or the big night of combat when a trawler was intercepted with a major arms haul. It was a high point of the division’s engagements.
• • •
ABOUT TEN DAYS later, I was still waiting to be assigned my own boat. The operations officer, Lieutenant Schacte, asked me if I would like to take part in an operation they were planning for that night—a so-called skimmer op. I didn’t know precisely what it entailed, but I knew it was a small boat operation and a break in the monotony of early indoctrination patrols. I said yes.
We departed the base on a Swift boat, heading north, towing a small thirteen-foot Boston Whaler behind us. Night fell just as we arrived at the target area. Lieutenant Schacte had recruited two enlisted men, Bill Zaladonis and Pat Runyon. I had never met Runyon, but he and Bill knew each other from service prior to arrival in Cam Ranh. Each volunteered hoping to see some action before his tour was up.
We lowered an outboard engine into the Whaler, positioning it on the transom. Then we placed an M-60 machine gun on the flat, forward deck of the Whaler. Finally, we lowered a radio and prepared to head inland. Schacte instructed us to go toward the shoreline, maneuver up through a small inlet between the peninsula and an island, and take any violators of the curfew under fire if need be. There was a simple rule: if someone was there, they were enemy in a free-fire zone.
Three grown men could barely fit in the Whaler. I was jammed in the middle while Zaladonis manned the engine in the stern and Runyon worked the M-60 machine gun in the bow.
Schacte assigned our boat the call sign “Robin.” He and the Swift boat would be “Batman.” They would hang back in the bay to provide fire support if needed. Zaladonis, Runyon and I spent most of the night inching up the inland shoreline to intercept Viet Cong. Again and again we were startled beyond description by one or two Vietnamese at a time, who, sitting quietly in their sampans, suddenly took shape out of the dark. We had no choice but to take them into custody, then retrace the entire distance traveled in order to deposit them on the Swift boat so they couldn’t warn anyone we were coming. To complicate matters, the steering cable broke and the engine needed to be manipulated from the stern.
Several hours later, when we finally got close to the shore, we shut the engine down. We started to paddle stealthily. By now we were in a tiny passage of water with jungle rising up about five to ten yards away on either side. All we could hear was our own breathing. We came slowly around a bend when suddenly, yards in front of us, there was a sampan with a man in the stern. Then, suddenly, another man jumped out from under a tarp, scaring the hell out of Runyon in the bow. Runyon was so surprised he instinctively pulled the trigger on his machine gun. Fortunately for the two men, the gun’s safety was still on. Had he fired, the men would have been blown overboard, dead for certain and likely shredded by a machine gun only yards away. Our initial impression was they were fishermen, stupidly or wittingly in a free-fire zone, fishing in a no-fishing area after curfew. I learned soon thereafter that deaths in a free-fire zone were almost always tallied as Viet Cong killed in action, and so they would have been had that gun gone off.
Runyon was so shaken by the near miss that he changed places with Zaladonis and drove the boat for the rest of the mission. We detained the fishermen and again made the trip all the way back to the Swift. There they confirmed their bona fides as genuinely innocent fishermen who didn’t know where one zone began and the other ended. Their papers were perfectly in order. So far in our mission, a lot of time was chewed up playing prisoner taxi. Finally, very early in the morning, while it was still dark, we reached the point up the coast designated as our objective. There, through the magnified moonlight of the infrared starlight scope, I watched, mesmerized, as two sampans, with several people in each, glided in toward the shore. We had been briefed that this was a favorite crossing area for VC trafficking contraband. I turned the radio off so that we would not receive an unwanted voice that could be picked up by our new targets.
We paddled in closer to shore while the Vietnamese pulled their sampans up on the beach and began to unload something—we couldn’t tell what. I illuminated them with a flare. The entire sky exploded into daylight. The men stood up, stiff and erect, momentarily frozen. Then, with panicked leaps, they ran for cover. We opened fire. My M-16 jammed, and as I bent down in the boat to grab another gun, a stinging piece of heat smacked into my left arm above the elbow. The inside of my arm burned. I presumed I had been hit by shrapnel or small-arms fire. I had no idea where it had come from. By this time, Runyon had started the engine, which had been resisting his best efforts. We passed by the empty beach to our starboard side, strafing it. Then it was quiet.
We fired a couple more flares to determine if anything besides the sampans was vi
sible on the beach, but there was no way to do it without putting too much light on us as well, so we stopped. We beached briefly and considered recovering whatever the VC had been transporting, but most of our ammunition was gone and our engagement had alerted any VC for miles around of our presence. We were not in a good position to fend off a counterattack. Runyon ensured the sampans were unusable by filling them with holes from the M-60 machine gun. Then, with a warning from the cover boat of a possible VC ambush, we departed the area, taking a different route.
I was a little frustrated. Taking so many fishermen as prisoners had chewed up much of the night. I wondered what might have unfolded if we could have set up an ambush earlier at the upper end of the inlet. I thought we had improvised pretty effectively. The vision of VC running like spooked deer stayed with me. Zaladonis couldn’t see the people clearly when he first started firing. The .30-caliber bullets kicked up the sand way to the right of them as he sprayed the beach, slowly walking the line of fire over to the left, where the men had been leaping for cover. I had been shouting directions and trying to unjam my gun. Runyon was locked in a personal struggle with the engine, trying to start it. There were moments when each of us felt his heart in his throat. It occurred to me many years later that Navy SEALs train for a long time for similar operations. Two of us had never even said hello before that night. We operated out of instinct. When I got back to the Swift boat, the adrenaline subsided; I curled up on the afterdeck and slept while we transited back to Cam Ranh.
The doctor at the medical facility took the piece of metal out of my arm and bandaged me up. The next day I was sent on a regular Swift boat indoctrination patrol with an officer who was nearing the end of his tour. It was uncommonly boring. We slowly steamed north and south for the length of our patrol area. There were no sampans, much less Viet Cong freighters. The boat pounded uncomfortably in the monsoon waves. As it got dark, we anchored in a small cove and relaxed over dinner.
