by John Kerry
On the night of our last day on patrol near Nha Be, we got a call to pick up a Vietnamese woman who needed emergency transportation to the Navy base. At full speed, through the darkness, we raced down the Soi Rap River to a prearranged rendezvous with another Swift. There was something very special about answering this call. We were racing to save a life rather than take one. We sensed this. It lent purpose to all the hours spent cruising slowly up and down the river boarding and searching.
When we reached a point known as the French Fort, the other Swift showed up on the radar, a yellowish electronic flash, moving closer to us each time the sweep illuminated it with its mesmerizing 360-degree arc. We slowed, turned around to face upriver and waited for our sister ship to come alongside. As soon as it was close to us, we transferred the stretcher bearing the woman and then we shot off into the night to deliver her to professional medical hands in Nha Be.
The woman was in great pain. Before separating from the other Swift, they had told us she had an extrauterine pregnancy and was close to death. Her mother or possibly just a friend came aboard with her. They held hands, and both seemed awed by the concern and effort that was being made to do something for them. We had called ahead to the base at Nha Be. They said they would be expecting us.
Doctors were hovering over the stretcher as soon as we passed it to the pier. I last glimpsed the woman as she disappeared in the dark with a covey of curious soldiers and doctors scurrying around her. I never found out whether she lived, but that night I felt the patrol had been worthwhile.
Night was a time of fascination. We were only seven miles from Saigon. The horizon in that direction was always bright and inviting. Throughout the night, aircraft were flying around and around the city, dropping flares to watch for movement in the dark, lending security to the city’s perimeter defenses. From where we sat in the river, there was a constant ballet of flickering light as the flares ignited high in the sky and drifted slowly to the ground. I would play a game, betting against myself which flares would hit the ground still burning. Sometimes helicopters, flying a support mission for a night ambush, would open up on a target and we could watch a steady stream of red tracers curve toward the ground. If the burst of fire was long enough, a straight line of red seemed to connect the helicopter with the target below it. Everyone knew that the guerrillas were moving at night. That thought alone brought a certain excitement to patrol.
When the patrol finally came to an end, we tied up at the pier at Nha Be, waiting for our relief to arrive. I went into the tactical operations center to speak with the officer on watch. I was curious to see how our missions were devised. It turned out that the center was shared by the Americans and the Vietnamese. The Americans couldn’t make a move without checking with their counterparts, and the officer told me that their counterparts seldom knew what was going on. He said, “Whenever you want to get a plan moving, you explain to them the details of an idea. After proposing one or two alternatives, you wait for the Vietnamese to say, ‘Why don’t we do this?’ It’s usually the first thing that you’ve proposed. If they don’t suggest it, nothing happens. When they finally do, you congratulate them on their good thinking and move on to the next problem.”
I asked him if there were any waterway restrictions on traffic to Saigon. He said no. An idea that had been germinating in my head for several days became a reality. When the relief boat assumed the patrol, we set off from the pier, and entering the Saigon River, we made a brief curiosity foray into Saigon.
The river from the South China Sea to Saigon was a highway, with ships from all over bringing cargo to the capital. It was a mixture of U.S. and Vietnamese warships, cargo junks, sampans and ferries. The river was key to the U.S. military supply chain. Every morning, U.S. minesweepers steamed the length of the river to ensure that no mines had been placed overnight. To further protect the traffic, the U.S. Air Force had dropped Agent Orange along both banks, killing all the vegetation for a mile back to ensure that no insurgent force could hide in the foliage. The VC were determined, however. They would dig bunkers in the mud and jump up to fire a B-40 at a passing warship, then disappear before fire could be returned. Once, though, a VC made the mistake of firing at a ship that was carrying soldiers from the Republic of Korea. The senior ROK officer ordered the ship’s captain to make a hard turn into the bank and hundreds of their soldiers streamed off. It was reputed that no other VC tried to shoot at passing ships for months afterward.
It was only a few miles upriver to Saigon. We covered them at full speed until we reached the outskirts of the city. Saigon was a world apart, a world of freighters tied up at docks, of barges housing refugees, of gaudy advertisements on billboards, of cars and buses weaving in and out of traffic, of large government buildings that dominated the waterfront, of countless huts raised above the mud banks on wooden poles, of dilapidated Navy ships belonging to the Koreans and docked in front of the Vietnamese Naval Headquarters, of water taxis skirting across the harbor, and, on this day, of one U.S. Navy Swift boat parading boldly through the middle of the city on a quick sightseeing tour. For a few moments, Saigon and Vietnam were connected in a way they hadn’t been. We promised ourselves that we would return.
When we arrived back at the Cat Lo base, we were greeted with the news that one of the boats had been hit badly on a river patrol. Lieutenant (JG) Bob Emory had been medevacked. One of his men was killed. His boat had been towed back to the base. I walked over to see it. A huge hole ran through the pilothouse and down into the main cabin. The ambush occurred toward the end of a mission in a small river. Emory’s boat had been playing one of the psyops tapes over the boat’s loudspeaker. His engineman went below to turn off the tape machine. At the moment he turned around to walk back up into the pilothouse, a B-40 rocket went right through the hull into the main cabin and blew the man’s head off. The shrapnel from the rocket tore into Bob’s legs. Others were wounded too.
We arrived to see Bob’s boat pulled out of the water, resting in skids on the floating dock where the repair work was done. Several men were on board cleaning up. I watched one of them make a face of disgust as he picked some hair and teeth out of the ceiling. The brief inspection of Saigon and the pleasurable side of the rivers evaporated instantly. The war was suddenly very real again.
Two days later, we were operating in the close vicinity of Dong Tam, the home base of the Ninth Infantry and the Riverine Force. I was trying to find a way to get into the Bob Hope USO Show and I was really low on fuel. I see this LST anchored in the middle of the river with a floating dock at its side. A couple PBRs were refueling there. I pulled up at the dock, tied up and was looking around for someone to ask for fuel. Suddenly this distinct mix of Brooklynese and Boston yells to me, quite authoritatively, “Hey! You can’t tie your boat up here! Get your damn boat away from my ship!” I knew that voice immediately. I looked up and there was Paul Nace, whom I hadn’t seen since we left Treasure Island. A year and a half had gone by. Paul hadn’t recognized me—little did I know he was the officer in charge of the dock and, at that moment, my future. Suddenly, Paul recognized me and broke out into a big shit-eating grin—a wonderful moment of reunion in the middle of war, in the middle of the Mekong Delta. I’ll never forget that moment and the improbability of a random meeting in a river with a friend in Vietnam. I also vowed never to let him forget that his first instinct was to deny me fuel! It was the only negative thing Paul ever said to me.
• • •
DAYS LATER, WE were assigned to take part in a Riverine Force attack up several small streams not far from Dong Tam. We rendezvoused with a massive Riverine armada. Monitor-like vessels, troop carriers with massive steel reinforcements on their sides and sandbags were everywhere. We looked puny and exposed beside them. At one point I heard someone yelling, “Mr. Kerry—Mr. Kerry—hello!” I looked over to see one of the enlisted men from Gridley waving to me from one of the carriers. I shouted my well wishes as we slid away from them. We were supposed to be doing an exhi
bition assault for the benefit of Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, who was scheduled to observe from helicopters above us. At the last minute, our coordinates were changed to a different location because the initial assault zone was too hot. I will never forget this staged mission, which inevitably filled the secretary with a contrived view of what was taking place on the ground.
A few days later, we were operating with a small group of PBRs during another assault. As we nosed up a small side river we came under brief fire, and I heard Gardner yell from the guntub, “I’m hit!” The fire subsided quickly. We exited into the larger river. Gardner had a light wound in his arm. We departed immediately to the medical facility at the Ninth Infantry headquarters.
When I walked Gardner into the field hospital at the Dong Tam base, I found myself witness to a struggle for life in the triage area. A severely wounded man lay on a stretcher. He was Vietnamese. He was completely nude. His small, bony body was stretched out on the brown plastic mat covering the operating tables. Figures in green pushed in and out through the two doors that marked the pre-operating section of the Third Surgical Division, U.S. Army. An eerie, makeshift but still professional fluorescent light shone down on his chest, which was moving up and down with each trying breath, up and down with no rhythm and with very little strength. The tent was very cool, and my eyes caught the plastic tube for air-conditioning that ran across the overhead and that dominated all the other septic trimmings of the emergency ward, reminding me starkly and harshly that was where I was. Three or four operating tables, glass cabinets with surgical tools and battle dressings, oxygen bottles and resuscitators all congested to paint an ugly picture for an eye that was already transfixed and shocked.
When they took Gardner off to patch him up, I remained fixated on the struggle of the young Vietnamese infantryman. I watched while a very young boy with concern, hope and inexperience in his wide eyes prepared another pint of blood for transfusion. He quickly and meticulously pulled the plastic blood bag into an inflatable net and rubber container and, after breaking the seal, inserted a tube into the bag. Then, pumping on the kind of hand pump that a doctor uses to take blood pressure, he squeezed the blood from the bag into a small receptacle, and from there it ran into the limp body lying at the mercy of those who stalked around it.
With each thrust of his hand, slowly pushing the blood through the tube, I wanted so badly for life to be driven into the courageous figure that lay there so helplessly. Now and then the feet of the wounded man would twitch and his arm would try to move up toward his head—movements that were strangely disconnected from the rest of his body and from normality. I will call him Nguyen, because he could well have been and if he wasn’t, he still needs a name. He was a Tiger Scout, a pathfinder for one of the platoons of infantrymen at Dong Tam. Whispers said that he had walked into a booby trap. Other murmurs said that he had been hit by gunfire. From where I was, I could see that his neck was bleeding. His head was arched back and his eyes, only half-open and dazed, were searching for something. There was nothing familiar here for this man. This was a moment of complete loneliness, I thought. No one to hold on to. No one to talk to, because he could not speak English and we could not speak Vietnamese, and, anyway, how does one bridge such a gap at a moment like this?
His left hand was wrapped in gauze that had turned almost completely red, soaked as it was with his blood, his red badge of courage. A pool of red had gathered on the table below the green Army stretcher on which he lay. Large transparent plastic tubes surrounded his legs, inflatable splints, and these too showed an increasing hue of dark red as his life flowed through them. I felt weak and my stomach began to twist. Beads of sweat poured all over me. I was hot and cold at once. I sat down on the floor because I thought I was going to be sick.
Nguyen’s right hand, with long, sensitive fingers, occasionally reached up and swayed in the air. I wondered if he was trying to find something that we might understand or to reach out and touch something a man touches before he dies. Tears came to my eyes. I wanted to hug this little man who was so alone in his personal battle. His chest still moved up and down and with the movement remained the hope that he would win. I wanted so much for him to win. Once or twice his hand moved over to one side and his head slowly followed, allowing me to see the strong features of his face, a face hardened by years of war, suffering and uncertainty.
Then his right arm moved upward and out toward nothing but air. A doctor quickly took his pulse and his blood pressure. His toes, sticking out from the plastic splints, twitched back and forth. He tried to raise his head to look—maybe to ask for something, or perhaps in a last effort to fight for life. Then he was quiet. His right hand came slowly down on his chest and his other arm, bandaged and absent, lolled over the side of the stretcher. Nguyen was gone. No words. No cry. No sound of a breath. I prayed that I would never be as alone as he had been those last moments. I never learned his name. I don’t think anyone in the tent did.
It seemed so absurd—a man dying alone in his own country. I wanted to cry, but I thought that I couldn’t let myself, and so tears just welled up in my eyes.
The next two weeks passed quickly. We patrolled through several of the main rivers of the Mekong, experiencing a remarkable insight into the busy, beautiful life on the rivers, the main highways of South Vietnam. We shot duck with the riot gun from the bow of the boat, we traded C-rations for fresh shrimp, we boarded and searched countless junks, we interacted with the seemingly endless parade of very young children who would beg for a handout—any handout—as they would yell “You number one.” We soaked in a bucolic but bustling life, somehow capable of producing its own tranquillity on a brown river running fast with a heavy current toward the sea. It was something to behold. Occasionally a few shots were exchanged here or there, but no serious firefights.
• • •
EARLY IN JANUARY 1969, we returned from a several-day patrol to be informed we were to return to An Thoi to resume our assignment with CosDiv 11. Back we went, retracing our journey around the southernmost point of Vietnam, the Cà Mau Peninsula, then the straight shot north to Phu Quoc Island, through the deep turquoise waters of the Gulf of Thailand. The demarcation between the muddy brown water of the South China Sea and the gulf was stark, as if a painter had drawn a bold, clear line across a canvas, one color on one side, a different one on the other.
An Thoi was the same as when we left, except the number of raids had grown. With experience under our belts in Cat Lo, we were immediately cycled into the rotation. Most of the members of my initial 44 boat crew had timed out on their year in Vietnam. Those who hadn’t were detailed to fill individual slots on boats as other vacancies opened up.
On January 29, Ted Peck, one week after shifting with his whole crew to the 94 boat, was part of a six-boat operation up the Cua Lon River, led by a Commander Connolly, a desk officer from Cat Lo. It was hard to understand what a desk guy from Cat Lo was doing leading an An Thoi raid, but Peck and his crew, distinctly not thrilled at having been rousted early in the morning from a sound sleep, went to work. Soon, Commander Connolly instructed Peck and another boat to head up a small side canal to hunt for VC. Peck, I later learned, had haunting premonitions about what was to follow.
It was low enough tide that the boats were literally looking uphill, up the muddy gray banks of the canal. Conversely, anyone shooting at them was shooting down at a sitting duck in a bathtub. Moreover, the crew had no extended vision beyond the lip of the hill. Abruptly, an explosion went off under the 94, lifting and rocking it in the water. Del Sandusky, the boatswain’s mate, remembers seeing a spider hole on the left side. Before he could shoot, Peck was seriously wounded by machine-gun fire from the banks. Bleeding and in pain, he managed to get off some shots while Sandusky miraculously managed to turn the boat and head out of the canal. Sandusky barely had room to turn in. He had to spin the boat at full power, nestling the bow in the mud on one side of the canal while the stern just cleared the other. He churned the
props through the mud while ordering David Alston, the twin .50-caliber gunner, to stay in the guntub and keep firing. Peck then got hit again with a bullet in his ankle, breaking his leg. Alston kept firing. A bullet grazed his head and another hit him in the arm, but he kept up a furious barrage of the twin .50s. Once they got out in the main river, free from the intense firefight, help arrived to find that Ted Peck, despite the pain and being half-conscious, remained as tough as nails. Ted was transferred to an emergency medical unit, where he underwent surgery. He was then medevacked to the hospital in Saigon. We were told it was touch and go. Ted’s pluck, combined with every man on that boat doing what he was supposed to in a hellish moment of surprise but certainly terror, saved all their lives.
Because Ted was to be sent back to the States, I was the lucky OINC who took over the 94 boat and its extraordinary crew. We bonded quickly.
My second-in-command was Del Sandusky, the boatswain’s mate who had so skillfully maneuvered the boat out of danger. There is no doubt in my mind or that of any of his crewmates that Del’s remarkable seamanship in turning that boat under intense fire saved the lives of the entire crew.
Gene Thorson, nicknamed “Thor,” was our engineman. It was our good fortune that he was one of the best in the business. The last thing you wanted to ever experience was engine failure in the middle of an ambush. With Thor’s talent, we never did.
Tommy Belodeau, the forward gunner, a radarman, hailed from Massachusetts. He and I felt an immediate connection, from Red Sox to accent. Tommy had already seen serious action prior to the latest ambush. He had been decorated for capturing a prisoner on the riverbank after a chase.
