On February 28, 1969:
When Kerry's Patrol Craft Fast 94 received a B-40 rocket shot from shore, he hot dogged his craft beaching it in the center of the enemy position. To his surprise, an enemy soldier sprang up from a hole not ten feet from Patrol Craft 94 and fled.
The boat's machine gunner hit and wounded the fleeing Viet Cong as he darted behind a hootch. The twin .50s gunner fired at the Viet Cong. He said he "laid 50 rounds" into the hootch before Kerry leaped from the boat and dashed in to administer a "coup de grace" to the wounded Viet Cong. Kerry returned with the B-40 rocket and launcher. Kerry was given a Silver Star for his actions.
Kerry commanded his first swift boat, No. 44, from December 1968 through January 1969. He received no medals while serving on this craft.
While in command of Swift Boat 44, Kerry and crew operated without prudence in a Free Fire Zone, carelessly firing at targets of opportunity racking up a number of enemy kills and some civilians. His body count included-- a woman, her baby, a 12 year-old boy, an elderly man and several South Vietnamese soldiers.
"It is one of those terrible things, and I'll never forget, ever, the sight of that child," Kerry later said about the dead baby. "But there was nothing that anybody could have done about it. It was the only instance of that happening." Kerry said he was appalled that the Navy's ''free fire zone'' policy in Vietnam put civilians at such high risk.
Kerry's first night on Mekong Delta river patrol found PCF-44, his first Swift boat, supporting a provincial reconnaissance unit (PRU), one of more than 200 such eighteen-man squads in a CIA-funded program aimed at destroying the Vietcong through assassination, kidnapping, and sabotage carried out by Vietnamese mercenaries.
Paid four times what privates in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) received, plus hefty bounties per kill or captured prisoner or weapon,
PRU members in many cases were hardened South Vietnamese criminals given a choice between life imprisonment and joining up; in others they were North Vietnamese and Vietcong defectors recruited for their willingness to do anything for a price.
After the PRU had disappeared into the dense mangrove trees lining the bank, Kerry beached his boat on the mud, just a few hundred yards downstream from where the unit had landed. "There we sat silently, waiting to help if called upon," he wrote later in his war notes. "Hours passed slowly by. Then, late at night, a red flare shot into the sky from the PRU's position. It meant 'Emergency Extraction'—get the PRU's out as fast as possible." Two patrol boat river craft (PBRs) that were anchored close by also sprang into action. Before Kerry and his crew could get their Swift off the mud, "the PBRs had disappeared up a small estuary." The skipper of one was on the radio shouting to headquarters, "Emergency Extraction requested—moving in now—Emergency Extraction requested."
The Swift boat's young lieutenant had scant idea what he and his men were supposed to do. "The disorganization was incredible," Kerry wrote in his war notes. "We had never worked with the PBR's before. The Operation Order given to us that morning contained no contingencies for Swift boats." Kerry's Swift came under fire, but the crew couldn't tell from where. In the rush to get out of there, the boat ran aground. Finally the PBRs reappeared. Kerry's account of that night's events continued.
They had a sampan in tow and were moving very slowly, confident that the shooting was over for the evening. [Boatswain's Mate Stephen W.] Hatch nursed the Swift alongside the PBR. I jumped aboard to talk with the Chief Petty Officer in charge. "What happened?" "The PRU's were patrolling through the area when they came on a hut with two people in it. Man and a woman. PRU's went in and found the woman writing a letter to her VC boyfriend. So they took 'em into custody. As they were comin back they spotted a sampan with four people in it. They took 'em under fire and that's it." It seemed like an every day occurrence to him. "Were the people killed?" I ventured timidly. "Hell yes. PRU's don't miss when they shoot." "But the people in the sampan didn't fire or anything?" Just shooting them seemed incredible.
The Vietcong were not easily frightened—and not easily recognized. The battlefield was everywhere in Vietnam, and the enemy was sometimes a barefoot child carrying a bomb in a satchel. As a result, for the most part the rule on a Swift boat was "better safe than sorry." Every Asian was seen as a potential sniper. If a noise came from the thick mangrove brush on a riverbank, it was deemed wiser to spray the area with machine-gun fire than to make a closer investigation. And if in doing so one accidentally killed a civilian, it was better to keep it to oneself.
One of the most horrific moments of Kerry's tour in Vietnam occurred one day toward the end of winter, when the second Swift boat he commanded, PCF-94, and another Swift were patrolling the Cua Lon River in the southwestern delta region. The night was pitch-black, neither Swift's search or boarding lights were working properly, and both boats kept getting stuck on the bottom of a shallow channel. "Many minutes of silent patrolling had gone by when one of the men yelled sampan off the port bow," Kerry wrote in his war notes.
Everybody froze and we slowed the engines quickly. But the sampan was already by us and wasn't stopping. It was past curfew and nothing was allowed on the river. I told the after gunner to fire a few warning shots and in the confusion all the guns opened up. We moved in on the sampan and taking one of the battle lanterns off the bulkhead shone it on the silhouette of the craft that was now dead in the water.
Technically, the two Swifts had done nothing wrong. The sampan, operating past curfew, was undeniably in a free-fire zone. What's more, there had been several incidents of people in sampans trying to get close enough to U.S. Navy vessels to toss bombs into their pilothouses. But knowing they were following official Navy policy didn't make it any easier for the crews to deal with what they saw next. "The light revealed a woman standing in the stern of the sampan with a child of perhaps two years or less in her arms," Kerry wrote.
Neither [was] harmed. We asked her where the men from the stern were as one of the gunners was sure that he had seen someone moving back there. She gesticulated wildly and I could see traces of blood on the engine mounting. It was obvious that they had been blown overboard. Then someone said that there was a body up front and we moved in closer to see the limbs of a small child limp on the sacks of rice. She had already covered it and when one of the men asked me if I wanted it uncovered I said no realizing that the face would stay with me for the rest of my life and that it was better not to know whether there was a smile or a grimace or whether it was a girl or a boy.
Almost every American who served in Vietnam witnessed or heard about innocents' getting killed. The civilian casualties would haunt the consciences of many veterans, including John Kerry. It was impossible to rectify or rationalize a mistake that resulted in such a death. "The child was still dead," Kerry wrote of the accident on the Cua Lon River, "and we had done it."
"Good Hunting? Good Christ"
The longer he was in the Mekong Delta river system, the more Kerry's war notes reflected a distrust of his direct superiors. He also grew more and more uncomfortable with the tacit assumption that an American life was worth so much more than a Vietnamese life. Although he never saw the slightest evidence of bigotry, hatred, or cruelty of any kind in any of the men he served with on a Swift boat, or in any of his fellow Swift skippers, Kerry was troubled by the callous attitude he perceived coming from the top U.S. brass. Worse, it seemed to be trickling down into the enlisted ranks among men eager for promotions. He wrote in his war notes,
The popular view was that somehow "gooks" just didn't have very much personality—they were ignorant "slopeheads," just peasants with no feelings and no hopes. I don't think this was true among most of the officers and this made me wonder how much of it was feigned among the enlisted so that they would look good in the eyes of their more chauvinistic comrades.
The Chief talked on. "Doesn't matter. They shouldn'a been there. Besides, one of the PRU's says they had guns but that the sampan tipped over and the guns were lost in the water."
Then, Kerry wrote, he looked over at the young woman they had detained, "who was squatting in the rear of the PBR." She was defiant. She sat very calmly, watching the movements of the men who had just blown four of her countrymen to bits. She glared at me. I wondered about her boyfriend who was fighting us somewhere else. The PBR crew said that the men in the sampan got what they had coming to them but I felt a certain sense of guilt, shame, sorrow, remorse—something inexplicable about the way they were shot and about the predicament of the girl. I wanted to touch her and tell her that it was going to be all right but I didn't really know that it would be. Besides, she wouldn't have accepted my gesture with anything but scorn. I looked away and did nothing at all which was really all I could do. I hated all of us for the situation which stripped people of their self respect.
Kerry returned to his boat, and as it moved out to the Soi Rap River, he looked back and saw the PRU mercenaries talking animatedly, no doubt discussing the lucrative killing they had just done. One of them mimicked the expression and the position that one of the dead had assumed at the instant he had become one of the dead. It had been easy. No shot had been fired at them. Besides, the dead didn't matter at all. They were now just four more casualties of war. The United States would now