Could Vietnam win the White House for Kerry?

Could Vietnam win the White House for Kerry?
guardian.co.uk ^ | Tuesday February 3, 2004 | Suzanne Goldenberg

Posted on 02/06/2004 10:09:00 AM PST by Destro

Could Vietnam win the White House?

A tearful reunion with a former comrade revived John Kerry's presidential bid, fellow veterans have flocked to support him and now campaign adverts show him in full combat gear. Why does Vietnam still exert such power over American voters? Suzanne Goldenberg reports

Tuesday February 3, 2004

The Guardian

Making of a hero ... Lieutenant John Kerry (second from left) with the crew of his gunboat on the Mekong River in 1969

It was March 13 1969, and the US army Green Beret was running out of breath after diving five times beneath the surface of the Bay Hap river, to escape Vietnamese sniper fire from its banks. From downriver, he heard a gunboat approach. A US navy lieutenant, who had already been hit in the arm, exposed himself to fire once more to haul the Green Beret over the bow and to safety. Half a lifetime later, Jim Rassman, the erstwhile Green Beret, is a paunchy, retired police official who grows orchids for a hobby. Memories of that day are seared for ever in his brain. "He could have been shot and killed at any time, and so could I. So I figure I probably owe this man my life," he says.

More than 30 years later, Rassman had his chance to repay the debt. The navy man was John Kerry, one of the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, and Rassman may have saved his political career. The registered Republican has emerged from quiet retirement in Oregon to put himself at the Kerry campaign's disposal. Their tearful reunion earlier this month - their first meeting since Vietnam - has transformed Kerry's fortunes.

Two days after the two Vietnam veterans embraced at a campaign rally, the caucus goers of Iowa delivered a stunning victory to Kerry, confounding those who had declared his campaign dead. Two weeks later, the senator from Massachusetts is either the frontrunner or up there competing in all seven of the states holding their primaries today, and the pundits are now wondering if he is unstoppable.

It is possible to argue that Kerry's entire career is contained in the arc between those encounters in the treacherous waters of the Mekong Delta and the frozen plains of Iowa. It is also possible to argue that Kerry, like tens of thousands of American men of his generation, never truly left Vietnam behind.

"The memories come back all of the time. We haven't forgotten any of this. For the last 30 years, we have just learned how to manage," says Rob Stenson, now 55. Stenson spent 13 months as ground crew at the Danang airforce base in central Vietnam, and is an active campaigner for veterans' benefits. "It's not a question of getting over it. You manage it," he says.

Some 3.5 million Americans served in Vietnam, and tens of millions more grew up in its shadow. But beyond the obvious centrality of Vietnam to an entire generation, there is a hard-edged practicality to Kerry's lifelong tribute to the months he spent in uniform.

He has told interviewers that he doubts he could have succeeded in politics without having served in Vietnam. The forced companionship with the raw recruits under his command was the Boston prep schoolboy's first exposure to ordinary Americans. After returning home a bona fide hero with a chestful of medals, Kerry completed his credentials by fighting for peace, testifying in Washington against the war in 1971, and leading a march of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The testimony was the making of Kerry. The navy lieutenant was viewed by the Nixon White House as its most formidable anti-war opponent because it was understood that Kerry's impeccable war record would insulate him from charges of being an unpatriotic hippy.

At this time of inescapable parallels between a futile project to halt communism in south-east Asia, and a faltering attempt to remake the Middle East by going to war in Iraq, the current occupant of the White House harbours similar concerns.

As a wartime president, George Bush would rather not fight an election against a war hero - especially one whose Purple Hearts and Bronze and Silver Stars stand in contrast to his own experience. Republican operatives have indicated that they would rather Kerry did not emerge as the Democratic candidate, and rightwing commentators have begun to attack his service record and opposition to the war.

Unlike Kerry, Bush never went to war: family connections earned the future president a coveted position in the Texas air national guard. But even that sinecure eventually proved too taxing; a number of recent books suggest that he could have been absent without authorisation for as long as eight months.

But Kerry is more than his wartime record - as Democratic rival, General Wesley Clark, has discovered. Although Clark also served with distinction in Vietnam, he did not share Kerry's misgivings about the war. Those doubts, which Kerry expressed to the Senate foreign relations committee in 1971, have enabled him years later to reconnect with the men of his damaged generation. In later life, as a senator, Kerry joined fellow veteran and Republican John McCain to try to resolve the haunting issue of American MIAs, and to bring about reconciliation with Vietnam.

Some of these activities were controversial. Among the small but vocal minority who believe that some Americans remained in secret captivity in Vietnam, Kerry is seen as a traitor for leaving men behind. Other veterans bridle still at Kerry's testimony to the Senate, in which he said that US soldiers had committed rape, murder and torture, and ravaged the countryside of south Vietnam. Alternate versions of those heady days of the anti-war movement also portray Kerry as an opportunist who launched on to their protests for personal gain.

But one fact was indisputable. Kerry had established a connection with his generation, and that connection, in turn, could now win him the presidency. The reappearance of Rassman was merely the start. As the campaign went on, dozens of other vets attached themselves to the Kerry campaign as volunteers and a number who fought alongside him, made campaign appearances.

At this point, it is difficult to imagine Kerry's candidacy without Vietnam. His campaign ads include clips of a war-era Kerry walking along in fatigues and helmet, and testimony from his gunboat crew. The message is simple: "When the bullets began to hit the side of the boat, the boom, the pow, pow, pow, we found out that John Kerry can lead," says one of his crew.

Veterans involved with the Kerry campaign say there is a psychic bond that cannot be easily explained. "He is in effect the spokesman for our generation," says Max Cleland, another icon of that war, who has campaigned for Kerry in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. "In a strange way, it's a delayed reaction. Thirty-five years later, we have someone who speaks our language, who understands the issues of war, peace and readjustment, and who understands the tragedy of war."

Cleland, a former senator from Georgia, lost both legs and his right arm to a grenade while serving in Vietnam in 1967. He struggles to define what it is that tugs at the veterans who have signed on to the Kerry campaign. "It's a brotherhood of suffering - something so deep and painful that it goes beyond words."

The hunger to find meaning shows no sign of abating. The Fog of War, the recently released documentary on Robert McNamara, tries - and fails - to get the former secretary of defence to come to terms with America's role in the cold war. Late last year, the Toledo Blade exposed an atrocity that ranks alongside the infamous My Lai massacre: the killing of hundreds of south Vietnamese villagers by the 101st Airborne Division.

"I think it will remain an issue with the post-war baby boom generation as long as it is alive," says David Maraniss, author of They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967.

If anything, Maraniss says, Vietnam has become even more central to those who fought there. During the past five years, Vietnam veterans who had been silent for decades have begun to seek out their former comrades over the internet. He attributes the interest in revisiting the war to a realisation of mortality among a generation now approaching retirement. "Whenever I write anything about that period, I get calls from people all over this country, men who see something I have written and just need someone to talk to, even a reporter," Maraniss says.

Others say that the Iraq war is also a significant factor. Sydney Schanberg, the former New York Times reporter who became famous for his account of Cambodia's Killing Fields, believes the parallels between Iraq and Vietnam are inescapable. Both conflicts are futile; both expose the mendacity of governments. "The most important reason it resonates ... is that Iraq - though hardly analogous, nothing is ever perfectly analogous - has got the same broad template," says Schanberg. "You send men into a strange region where they don't speak the language, and they cannot tell automatically or easily who the friend is and who the foe is, and there are people trying to get at them, shooting at them right through the night.

"They are now learning, if they haven't learned, that their government either lied or distorted information in order to get public support to go to war."

Kerry's learning curve began even before he left for Vietnam. According to a lengthy biographical series in the Boston Globe last summer, he was already entertaining doubts about the war by the time he enlisted. He chose the navy because he believed he would be safe and because he liked the parallels with another Bostonian: John F Kennedy, who parlayed a career as a navy hero into the presidency.

But by December 1968, when Kerry arrived for his first tour in-country, the navy gunboats were being used for dangerous missions up the Mekong Delta. Kerry saw so much action that he was able to win an early transfer home soon after rescuing Rassman.

By 1971, when he appeared before the Senate foreign relations committee, Kerry was on his way to becoming a star. "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?" Kerry asked the committee. "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

In Kerry's New Hampshire headquarters last month, where a half-dozen greying Vietnam veterans were manning the phones and reconnecting, it was remembered as the former navy lieutenant's finest hour. At least so far.