"Kerry had had an action-filled tour as a swift-boat commander in Vietnam, where he was severely wounded in an ambush, gaining three Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star, in addition to the Silver Star, which by all rights should have been a Navy Cross. But Admiral Elmo "Bud" Zumwalt Jr. had intercepted the paperwork for Kerry's Navy Cross and changed it to a lesser award so that he could approve it himself (the Navy Cross requires congressional approval) and pin it on Kerry a few days later, as an "impact award," to boost morale.
Kerry could not help but sense the irony of his being a war hero, since he had not wanted to fight in the war at all. Before Vietnam, he had led a life of privilege. His father, a lawyer, had worked in the foreign service, and John had been schooled at St. Paul's and Yale, with summers in Europe. Exceedingly tall and rangy, Kerry was a good athlete, and at Yale he had distinguished himself as an orator; in fact, he delivered the senior oration at his graduation in 1966, criticizing the draft and the war. He had been planning to pursue his graduate studies abroad when he received a notice from his draft board that he would soon be called. Though he questioned the policy behind the war, he did not see either jail or exile as a reasonable alternative for himself; besides, he says he 'believed very strongly in the code of service to one's country.' So he enlisted in the Navy, to see for himself what was going on and at the same time to stay out of combat. To that end, he volunteered for assignment on one of the swift boats--short, fast aluminum craft that were used for patrol duty off the Vietnam coast. Two weeks before he arrived in Vietnam, the Navy began changing the deployment of the boats, sending them up the rivers instead to ferret out pockets of Viet Cong that were guarding the waterways for their own use. Still, Kerry shrugs off the attribution of heroism. In the action of February 1966 for which he was awarded the Silver Star, he maintains that he simply got tired of being ambushed. 'The riverbank just erupted with small weapons fire,' he recalls. 'We were caught in it. So I turned all the boats right into it and we charged the riverbank--beached right in the positions, ran ashore, and ran right over the ambush. Then I took one boat upstream with me, and we took [were hit by] a B-40 rocket on the boat, and I guess I just got pissed off again, and I went straight into the rocket position. I wanted to see some of the enemy and fight 'em. So we did, and we beat the hell out of 'em. We went into this village and captured a lot of weapons and people and VC flags.'"
Stationed in New York a few months later, in the spring of 1969, Kerry, showing the same gumption, went directly to Admiral Walter F. Schlech Jr. to request the early discharge. Before he had gone to Vietnam, he had spent hours debating the value of the war and the help we were allegedly giving the Vietnamese people, but once in combat 'the answers hit [him] pretty hard, right in the face.' He was appalled by 'the lack of strategy, the stupidity of many of the missions, the apparent lack of political will by this country to pursue [the war], the lack of a commitment to the men who were fighting in the field, [and] the absurdity of some of the losses that we were incurring,' as well as 'the corruption within the [South Vietnamese] government.' 'Everything added up,' he says in hindsight, explaining how 'this kid coming back from nowhere,' who 'wasn't known from Adam,' suddenly found it in his heart to run for Congress in order 'to make an antiwar statement.' Schlech, who disagreed with Kerry's position on the war, agreed to set him free from the Navy. 'To his enormous credit,' remembers Kerry, 'he understood where I was coming from, and he said, 'That's a fair request. You've served honorably, and you've done your duty, and I think you have a right to exercise your judgment.' Kerry's discharge came through on January 1, 1970."
By the way, Kerry didn't run for Congress at that time. He deferred to Fr. Robert Drinan, and eventually became chairman of Drinan's campaign.