John Kerry: The mission I found in Vietnam

WASHINGTON The year 1968 was unlike any other I have known. I was 24 years old, a newly minted naval officer in a convoy headed for the Gulf of Tonkin.

I remember lazy moments standing watch on the U.S.S. Gridley - out on the fantail, the fo'c'sle, anywhere, looking at the sea, enjoying glorious sunsets and sunrises on the bridge.

Then, on the afternoon of Feb. 26, when we had left Midway Island, the reality of Vietnam hit me right between the eyes. Gridley's executive officer came to me and asked if I had a friend named Pershing - and I knew immediately why he was asking.

I fought to restrain an empty crying. I didn't even have to read the telegram; I knew that Dick Pershing, my childhood and college friend, was dead. For days on the empty Pacific I could barely stand the knowledge that I would never see him again. It was the loss of someone irreplaceable, a loss of innocence, a loss of the sense of invincibility and bravado that young men have as they go to war.

Soon after, off Vietnam, we learned that Senator Eugene McCarthy and a band of college students living on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches had rocked the foundations of the political world in the New Hampshire primary, sending the message to President Lyndon Johnson that he couldn't be president any more.

Weeks later we heard of the death of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., assassinated while campaigning for justice in America. We knew that cities across the country had exploded in riots and much of Washington itself was in flames. There was war all around us and war at home.

After a few months of search and rescue work in the Gulf of Tonkin, the ship was returning to California when the crackling radio picked up the end of Robert Kennedy's victory speech, the shots fired in the kitchen, the chaos. We docked early the next morning - June 6, 1968. Robert Kennedy died that day.

I spent a lost weekend in Long Beach glued to the television set. It was strange, leaving a place of violence to come home to violence - violence that shook our sense of the order of things. Later that summer I reported for Swift boat training in Coronado, California. We lived with the deep-throated roar of Phantom afterburners streaking out of the naval air station, carriers dominating the harbor, Marine recruits surviving basic training, and we watched the turmoil in our own country. I had been a participant and an observer, and my beliefs were challenged during that difficult time.

Soon I found myself back in Vietnam, on the front lines of a very different war from the one I had known on my first tour of duty. We were outsiders in a complex war among Vietnamese. Too many allies were corrupt. Adversaries were ruthless. Enemy territory was everywhere.

It is hard still to explain the clashing feelings. There were the deep and enduring bonds forged among crewmates, brothers in arms from all walks of life fighting each day to keep faith with one another on a tiny boat on the rivers of the Mekong Delta. And there was the anger I felt toward body-counting, face-saving leaders sitting safely in Washington sending to the killing fields troops who were often poor, black or brown. But that was Vietnam, where the children of America were pulled from front porches and living rooms and plunged almost overnight into a world of sniper fire, ambushes, rockets, booby traps, body bags, explosions, sleeplessness and the confusion created by an enemy who was sometimes invisible and firing at us and sometimes right next to us and smiling.

I found understanding only in the shared experience of those for whom the war was personal, who had lost friends and seen brothers lose arms and legs, who had seen all around them human beings fight and curse, weep and die.

At times it seemed that we were the only ones who really understood that the faults in Vietnam were those of the war, not the warriors.

I returned home to America and moved to New York City, prepared to serve out the remainder of my naval duty in Brooklyn. Part of me wanted to forget Vietnam and get on with my life, but part of me felt compelled to tell the story. I was unsure how.

Then, in April 1969, I received news so eerily similar to what had happened on that first voyage to Vietnam. Another close friend - Don Droz - had been killed in a swift boat ambush in the Duong Keo River.

At that moment I knew I couldn't wait. There was no further thinking to do. It was time. That's the day I decided to give all my energy and strength to one more mission: to end the war in which I'd fought.

John Kerry, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, is candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Ah hah!

Found it at last.

In his words, "Then, on the afternoon of Feb. 26, when we had left Midway Island, the reality of Vietnam hit me right between the eyes....

Soon after, off Vietnam.... (So the GRIDLEY hadn't even gotten to 'Nam at the end of February!)....

After a few months of search and rescue work in the Gulf of Tonkin ... We docked early the next morning - June 6, 1968 (in Long Beach, CA).

So, the ENTIRE TIME his first tour in Vietnam was AT MOST 90 days: March, April, May of '67. Then, after 90 days of air-conditioned comfort off the coast, they left Tonkin (at the end of May) and had already returned to California by the first week in June.

LOL! Thanks nopardons. You must have been very brave back then. I'm glad you're on our side. :) I spent time on a major university campus after I got back and it got very ugly.

I can't believe anyone who has ever been connected to or supported the military would ever vote for Kerry after what the RAT's did to the absent tee ballots in Florida.

"John Kerry served in Vietnam???? REALLY????? I did not know that, he really should talk about that experience some time."

Yep. And in the FOUR MONTHS of HELL he spent there, he got a couple of scratches that he will PAINFULLY bear the rest of his life.

I hope he can bear the terrible burden of his war wounds. Such disabilities and the horrible nightmares he must endure every night.
Hopefully he can OVERCOME this make something out of his war weary life.

I was brave and a bit reckless. Here I was, about the same age or younger, than the protesters, dressed in nylons,heels,a dress,wearing my flag pin, makeup, and my hair done, fighting back the scum of the earth;which was exactly what they looked and smelled like.I'd still do exactly the same today,if I have to!

No, THANK YOU for serving.

I can't believe that there are vets, or family members of vets,who are not still outraged by Kerry and the rest,to this day. And that includes today's military and the 2000 absentee ballots too.

I may no longer be young, but I'm still more than a match for any of those sniveling,aging antiwar morons.

It is of special interest to read the words of Marcus Tullius Cicero regarding the danger of internal subversion. In a speech to the Roman Senate, as recorded by Sallust, Cicero said:

"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious.But it cannot survive treason from within.

An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city.

But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.

He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.

A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the plague."

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