The Washington Post
April 23, 2004
Keen Focus on Lt. Kerry's Four Months Under Fire
Lois Romano, Washington Post Staff Writer
Throughout the last decade of Kerry's political career, his crewmates have defended him when his credentials and record have been questioned; they are now campaigning for him. In a recent interview, Kerry dismissed the current questions about his first Purple Heart as partisan politics. He also said he left early because he had turned on the war. One of his crewmates, Michael Medeiros, said Kerry ensured that his men were given a non-threatening assignment before he left Vietnam.
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He arrived in the jungle as a Yalie with a Boston Brahmin résumé and the initials JFK -- a different breed from his crewmen, barely out of their teens and with working-class roots. Kerry would also spend his free time chronicling his experiences in letters home, which historian Douglas Brinkley used in his recently published book "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War."
But the consensus among crewmates is that he bridged the differences and connected with his crew immediately. In combat, eight of nine of them say, he was daring and unflinching, never tentative. The ninth, Stephen M. Gardner, an avowed Bush supporter, recently told Brinkley: "Whenever a firefight started he always pulled up stakes and got the hell out of Dodge." Once, famously, Kerry -- in violation of regulations -- beached his boat and went after the enemy, chasing down and killing a Viet Cong guerrilla carrying a rocket launcher.
"I didn't want to just react and respond. I wanted to win," Kerry said. "I went there with a purpose, and that was to be successful on the missions."
Medeiros, who in 1969 was a crewmate of Kerry's, said Kerry "wanted to be aggressive."
"I liked him immediately. . . . He was a strong leader willing to take calculated risks. We were the seasoned ones; he respected that. He took the approach that we didn't have to prove anything to him. He had to prove something to us," Medeiros said.(snip)
The Boston Globe
May 25, 1996, Saturday
Boorda was inspired by Kerry's remarks
By Chris Black, Globe Staff
Adm. Jeremy (Mike) Boorda, the chief of naval operations, was buried at Arlington National Cemetery this week. Last June, he found himself moved by remarks made by Sen. John F. Kerry at the transfer of two Vietnam-era swift boats to the Navy Museum.
Both men served as naval officers in Vietnam: Boorda on a destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin and Kerry as commander of a swift boat, the fast-moving combat vessels used by the Navy to pursue the enemy down the treacherous inland rivers in the Mekong Delta.
In a communication to the top officers of the Navy last June about Kerry's speech, Boorda wrote: "The senator was able to capture the essence of small-unit combat, the dependence of each crew member and each boat upon the others, the trust and love (he used the word love several times in his speech, and it was just right) that grew among those who served, and the honor, courage and commitment (yes, he used those words, too) that is the foundation of what we are all about."
Boorda sent a copy of the speech to every flag officer in the Navy. "Use the thoughts when the opportunities arise to help your people understand what service in this Navy of ours is truly all about," he wrote. "Thanks."
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