Three Decades Later, Vietnam Remains a Hot Issue

ohn Kerry and George W. Bush started out the tumultuous late 1960's in exactly the same place, young men of privilege with a scant two years separating them at Yale.

But they were worlds apart in outlook, and they made starkly different choices after graduating that now, more than three decades later, continue to reverberate loudly in their presidential contest. At times the debate has grown so loud that it has nearly drowned out the issues of the moment, particularly in the week leading into the Republican National Convention.

One young man, Mr. Kerry, had misgivings about the Vietnam War but volunteered anyway, took and saved lives and won medals for valor, then came home and led other veterans trying to stop the war - while antagonizing countless others in uniform. The anger over his antiwar period remains on fire to this day, consuming a group of veterans who have lobbed unsubstantiated charges that he did not earn his medals and are questioning his fitness to be president.

The other young man, Mr. Bush, supported the war but avoided combat by landing a coveted spot as a National Guard pilot. He struggled in his powerful father's shadow to find his own place in life and tried his own hand at politics, going to work for a Republican candidate trying unsuccessfully to capture a Senate seat from Alabama.

It was that period of politicking, when Mr. Bush left his Texas Air National Guard unit to transfer to Alabama, that has led Democrats to question how and where he performed his prescribed military service from May 1972 to May 1973. The White House says he fully performed his service and took an honorable, and early, discharge in October 1973 to attend Harvard Business School.

As 1968 began, Mr. Bush was a senior at Yale and a congressman's son who was grappling, as were his classmates, with a decision "each of us had to make: military service or not," he wrote in his autobiography. For Mr. Bush, who wrote that his inclination was to support the war, "leaving the country to avoid the draft was not an option."

Volunteering for combat was not an attractive option either. "Did I think about going to the Army post and saying, 'Send me to Vietnam?' '' Mr. Bush asked in an interview in 2000. "Not really. I wanted to fly, and that was the adventure I was seeking."

Mr. Bush, then 21, had inquired about getting into the Texas Air National Guard while home for Christmas; back at school, he took the Air Force officer's qualifying test on Jan. 19, 1968. He scored in the 25th percentile for pilot aptitude but the 95th for "officer quality," according to The Dallas Morning News.

On Feb. 10, Ensign John F. Kerry, 24, a day out at sea on a frigate in the Pacific, sent off a request for duty in Vietnam. He wanted to see the war up close.

"I consider the opportunity to serve in Vietnam an extremely important part of being in the armed forces," Mr. Kerry wrote. He asked to command a Swift boat, and offered to extend his hitch if need be.

Mr. Kerry had graduated from Yale in 1966, having signed up for Officer Candidate School in February of his senior year. His classmate David Thorne, who followed him into the Navy a month later, recalled talking with Mr. Kerry about joining in the idealistic terms of a generation that had not yet lost its innocence.

"It felt like the right thing to do, and I made the decision for the same reasons," Mr. Thorne said. "This was the war that our generation needed to fight."

Two weeks after asking to be transferred, Mr. Kerry learned that his best friend from Yale had been killed in action.

In late May, Mr. Bush met with the Texas Air National Guard commander, who recommended him for a direct commission to second lieutenant - a departure from the usual route of R.O.T.C. or Officer Candidate School - and for pilot training.

Mr. Bush has consistently said he never requested special treatment, though Ben Barnes, who was speaker of the Texas House in 1968, said in 1999 that he had been asked by a Houston businessman - not by the Bush family - to recommend Mr. Bush for a pilot's slot, and that he had done so. Mr. Bush was given a spot in an F-102 fighter-interceptor squadron sometimes called the "champagne unit" for its sons of important people. (Mr. Barnes told a group of Kerry supporters that he was "ashamed" of having helped Mr. Bush and other wealthy or well-connected people get into the National Guard.)

Mr. Bush graduated from Yale on June 10, and a month later entered basic training in San Antonio. The next week, Mr. Kerry, by then a lieutenant junior grade, left the frigate Gridley to train for Swift boat duty in Vietnam.

The two young men were taking similar-sounding steps, but on very different tracks. In November, Mr. Bush went to Valdosta, Ga., for pilot training. He was given time off to work in the Florida Senate campaign of Edward J. Gurney, whose consultant, Jimmy Allison, had long been Mr. Bush's father's top political operative.

Mr. Kerry, meanwhile, finished his survival training; became engaged to Mr. Thorne's sister, Julia, in late October; and soon found himself in Cam Ranh Bay, South Vietnam. On Dec. 2, he volunteered for a nighttime patrol on a Navy skimmer and was wounded lightly by shrapnel, according to his military records. His injury won him his first Purple Heart.

In Georgia, Mr. Bush started out on the military equivalent of Cessna 172's for about six weeks, said Norman Dotti, a classmate who recalled that other trainees, most of them headed into the regular Air Force, did not resent the congressman's son.

"If there was any envy, it was because he was in the Guard, and he was going to go fly a fighter," Mr. Dotti said, while Air Force pilots would have their aircraft chosen for them.

Mr. Bush did well, Mr. Dotti said - "I'd fly with him again" - and moved on to subsonic jet trainers in February, then to supersonic jets.

By mid-March, Mr. Kerry, who had been wounded three times and whose records credited him with killing 20 of the enemy, had already asked to transfer out of Vietnam.

Halfway around the world, he was learning hard lessons after taking charge of his first Swift boat, PCF-44, in early December 1968. In his letters and journals, he told of deadly ambushes and the fog of war: ducking from American gunfire and air strikes; losing a friend to friendly fire; being ordered in night missions to "shoot indiscriminately at a target we couldn't see."

He wrote of watching a South Vietnamese soldier die of multiple wounds, and of shooting up a sampan, unwittingly killing a child on board.

By March 17, when he asked to leave Vietnam, he had won three Purple Hearts, one Silver Star and one Bronze Star. He was wounded for the last time on March 13, after a Green Beret on his own boat, Jim Rassmann, fell overboard in an ambush. An explosion had knocked Mr. Rassmann off the boat and hurt Mr. Kerry's right arm, but Mr. Kerry steered back into the ambush and pulled Mr. Rassmann to safety. On the recommendation of Mr. Rassmann - who campaigns at Mr. Kerry's side these days - Mr. Kerry won the Bronze Star.

While Mr. Bush made his way through jet pilot training in 1969 - and became the buzz of his air base when he was flown off to a dinner date with Tricia Nixon, the president's daughter - Mr. Kerry made his way to a job as an admiral's aide in New York. Another close friend's death, he said, "galvanized" his urge to speak out against the war.

He had learned to fly at Yale. And that fall, he rented a plane and flew Adam Walinsky, a former speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy, to antiwar rallies across New York State, pestering him with questions about politics.

A month later, Mr. Kerry asked for an early discharge from the Navy so he could run for Congress. His admiral wrote that "the country and the Navy will be better served" if he won.

In January 1970, released from active duty, he nearly upset the favorite in a pre-primary caucus to pick an antiwar candidate for Congress. He helped out in the winner's campaign, married Ms. Thorne and, on a trip to Paris that summer, met on his own with North Vietnamese delegates to the peace talks.

He also joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and gave a speech at a Labor Day rally in Pennsylvania that so impressed other members that they made him their spokesman.

Mr. Bush finished his pilot training in June 1970 and shifted to weekend duty, flying alert missions with his F-102 squadron outside Houston. His father was running for Senate, and the Texas Air Guard proudly sent out a release saying that "fighter planes are Lt. Bush's 'thing.' "

That fall, his father lost his Senate race and moved to New York to become ambassador to the United Nations. Mr. Bush stayed in Houston and got a job at an agricultural company run by a family friend.

Mr. Kerry was immersing himself in the antiwar movement. In January 1971 he attended the poorly publicized Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit, where other veterans told of torture, gang rape and the killing and mutilation of women and children. His televised testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April instantly made him the most celebrated antiwar spokesman of his day. But in recounting what he had heard in Detroit, he also antagonized countless other soldiers and veterans who said they saw his descriptions of "atrocities" and war crimes as libelous and treacherous. One of them was a fellow Swift boat veteran named John E. O'Neill, now the co-author of a book saying that Mr. Kerry is unfit to be president.

In Texas that summer, Mr. Bush was preoccupied with his own future, his bosses at the agricultural company recalled. Peter Knudtzon, his supervisor, said in an interview that Mr. Bush had been fascinated by the mechanics of politics and power, and was mulling a run for the State Legislature - gauging the value of his father's name, but also looking for a way to "do it on his own."

By late 1971, both Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry were looking ahead. Mr. Kerry began to pull away from the increasingly radical Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and quit the group in an acrimonious meeting where some talked of assassinations. He had his eye on Congress again and, looking at the political landscape, took aim at an open seat in blue-collar Lowell, Mass.

Mr. Bush went to Alabama, where Mr. Allison was managing the long-shot Senate bid of Winton M. Blount, a construction magnate challenging an entrenched Democrat, John J. Sparkman. Mr. Allison hired Mr. Bush as political director after the May 1972 primary.

That month, Mr. Bush requested a transfer to Maxwell Air Force Base, outside Montgomery, but his Texas unit denied it. In September 1972, he submitted a new application and was granted a temporary transfer to an Alabama Air National Guard unit at Maxwell, though he was not qualified to fly its Phantom II jets.

Mr. Bush had moved to Alabama in May. In August he missed a physical and was suspended from flying by his superiors in Texas. White House officials said earlier this year that he had skipped the physical knowing he would not be flying in Alabama.

The campaigns that Mr. Kerry ran and Mr. Bush worked on in 1972 had some things in common. Mr. Kerry was lambasted for spending record sums and raising most of it from outside the district; Mr. Blount, for trying to buy a Senate seat and bringing in "hired guns" from Texas.

The Lowell newspaper tarred Mr. Kerry as all but a traitor for his antiwar activity. In Alabama, Mr. Bush's man accused his rival of being soft on North Vietnam and coddling draft dodgers.

Both contests became one-sided in the end, and Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush's man were both trounced.

In defeat, Mr. Kerry withdrew from politics, went to law school and started a family. Mr. Bush got his M.B.A. and married Laura Welch. There would be plenty of time for comebacks.

Once again, the New York Slimes needs to look at a map: the Mekong never forms the border between Cambodia and Vietnam. Kerry wasn't there. His own biographer says so. His own campaign has all but admitted it. But the America's Pravda just won't give up.

"One young man, Mr. Kerry, had misgivings about the Vietnam War but volunteered anyway, took and saved lives and won medals for valor, then came home and led other veterans trying to stop the war - while antagonizing countless others in uniform."

I stopped reading right here. JFKerry first choice was to stay in school and then he "volunteered" to join the NAVY.

This story of two young men is tainted from the get go!!!

No mention that the alleged businessman who made this request was deceased at the time Barnes said this. No mention that Barnes is vice-chair of Kerry's finance committtee, and has raised over half a million for Kerry. No mention that Barnes admitted in 1999 that the Bush family didn't even know about this alleged help he gave.

I have never read much from the New York Times, now i know why... why the hell does most of the article talk about Bush and NOT the allegations leveled against Kerry? anyone? they had over 3 years to look at Bush's guard service and frankly they have been over and over and over all of this 1000 times before... now we have new allegations against their guy and SHHHHHHH lets not talk about him, lets turn the argument. Someone in school taught me that.

You stopped reading (and who could blame you) so you missed my favorite part "In January 1971 he attended the poorly publicized Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit,...."

Poorly publicized? So I guess that's why John F'in K. had to spread their lies around.

Let me tell you, if after all this re-hash of the central differences between the Republicans and the Democrats, if Bush loses and Kerry wins, we as a nation are truly doomed.

Kerry must be rejected and repudiated by the public as no other politician in my memory has needed to be. Should he win we may as well tear down the statue of Liberty and replace her with a likeness of Hillary Clinton, we can reconstruct the Lincoln Memorial with a statue of her "husband" Bill in a really disgusting pose (sorry, but the image just came to me), we can strike "in God we trust" from our currency and replace it with the phrase "Madelyn Murray O'Hare was right", and we can all agree to use Al Gore's translation of E Pluribus Unum and say that it means "out of one, many".

This article is a new low, even for the Times.

they made starkly different choices after graduating

Um... one went into the military and became a politician.

The other went into the military and became a politician.

The stark contrast is mind-numbing.

I don't think Vietnam would be an issue but just a past memories. We can't never get over Vietnam because these politician using it as a way to get them elected. I am not just talking ONE politician.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. I intend to call no witnesses.

I offer only this one piece of evidence that I refer to people who "report" for the mainstream media as mere employees rather than by the title "journalists" because that's all they are, employees -- though I have no proof that they actually receive a salary.

Exhibit A is Mr. Halbfinger's article.

I rest my case.

From the article:

The NY Times doesn't go any further, into the interesting question: Were the "Winter Soldier Innvestigation" testimonies truthful?

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August 29, 2004

Three Decades Later, Vietnam Remains a Hot Issue