LewWaters
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 Posted: Fri Oct 08, 2004 7:29 pm Post subject: Kerry, A War Remembered |
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From time to time, we have quoted the book, The Vietnam Experience, A War Remembered, where Kerry spoke that he really didn't want to get involved in the war and volunteered for Swift Boats because at the time, they were performing relatively safe duty off the coast.
I received a copy of the book and have scanned the entire article. It's amazing to me to see what he said in 1986 compared to what he says today. The article is lengthy, but worth reading, if for no other reason than to rip it apart  Here it is below, minus illustrations;
| Quote: | John Forbes Kerry
Swift Boat Commander U.S.. Navy, Phu Quoc Island 1968-1969
John Kerry was born in Denver in 1943 but spent much of his childhood in Washington and Europe, where his father held several important posts in the Foreign Service. From his parents Kerry gained a "sense of commitment to country" that be carried with him through St. Paul's School and Yale University.
By the time of his graduation in 1966, be had already signed up for the Navy. From December of that year to July 1968 be served on a destroyer, the U.S.S. Gridley, spending several months patrolling off the coast of Vietnam. In November 1968 be returned to Vietnam where be participated in the river war of the southern delta, earning both the Silver and Bronze Stars for heroism in combat. Upon his return to the United States be became active in the antiwar movement as national coordinator of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
After graduation from law school Kerry spent three years as an assistant district attorney and two years as lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. In 1984 be was elected to the United States Senate.
Up Until Vietnam I wasn’t defined as a person. I was just a kid coming out of college. I played sports, I took exams, I graduated and there I was, full of hopes and aspirations but essentially unformed.
I was already committed to the Navy, but I didn’t even have any strong feelings about the war. In fact, prior to signing up I had been somewhat supportive of our position in Vietnam. But slowly my attitude changed to one of skepticism. It was “What’s going on here? What are the facts? Do we listen to the traditional voices of public rectitude that we’ve listened the past, or do we figure this out for selves?” I was beginning to ask questions - about an American foreign policy that seemed to be without any rationale, about a draft which was being used to provide the big stick for that foreign policy - but I hadn’t answered them at that point. The war wasn’t personal to me yet. It was an abstract foreign policy adventure that the United States was engaged in that I was thinking about in abstract, schoolboy terms.
Then in Vietnam I saw life and death on a daily basis. I got shot at and I shot back at people. And because of the kind of war it was, because I didn’t like it, because I felt I had to speak out against it, because I had to define my own feelings about it and put them into a public context as I opposed the war, it came to define me absolutely. It demanded I go against the grain in many ways. I mean, the easiest thing in the world for me to do when I came back would been just to be quiet and go about my business, operate in the traditional channels and not stir the waters at all. But I wasn’t happy with myself doing that. I couldn’t not speak out against the war because I thought it was wrong.
For quite a while after I joined the navy, however, my connection with the war remained pretty tenuous. During my first tour on the Gridley we were quite removed. I went into Da Nang for eight hours one day and got to see the accouterments of war, but most of the time were just steaming around in circles behind aircraft carriers out in the Gulf of Tonkin. Occasionally we’d have a readiness alert when North Vietnamese MiGs flew toward us from the mainland. But they’d always back off, it was really a game of chicken. I had no contact the Vietnamese people. I wasn’t talking to grunts who were out in the field. I didn't have any real feel for what the heck was going on.
The first trip to Vietnam did give me a heightened curiosity by virtue of having been so near and having been part of the support operation. But volunteering for Swift boats had nothing to do with my curiosity about the war. They attracted me because it was the one thing you could do as a junior officer and have your own command. In fact, when I signed up the Swift boats they had very little to do with the war. They were engaged in coastal patrolling and that's what I thought I was going to be doing. Although I wanted to go back and see for myself what was going on, I didn't really want to get involved in the war.
I started out in Cam Ranh Bay, but about two weeks after I arrived they changed the policy on Swift boats. Originally, our mission was to interdict the flow of arms along the coast. The Swift boats formed the inner ring of a triple perimeter with destroyers on the outside and Coast Guard cutters in the middle. But a lot of swiftees started getting really bored, you know, running around up and down the coast, so some of the guys began to venture in close to shore or went up the rivers shooting their guns in free fire zones. Then one day a boat made a run through the tip of the Ca Mau Peninsula. They came in on the Gulf of Thailand and exited on the South China Sea. And the captains and admirals in Saigon thought this was just terrific, the navy getting involved in the war, being right in there where the action was.
So I got transferred to Phu Quoc Island off the Cambodian coast to be part of a new program called Operation Sea Lords - Southeast Asia Lake, Ocean, River, Delta Strategy - that called for the Swift boats to start operating in the rivers. For the next five months it seemed as though we were in and out of every river in the southern part of the country. We even went on missions up the Mekong into Cambodia.
We were given patrol areas along certain stretches of river where we'd stop junks or sampans and search them if they looked suspicious. We also did a lot of work with ground troops. We once moved a whole ARVN division upriver to the jump-off point for an operation. We inserted. SEALS, the navy commandos, we inserted Lurps, the long-range reconnaissance patrols. But most of the time we were going into the rivers and free fire zones and shooting targets of opportunity or waiting to be shot at to return fire and prove to the enemy that they didn't own that region. Our mission was defined as an effort to show the Vietcong that they couldn't operate in that part of Vietnam with impunity. We were literally there to shove the American flag in the enemy's back yard.
But it didn't seem to me we were accomplishing very much at all. You'd randomly stop a boat among the dozens that were going up and down the rivers and maybe you'd come up with some weapons. But for the one or two you stopped, hundreds of others went by and you knew weapons were slipping by you. Oh, we had individual victories here and there. Occasionally, we'd stumble on to something that was happening. But our engines could be heard from five miles away. We never surprised anybody. We were constantly getting ambushed. As you rode along you could see bunkers built right into the riverbanks. They had .50-caliber machine guns, B40 rockets, the whole deal. There was a kid named Harwood who lost the lower part of his leg to a .50-caliber, and one of my best friends took a B40 right in the stomach. His whole boat just blew up and beached. And here you are traveling along in a quarter-inch aluminum boat waiting to get hit. It was just a joke.
There were countless problems. Countless problems. The ARVN were untrustworthy and didn't want to fight. A number of them were obviously VC. They knew most of the operations we were going on before we did. There were no defined lines of demarcation between "us" and "them," no specific territory to be gained and held. It was just this random process of fear here, fear there, tearing up these rivers with two 500-horsepower diesel engines booming away. If your goal was to win the hearts and minds of the people, we certainly weren't going about it very intelligently by thundering through in our boats and shooting the place up. And when you did get ambushed you usually lost more wounded than the other guys. So what have you gained?
There were twenty ways of doing things more intelligently, and we tried to suggest them endless times. We worked very hard from within to get people to understand that we didn't think what we were doing made sense. In fact, on one occasion they stopped the war on our behalf and flew us all up to Saigon for a big briefing. Admiral Zumwalt came and General Abrams, and they gave us this big spiel about what we were doing was so valuable, blah, blah, blah. Maybe it was just the navy's way of getting in on the war. I don't know.
But I was already beginning to feel that the war was a waste. The first patrol I went out on one of our men cut the nets of a Vietnamese fisherman who happened to be in a "prohibited zone." Here we were in another country, telling this fisherman who clearly wasn't bothering us in any way where he could and couldn't fish and destroying his livelihood in the process. Those nets were expensive. They weren't easy to come by, and there was no reason to cut them. There was no harm being done, no big problem. We were simply defining what was and wasn't permissible. There was something that just ran against my grain about us in our big boat with our guns ordering around the people we were supposedly there to help. And that kind of thing happened constantly.
With a one-year tour of duty you came, you did your thing, you left. You didn't bear any ultimate responsibility. You knew if you just made it through you could get out, so people started taking short cuts. For example, the B-52 strikes.
It was clear that places were targeted within our area of operations that weren't heavily VC. But they got bombed anyway. Or free fire zones. You came to understand by virtue of the fact that you went through them that a lot of these areas were not as cleared of people as we had been told, a situation that was subject to great abuse. Those with the guns were those who ruled. There was a recklessness and arrogance to the way we were fighting the war by everyone over there.
I'd lived abroad some of my life. When my father was stationed in Paris for a while I used to play in the old German bunkers outside my grandmother's house. From listening to her stories I got a vivid impression of what it was like to live in an occupied country, and that's what I felt I was in. I'll never forget the day I arrived at Cam Ranh Bay. There were dozens of Vietnamese scurrying around picking up cigarette butts after American GIs. There were Vietnamese waiting on tables at the officers' mess, Vietnamese making the beds, Vietnamese cleaning the latrines. And there we were, sitting around like kings running the war. We were the occupiers. And you can't win in those situations unless the population is supporting you, unless the indigenous troops are supporting you. And again and again and again we saw instances where the local troops, the Ruff-Puffs, the ARVNs, whatever, were unwilling to fight, had their own deals worked out with the VC.
Don't get me wrong. There were individuals, there were good units that were willing to fight. But not enough of them had a stake in it. Most South Vietnamese soldiers didn't feel they were fighting for their country because their leaders were unable to provide sufficient political motivation. The stronger infrastructure was on the other side, and they knew it.
It seemed to me that you had a classic insurgency in Vietnam in which the Communists were exercising governmental functions within the villages like taxation and so forth, a situation where the chief's head would appear on a stake and then a couple of days later if other people hadn't come on board they would start disappearing. You had to turn that process around. You had to secure territory, build your own political infrastructure, engage in the psychological contest for the population. But that wasn't taking place, and quick forays into an area which you simply tried to engage the enemy and then exit only wound up exacerbating the situation. It only increased the people's willingness to say, "Okay we're really better off with the VC because at least they stay behind and work with the people."
The Vietcong were given a purpose. They were finely tuned in their understanding and commitment to a goal. They believed they were fighting for the unification of their nation and rightfully kicking out a foreign aggressor. It was a very powerful rationale and one we never really seemed to understand. The simplicity of their goals just made a great deal more sense in the agrarian, peasant world that surrounded us than the complicated geopolitical framework we were attempting to impose on them.
When I left Vietnam I was very proud of my personal service, of the men I’d served with, of their caliber and their qualities and their caring about each other and what they were trying to do. About the goals and definition of our mission I was furious. I was outraged. I was very, very angry that people were being asked to perform senseless tasks at great risk to such little purpose, unless harrasment and interdiction had a great purpose. And this was a feeling shared by most of the men. They had become very disgusted with what we were doing. It was a subject of constant wardroom discussions and late-night debates.
We all felt betrayed and disillusioned. I think that for a lot of us the traditional assumptions and expectations of Americans of our age in that period were crushed by what we discovered were falsehoods, outright lies, and chicanery. The body-count process. The way the war was being sold versus what it really was. Admirals telling you things were happening that you knew weren't true. The idea that we were fighting against communism when it clearly was primarily a nationalist struggle. It was burst bubble after burst bubble. There was just a kind of stench to the whole war.
I came back from Vietnam with a basic commitment that I was going to try and save the lives of some of my buddies and not have more people killed. I didn’t think people should be silent about it. I saw a special responsibility, moral and personal, to tell what I had seen. I thought I had a perspective that was important to people's ability to understand what was happening over there. Because I’d seen it, I’d been there, I knew firsthand.
I intended to go to law school when I came back, but while I was still in the navy I participated in the Moratorium against the war in October 1969. I had negative feelings about the sort of hardcore guys - the real trashers, that wing of the antiwar movement that was out there for the kick and the shock value. I didn't have a lot of use for that. I thought they were all on ego trips, frankly, and I thought they had a different and more cumbersome social agenda than just ending the war. But the average people who I saw marching in protest - the kid in school, the housewife, the parent who had lost a child in Vietnam -I found it extremely moving and supportive. It was very liberating to know they were there, that they were just standing up in opposition. That was really a turning point for me. It was the Moratorium that coalesced my feelings, that answered a lot of questions about whether there was a way to communicate what I felt. After the Moratorium I knew there was a way to do it and that was to go out and work and organize against the war.
I was able to get an early release from the navy and I became very active all around New York City just speaking as a veteran and saying, "Look, here's what's happening." At one of these gatherings I met somebody who was involved with a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and that's how I really became part of the antiwar movement.
Over the next year the VVAW staged a number of events including the Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit where 150 veterans testified about war crimes they had seen or participated in. Winter Soldier was a terrifically important statement, but nobody heard about it. The New York Times didn't even cover it as a matter of fact. And it was my frustration over the lack of attention that led me to conceive of our march on Washington that eventually took place in April 1971. I was working on a book at the time, but I felt so strongly that we weren’t getting our message across that I dropped what I was doing and became a full-time organizer. I was named national coordinator of VVAW and for the next twelve months devoted an enormous amount of energy to raising funds and trying to pull together the whole effort of the march.
We called it Dewey Canyon III after the American operation code-named Dewey Canyon II in which U.S. forces supported the South Vietnamese invasion of Laos. There isn't any question in my mind that Dewey Canyon III was the moment when veterans of the war as an entity broke through the national consciousness. The image each night of veterans conducting mock search and destroy operations in the streets of Washington, the encampment on the Mall, the confrontation with the Supreme Court over our right to demonstrate, the emotions of the medal-returning ceremony when some of the vets took their decorations and threw them on the steps of the Capitol - the whole thing made Americans realize that there was a group out there besides the "peaceniks" who had a view about why Vietnam was wrong.
Some people argue today that the antiwar movement actually prolonged the war by alienating the majority of Americans, but I think that is absolutely false. If there had been no antiwar movement the war would have gone on for a much longer period of time or been escalated to a much greater degree. The war ended because congressmen and senators raised hell-ultimately when middle America raised hell - because people began to perceive that it was not what it was cracked up to be. And the reason that people began to see that was because there was a group of people there to call the country to conscience over a long period of time. And it took a long time to break through all the barriers. When you have the president and the Congress and the traditional rhetoric of patriotism and all the rest to call into question, it's very hard to break through with a minority perspective. The antiwar movement, including the VVAW, educated this country about what was happening over there and what was at stake. It limited the options available to Nixon and Kissinger. Without that pressure they would not have Vietnamized the war and gotten our troops out.
Unfortunately, the VVAW has a very mixed reputation today. There are still veterans who condemn VVAW, who will tell you that while they were fighting in Vietnam this group was back here being unpatriotic. And that is totally untrue. There wasn't a Vietnam veteran who was part of the VVAW who didn't do what he did because he believed he was trying to save the lives of his brothers in Vietnam and for no other reason.
The fact is that the VVAW accomplished a lot of things that most people are completely unaware of. VVAW was the first group in the country to set up rap sessions for veterans to begin the process of reassimilation. It was the VVAW that called attention to the inadequate services which veterans were receiving on their return. We were the first to expose problems with the VA, to talk about the issue of lack of benefits. No other veterans group - the VFW, the American Legion, ever touched it. The first post–Vietnam stress syndrome efforts with the psychiatrist Robert Lifton at Yale University were started by VVAW. It was VVAW which began working on the question of Agent Orange long before anyone else was interested. The VVAW performed some extraordinary services that no one, including vets, has ever given them credit for. We set the agenda which Vietnam veterans groups, whether it's the Vietnam Veterans of America or the Veterans of Vietnam or the Vietnam Era Veterans, are still working for today.
And succeeding. I think they've been pretty effective in giving a legitimacy to these concerns, in making Congress aware of vets' issues. The gains have not been enormous, but there has never been the kind of conglomerate Vietnam lobby in the way there was at the end of World War II and Korea. When guys came back from Vietnam they wanted to disappear. They wanted to get out of uniform and forget about it. I mean, they just wanted to hide. Especially those who came back from '68 on, the real anti-war years when people in this country weren’t praising their service but condemning the war. That made it tough for a lot of guys, no question about it. It devalued those years for them and it's only now that a lot of people are finding a desire, or even a willingness, to come together as vets.
That's why every Vietnam veteran in Congress owes it to veterans to speak out for them. Because I think the veterans of this generation got about as bad a deal as any group of veterans in the history of this country. There are still a lot of vets out there who need voices in Congress that are raised on their behalf whether it's in terms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or drug and alcohol dependency, or chronic unemployment, whatever. A lot of folks still are having difficulty getting back into things - even now, fifteen or twenty years later. And as long as they're out there I think we owe all of them that effort. There has never been the kind of energy on behalf of veterans of this war as a group that was given to veterans of other wars, and I think one of our missions in Congress ought to be to provide it.
There's more possibility for that now because in the last few years a lot of Americans have realized they didn't even say thank you to the men who served in Vietnam. When the hostages were returned from Iran a lot of people suddenly spoke up and said, "Wait a minute, these people are being treated like heroes. What about the guys that came back from Vietnam?" And the Vietnam Memorial has been extremely important. It's not only brought a lot of visibility to the problems that vets are having, it's also acted as a catalyst. It's helped a lot of people get to the point emotionally where they want to share being a veteran again, to feel proud of their service. I think veterans of. Vietnam ought to feel as much pride as veterans of any other war. They fought under the most difficult circumstances in every single respect. Difficult in terms of home support, difficult in terms of the kind of war they fought. There isn't a veteran who shouldn't be proud, no matter what.
They say time heals a lot of things. But I think for many veterans it's always going to be a little bit too little and a little bit too late. There are a lot of vets who simply will never get over the scars of those first years. They appreciate the thank yous, it makes them feel better, but it's not a cure. It’s never going to take away the memory of what it was like when they came back or the kind of war they fought in.
I don't disagree with those who refer to Vietnam as a noble cause. I think it was very noble that we sought to help the South Vietnamese. And there is nobility in a young man dying on behalf of his country. For a young soldier who loved his country and who decided he should support his president, who went to Vietnam and died there, that was not a death in vain because that person gave himself to something he believed in. And that's the most you can do in life. That's as noble as it gets.
But things that are noble may not always be realistic or well designed or well implemented. It wasn't a war we were determined to win. That was what enraged me and so many others when we returned from Vietnam, that there was a terrible expense of human life that added up to nothing. That's what I was trying to say to people. Don't ask those you call upon to serve to have our patriotism used that way. You owe us more than that. |
Pages 112 to 117, The Vietnam Experience – A War Remembered, 1986 by Boston Publishing Company, Boston Massachusetts.
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