SwiftVets.com

[SBD]

This was the first time I had read this story but it was so full of crap that I was actually laughing as I read it because in some ways it is probably the most accurate story as well. Trying to blend the truth with the fiction sounds more like a comedy. It actually inspired me to start a thread of Kerry's Most Ridiculous Vietnam Stories because I am sure there are more that I haven't read yet so if anyone has a ridiculous story, please post it.

The Boston Globe, June 16, 2003


Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company
The Boston Globe

June 16, 2003, Monday ,THIRD EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1

LENGTH: 2160 words

HEADLINE: HEROISM, AND GROWING CONCERN ABOUT WAR


BYLINE: By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff

BODY:
The Christmas Eve truce of 1968 was three minutes old when mortar fire exploded around John Forbes Kerry and his five-man crew on a 50-foot aluminum boat near Cambodia. "Where is the enemy?" a crewmate shouted.


In the distance, an elderly man was tending his water buffalo - and serving as human cover for a dozen Viet Cong manning a machine-gun nest.


"Open fire; let's take 'em," Kerry ordered, according to his second-in-command, James Wasser of Illinois. Wasser blasted away with his M-60, hitting the old man, who slumped into the water, presumably dead. With a clear path to the enemy, the fusillade from Kerry's Navy boat, backed by a pair of other small vessels, silenced the machine-gun nest.


When it was over, the Viet Cong were dead, wounded, or on the run. A civilian apparently was killed, and two South Vietnamese allies who had alerted Kerry's crew to the enemy were either wounded or killed.


On the same night, Kerry and his crew had come within a half-inch of being killed by "friendly fire," when some South Vietnamese allies launched several rounds into the river to celebrate the holiday.


To top it off, Kerry said, he had gone several miles inside Cambodia, which theoretically was off limits, prompting Kerry to send a sarcastic message to his superiors that he was writing from the Navy's "most inland" unit.


Back at his base, a weary, disconsolate Kerry sat at his typewriter, as he often did, and poured out his grief. "You hope that they'll courtmartial you or something because that would make sense," Kerry typed that night. He would later recall using court-martial as "a joke," because nothing made sense to him - the war policy, the deaths, and his presence in the middle of it all.


To his crew, Kerry was one of the most daring skippers in the US Navy, relentlessly and courageously engaging the enemy. But the battles and moral dilemmas were in shades of gray, and Kerry to this day wrestles with the scenes of death he commanded.


In an intense three months of combat following that Christmas Eve battle, Kerry often would go beyond his Navy orders and beach his boat, in one case chasing and killing a teenage Viet Cong enemy who wore only a loin cloth and carried a rocket launcher. Kerry's aggressiveness in combat caused a commanding officer to wonder whether he should be given a medal or court-martialed.


Kerry would watch in despair as a crewmate killed a boy who may or may not have been an innocent civilian. He would angrily challenge a military policy that risked the death of noncombatants. And he would try to escape the fate of five of his closest friends, all killed in combat.


Along with Kerry's unquestionable and repeated bravery, he also took an action that has received far less notice: He requested and was granted a transfer out of Vietnam six months before his combat tour was slated to end on the grounds that he had earned three Purple Hearts. None of his wounds was disabling; he said one cost him two days of service and the other two did not lead to any absence.


No period better captures the internal conflicts besetting John Kerry than Vietnam. He enlisted as a Navy officer candidate despite his criticisms as Yale's class orator of America's intervention in Southeast Asia. He would become a war hero, recipient of the Silver and Bronze stars, but would also become an antiwar leader, causing some former crewmates to feel he had betrayed them.


In an effort to understand a fuller picture of Kerry's combat in Vietnam, the Globe examined thousands of recently declassified Naval documents; interviewed sailors who served alongside Kerry; conducted four interviews with Kerry; and read some previously unreleased journal entries and letters selected by the senator.

A dangerous assignment


Kerry initially thought about enlisting as a pilot. But his father, Richard Kerry - a test pilot who served in the Army Air Corps - warned him that if he flew in combat, he might lose his love of flying. So Kerry, who sought in so many ways to emulate John Fitzgerald Kennedy, took to the water, just as his idol served on a World War II patrol boat, the 109.


Kerry served two tours. For a relatively uneventful six months, from December 1967 to June 1968, he served in the electrical department aboard the USS Gridley, a guided-missile frigate that supported aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin and was far removed from combat.


"I didn't have any real feel for what the heck was going on [in the war]," Kerry has recalled. His ship returned to its Long Beach, Calif., port on June 6, 1968, the day that Robert F. Kennedy died from a gunshot wound he received on the previous night at a Los Angeles hotel. The antiwar protests were growing. But within five months Kerry was heading back to Vietnam, seeking to fulfill his officer commitment despite his growing misgivings about the war.


Kerry initially hoped to continue his service at a relatively safe distance from most fighting, securing an assignment as "swift boat" skipper. While the 50-foot swift boats cruised the Vietnamese coast a little closer to the action than the Gridley had come, they were still considered relatively safe.


"I didn't really want to get involved in the war," Kerry said in a little-noticed contribution to a book of Vietnam reminiscences published in 1986. "When I signed up for 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."


But two weeks after he arrived in Vietnam, the swift boat mission changed - and Kerry went from having one of the saf est assignments in the escalating conflict to one of the most dangerous. Under the newly launched Operation SEALORD, swift boats were charged with patrolling the narrow waterways of the Mekong Delta to draw fire and smoke out the enemy. Cruising inlets and coves and canals, swift boats were especially vulnerable targets.


Originally designed to ferry oil workers to ocean rigs, swift boats offered flimsy protection. Because bullets could easily penetrate the hull, sailors hung flak jackets over the sides. The boat's loud engine invited ambushes. Speed was its saving grace - but that wasn't always an option in narrow, heavily mined canals.


The swift boat crew typically consisted of a college-educated skipper, such as Kerry, and five blue-collar sailors averaging 19 years old. The most vulnerable sailor sat in the "tub" - a squat nest that rose above the pilot house - and operated a pair of .50-caliber machine guns. Another gunner was in the rear. Kerry's mission was to wait until hidden Viet Cong guerrillas started shooting, then order his men to return fire.


Unofficially, Operation SEALORD was dubbed ZWI, for "Zumwalt's Wild Idea." Navy Admiral Elmo "Bud" Zumwalt was frustrated that the coastal patrols had failed to stop the infiltration of arms via the Mekong Delta waterways. Communist forces effectively controlled the river supply route because US forces weren't supposed to go into Cambodia, and the rivers of the Mekong Delta were considered too dangerous for American boats. When Zumwalt decorated an officer who took the extraordinary risk of running the rivers, Kerry took notice.


Under Zumwalt's command, swift boats would aggressively engage the enemy. Zumwalt, who died in 2000, calculated in his autobiography that these men under his command had a 75 percent chance of being killed or wounded during a typical year. (This wasn't just a statistical concern; one of the swift boat sailors was his son, Lieutenant Elmo Zumwalt III. Kerry experienced his first intense combat action on Dec. 2, 1968, when he "semi-volunteered for, was semi-drafted" for a risky covert mission in which he essentially was supposed to "flush out" the enemy, using a little Boston Whaler named "Batman." A larger backup craft was called "Robin."


Unfortunately, Robin had engine trouble, and Batman's exit was delayed until the boats could depart in unison. The Batman crew encountered some Viet Cong, engaged in a firefight, and Kerry was slightly wounded on his arm, earning his first Purple Heart on his first day of serious action.


"It was not a very serious wound at all," recalled William Schachte, who oversaw the mission and went on to become a rear admiral.


Kerry commanded his first swift boat, No. 44, from December 1968 through January 1969, a period that is often overlooked because he did not receive any medals while serving on this craft. But he first learned to skipper on the 44, and he conducted the wrenching Christmas Eve mission in which the old man in the river was probably killed in the crossfire.


Kerry said in a recent interview that he didn't remember anything about the elderly man in the water, noting that he sometimes couldn't see all of the action. But Wasser, who says his memory of the event remains vivid, reminded Kerry about it when the pair met earlier this year and talked about the mission for the first time in many years. Wasser remains haunted by the image of the man being shot: "I don't even enjoy Christmas anymore," he said.

In the free fire zone


The possibility of killing innocent civilians haunted Kerry. With many of the South Vietnamese waterways in "free fire zones" - meaning that the US Navy was authorized to shoot anyone who was violating a curfew - the likelihood that innocent villagers could be killed was high.


One of Kerry's crewmates on swift boat No. 44 said such an event happened. Drew Whitlow of Arkansas said he was on patrol with Kerry when Whitlow spotted movement along the shore and yelled, "I'm going to fire!" The quiet river exploded in gunfire, with people on the shoreline dropping, dead or wounded, and no fire being returned.


Whitlow recalled the scene: "This is a free fire zone, I will fire, I will put rounds in, I'm doing my thing, I'm feeling Mr. Macho. But then when you get close, you see the expressions of the village people, people waving their arms, saying, 'No, no, no! Wait a minute, hold this off.' I ended up putting a few down, and then I found out it was friendlies."


To make matters worse, a mortar round ricocheted back at the boat and wounded three crewmen.


Kerry, asked about Whitlow's account, said he had no recollection of the episode and wondered whether Whitlow was confusing it with another event or whether he was with Whitlow on that occasion. Naval records do not resolve the matter. After being told about Whitlow's recollection by the Globe, Kerry discussed the matter with Whitlow and said he still doesn't remember it.


But Kerry does recall a harrowing incident, which he has never previously publicly discussed, in which he said a crew member shot and killed a Vietnamese boy of perhaps 12 years of age.


A member of Kerry's crew announced he was shooting, and the air filled with the ack-ack-ack of gunfire. The rounds blasted into a sampan, hurling the child into the rice paddy. The mother screamed as the flimsy craft began to sink, and Kerry, shining a searchlight, yelled, "Cease fire! Cease fire!"


Kerry said his crew rescued the mother, took her aboard the Navy vessel for questioning, and left the child behind. Due to the dangerous location, and the possibility that the gunfire had drawn the notice of Viet Cong, Kerry never had a chance to see whether the woman was hiding weaponry in the sunken boat, and does not know to this day whether his crew faced a real threat.


"It is one of those terrible things, and I'll never forget, ever, the sight of that child," Kerry said. "But there was nothing that anybody could have done about it. It was the only instance of that happening.


"It angered me," Kerry said. "But, look, the Viet Cong used women and children." He said there might have been a satchel containing explosives. "Who knows if they had - under the rice - a satchel, and if we had come along beside them they had thrown the satchel in the boat. . . . So it was a terrible thing, but I've never thought we were somehow at fault or guilty. There wasn't anybody in that area that didn't know you don't move at night, that you don't go out in a sampan on the rivers, and there's a curfew."


The details of the episode are murky, however, because none of Kerry's crewmates remembers it the way Kerry does. The closest recollection comes from William Zaladonis, a crewmate on No. 44 who vividly recalls killing a 15-year-old boy, but does not remember a mother being rescued. "I myself took out a 15-year-old" when the crew came across a sampan in a free-fire zone, Zaladonis said. "It was all legitimate. We told them to stop. When we fired across the bow, people started jumping from the boat. At that time my officer, whoever it was, told me to open up on them, and I did. And there was one body still in the boat, a 15-year-old kid. But over there, 15-year-old kids were soldiers."



NOTES:
JOHN F. KERRY / CANDIDATE IN THE MAKING / PART 2 SECOND OF SEVEN PARTS
This story has been divided into two parts because of its size this is part one.
JOHN ALOYSIUS FARRELL CONTRIBUTED TO THIS REPORT.

[Mooncusser]

PITIFUL. Kranish has been reading to many James Fenimore Cooper's novels.
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MACV '64...65
Thu Thua, Long An

I actually won the election before I lost it.

"It is a good day to fight! It is a good day to die! Strong hearts, brave hearts to the front! Weak hearts and cowards to the rear!" (Crazy Horse)

[WalterW]

Two VERY INTERESTING paragraphs about our "I'm brave, send me" hero:

[WalterW]

For thos who need such things, here's a link to the article:
Boston Globe 6/16/03
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"We do not need to divide America over who served and how. I have personally always believed that many served in many different ways." John F. Kerry, February, 1992