Veteran's day

With his Silver Star and his record of antiwar activities, Senator John Kerry may be the perfect presidential candidate for a population still coming to terms with Vietnam

by Seth Gitell

THIRTY YEARS AGO last week, John Forbes Kerry traveled to Capitol Hill to testify against the Vietnam War under the auspices of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). It was then that the former Navy officer posed this oft-quoted question to Congress: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

The anniversary of Kerry's dramatic testimony raises another question: can a Vietnam veteran be elected president? The query hangs over Senator Kerry as he puts the very beginning touches on a 2004 presidential run. Although his office is officially focused on his Senate re-election campaign next year, Kerry is unofficially gearing up for a potential 2004 run. He's already hit Tinseltown to line up the Hollywood heavy hitters. Earlier this month, he showed up at the Bel Air home of Lawrence Bender, producer of such films as Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting, and The Mexican, for a fundraising soirée. He's also visited Jefferson-Jackson Day events in Georgia and Colorado, and in June he'll address Washington State's largest gathering of Democrats. If Kerry runs and wins, he'll be doing what no other Vietnam veteran has been able to do.

The 2000 presidential campaign saw a Vietnam veteran, Al Gore, lose to a man who evaded combat by joining the Texas Air National Guard; Bush was assigned to train in Alabama but never showed up for duty, as the Boston Globe reported last October. Gore not only refused to make Bush's de facto AWOL status an issue in the campaign, but also played down his own status as a veteran. The public's continuing ambivalence about the war -- which divided the country and saw tens of thousands of men make the same sort of decision Bush did in order to avoid combat -- made it difficult, if not impossible, to make much of Bush's actions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And since Gore himself served in a non-combat role as an Army journalist, the vice-president seemed loath to play up his service. In his acceptance speech before the Democratic National Convention, Gore said: "I was an Army reporter in Vietnam. When I was there I didn't do the most or run the gravest danger, but I was proud to wear my country's uniform." Because neither man saw combat, both the public and the candidates themselves seemed to view their wartime actions as morally equivalent.

Almost every man elected president since 1968 has had to deal with Vietnam in some way or another. In 1968, Vietnam was the campaign's central issue. Lyndon Baines Johnson refused to run for re-election; Richard Nixon won the White House with his "secret plan" to end the war. In 1976, Jimmy Carter made points with the electorate by promising pardons for those who fled the US to evade the draft. In 1980, Ronald Reagan leveraged post-Vietnam and hostage-crisis malaise to a landslide victory over Carter. In 1988 George Bush selected Dan Quayle, first among the Republican chicken hawks, as his running mate -- a move that almost capsized his presidential contest against Michael Dukakis. Bill Clinton had to fend off attacks for having essentially dodged the draft, but in the 1992 Democratic primary he easily defeated Senator Robert Kerrey of Nebraska, a Navy veteran who had been awarded the Medal of Honor -- the nation's highest military honor.

But among all of these presidential candidates -- as well as those likely to run in the foreseeable future -- only Kerry can place on his résumé both heroic service in America's most controversial war and high-profile public protest against it. In many ways, Kerry is the perfect candidate for a public still coming to terms with the 30-year-old war. Should Kerry run, he'd do so amid a shifting cultural climate that's grown far more sympathetic to veterans. Steven Spielberg's 1998 masterpiece Saving Private Ryan sparked a wave of renewed interest not just in World War II but in veterans of all America's wars. The same can be said for Tom Brokaw's runaway bestseller about World War II veterans, The Greatest Generation. Time will tell whether Touchstone Pictures' Pearl Harbor, a May-release film starring Ben Affleck about the Japanese bombing raid that plunged the US into World War II, will do the same.

Kerry also has something else working in his favor. If he runs in 2004, it would be in the wake of Arizona senator John McCain's 2000 presidential bid. McCain, who spent six hellish years in the North Vietnamese prison camp known as the Hanoi Hilton, was ultimately unsuccessful, but he broke ground simply by being able to talk about his background as a veteran. That was in stark contrast to Nebraska senator Kerrey's 1992 campaign, which played up his service on the stump but not in his television advertising. It contrasts even more starkly with Kerrey's first run as governor of Nebraska. Kerrey recalls that one of the first things the press wanted to know was whether he suffered "flashbacks" from his time in Vietnam. The changing social climate toward veterans "will help him much more than it helped me in '91 and '92," says Kerrey, who now serves as president of the New School University in Manhattan. "We've learned a lot, if you ask me."

(When I spoke to Kerrey on Thursday, April 19, the big story on the attack on the village of Thanh Phong hadn't broken yet. I was unaware that the day before our conversation took place, Kerrey had disclosed in a speech to the Virginia Military Institute that he had killed civilians in Vietnam.)

THE MEDIA'S treatment of John Kerry was forged into a template with a 1985 Washington Post profile of the newly elected senator titled "The Vietnam War Hero, the Protester, the Senator." The Boston Globe's Charles Sennott retold the tale during Kerry's hard-fought 1996 campaign against former governor William Weld, in a richly detailed 4400-word profile rife with description of the "lush green palms and mangroves" of Vietnam's Mekong Delta. And Kerry was featured in An Unfinished Symphony, a 2001 documentary that played at the New England Film & Video Festival last month. The film perpetuates the leftist narrative of US involvement in Vietnam: that of the American soldier, trained by his country to be a killer, who returns home from the war to protest it.

As detailed as these stories were, few have had the opportunity to delve into the nuances of Kerry's feelings about that time, which have changed along with public perceptions of the war. With the 30th anniversary of his testimony before Congress approaching, the Phoenix asked him to talk about his wartime experiences and how he feels about them now. He agreed.

Early Patriots' Day morning, Kerry and two aides greeted me in front of his Louisburg Square home in Boston's beacon Hill. Kerry wore a brown leather bomber jacket festooned with patches designating the Navy units with which he served in Vietnam. (The jacket serves as his regular casual wear; he changed into a navy-blue blazer in time for a veterans' event later that day.) We set out in a Chrysler mini-van for Hopkinton, the start of the Boston Marathon, where Kerry was to fire the starters' pistol for the wheelchair race.

Once his task was completed, Kerry began to talk. It became clear that with the perspective of three decades he is able to move beyond the shibboleths of both the right and the left in his discussion of Vietnam. In particular, Kerry is able to criticize his comrades on the left during that time -- something that would have been impossible 30 years ago. He still believes the war wasn't worth it, but now that 10 years have passed since the end of the Cold War, Kerry is able to empathize with those who argue that Vietnam was a "necessary struggle" against the expansion of communism.

Kerry's newfound openness is evident in the ease with which he -- a proud sailor -- relates to other veterans of all ages. On Patriots' Day, for instance, Kerry visited an American Legion post in Auburn to pin missing medals on an elderly veteran of D-Day. Sitting at a table of World War II vets, he held court like one of them. Two days later, he was the only speaker to focus on Representative Joe Moakley's military background at a ceremony honoring the South Boston congressman. Kerry lauded Moakley as a "man of the Navy" and a "citizen soldier." Three decades ago, Kerry says, he could not have interacted with World War II vets the way he can now. "Thirty years ago, those guys would not have understood what we were saying," he says.

For Kerry, the war didn't assume major significance until after President John F. Kennedy's assassination and the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Incident, which prompted President Lyndon Johnson to announce a muster of 100,000 troops headed for Vietnam. Motivated by a sense of duty, a "semi-hawkish" Kerry enlisted in the Navy and applied for Officers Candidate School, a posting as difficult as getting into law school. At that point, Kerry thought a "thoughtful, moderated" response in Vietnam was preferable to "all-out war."

Yet news of the Viet Cong's Tet Offensive hit while Kerry was on his way overseas in January 1968. The powerful January 31 offensive, named for the Vietnamese New Year, marked a turning point in American perceptions of the war. Before that time, most of the American public believed that US forces were drubbing the Viet Cong. Tet demonstrated that the Pentagon had been shading the truth. Kerry's reaction was in line with many Americans'. He recalls being "taken aback that the Vietnamese were able to mount that kind of offensive, contrary to what most of the military people had been prognosticating at that point."

Whatever his reservations, Kerry went into his mission gung-ho. After a stint patrolling the coastline, his job shifted to performing search-and-destroy missions in the canals and small rivers that snaked through the Mekong Delta. The mission, in Kerry's words, was "to take the fight to the enemy's back yard."

And that enemy, as he is now willing to say, was "engaged in terrorist tactics throughout the region." Antiwar activists rarely acknowledged such things in the 1960s and '70s, and Kerry himself told of America's own atrocities in Vietnam when he later testified on Capitol Hill. But today he says of the Viet Cong: "They were going into villages, killing known South Vietnamese sympathizers, taxing people -- basically setting up their infrastructure to fight the war."

As hard as Kerry drove himself and his crew, the young officer and his comrades quietly began to question US policy. "Once I got in country and began to see what was happening with my own eyes and make my own judgments about how the war was being fought, I began to turn against it," he recalls, saying that he saw American lives being risked for a South Vietnamese government that was not motivated or able to defeat the enemy. The men hashed over everything from tactics and strategy to the "overall goals and objectives of the Vietnam struggle itself."

Challenging established practice would thrust Kerry into the role of hero. One day in February 1969, his boat, which ordinarily carried seven men, was weighted down with roughly 20 while making its way down a river beset by Viet Cong fire. His experiences had caused Kerry to question the wisdom of merely continuing down the river. If the approaching fusillade comes mostly from light-caliber weapons such as AK-47s, he thought, why not attack? "I figured rather than sit broadside for a long period of time, this was the perfect opportunity to surprise them and try a new tactic," Kerry says. When attacked, he ordered his boat and two others to steam toward the ambush site. Once there, Kerry leaped off and personally pursued one of the attackers. Soon the Americans overpowered the enemy. "We destroyed the bunkers," he says. "We killed a bunch of them -- captured their weapons and ran right over the ambush." The episode won Kerry a Silver Star.

KERRY RETURNED from Vietnam opposed to the war, and he wanted to do something about it. But first he had to finish out his military service, which he did by working for an admiral in New York City. It was in New York that he confronted the animosity of the left for the first time. Kerry remembers dirty looks and harsh language from others opposed to the war. "There were hippie protesters here and there who objected to people in uniform," he says. "On a couple of occasions I heard people say `baby killer.' " Friends of his, Kerry says, were even spat on by antiwar types.

Despite the scorn he encountered, when the Navy mustered Kerry out of active service he planned to run for Congress from Massachusetts as a protest candidate against Representative Phil Philbin, a pro-war hawk. But state Democrats thought Boston College Law School dean Robert Drinan, a liberal Jesuit priest, was a better choice, so Kerry backed Drinan and joined up with the nascent VVAW. Their first action was the Winter Soldier Hearings in Detroit, which publicized American atrocities.

Black-and-white footage in An Unfinished Symphony shows a boyish-faced Kerry with sideburns wearing a dark turtleneck underneath a groovy, multipatterned long-collared shirt. "Is there something that you really kinda want to say about the crimes and why they happened?" he earnestly asks another vet. "I'd almost need a book to answer that, man," responds the vet, a wide bandanna wrapped around his head. Basic idea? American soldiers in Vietnam were a group of bloodthirsty maniacs ruining somebody else's country for no apparent reason.

"I had some misgivings about Detroit," says Kerry now. "In the end I think it was too harsh -- too difficult for Americans to connect to." He doubted that simply stacking up US atrocities against Vietnamese ones would help people understand the war. These reservations ultimately led him to the antiwar action for which he is most remembered -- testifying before the Senate on April 23, 1971. Kerry thought a more broad-based critique of the war would be more successful in reaching Middle America. Wearing old fatigues, he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as a spokesman for VVAW, reciting a litany of American atrocities committed in Indochina. He had learned these stories two months earlier at a VVAW inquiry in Detroit: "They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power," Kerry stated before going on to his main point about the need to end the war, the line everyone remembers.

As part of the VVAW protest staged on the steps of the Capitol the day following the hearings, Kerry publicly discarded the combat ribbons representing the medals he'd won. The incident would come back to haunt him. In 1984, Kerry acknowledged that on that day he threw away other people's medals as well as his ribbons. The issue came up in the 1985 Washington Post profile when Kerry was asked about the demonstration and why he hadn't thrown away his own medals -- as he certainly appeared to have done. "They're my medals. I'll do what I want with them," he said. "And there shouldn't be any expectations about them. . . . It's my business. I did not want to throw my medals away." Sennott reported in 1996 that Kerry discarded the ribbons of his Silver Star, along with medals given to him by other veterans in New York and Massachusetts. Kerry gave the same account to the Phoenix.

"I threw back my ribbons," Kerry says today. "Somebody tried to make a deal out of that and it's not a deal." The most important thing about a military award, after all, is not the physical medal or ribbon but the fact that it was awarded in the first place. People are rightly outraged if a veteran wears an unearned medal, but any Silver or Bronze Star or Purple Heart can be acquired and pinned to a uniform if a person actually won it.

What is a big deal, yet relatively little known, is that only months after being in the national spotlight for the VVAW, Kerry left the group. Although he kept the move relatively quiet at the time, he now says that he'd begun to have second thoughts about the group's polemical tilt. He had earlier raised concerns about others in the antiwar movement who, he thought, failed to serve the interests of veterans. (The best example of this is actress Jane Fonda, who appeared in a North Vietnamese photo inside an anti-aircraft gun turret.) "We were trying to talk to the heart of America, and some of those folks had overstayed their welcome in my judgment or been so abusive in their rhetoric that they lost the ability to communicate," says Kerry. "I resigned and left [the VVAW] because the agenda of some of the folks within the veterans' movement ultimately became confused and went way beyond just trying to end the war. There was a lot of rhetoric about every social ill and evil there was."

Not everyone in Kerry's shoes protested the war in the first place. Former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey didn't join the VVAW or participate with any other organized protest group, even though he came back from Vietnam opposed to the war. "I became very uncomfortable with the people protesting the war," says Kerrey. "I did not feel as close to them as the people I served with." (As a student at Berkeley, however, Kerrey worked with antiwar activist Allard Lowenstein to register new voters.)

In fact, Kerry says, some of his wartime friends "were not supportive of what I did." Not all of them thought pride as a veteran could be reconciled with opposition to the war. Still, he believes that time has brought most of the these people to the view that he and the other protesters were right: "Nowadays most of the people who had second thoughts about it have come around to realize -- most of them, not all, but most -- that it was a mistake."

EVEN THOUGH Kerry personally turned against the war, he still saw -- and sees -- value in military service. "The duty was extraordinarily exciting and rewarding and challenging. I learned an enormous amount from it," he says, though he acknowledges that "being shot at" is not fun. Kerry praises military service for management and character training: "I think a lot of people who don't get the discipline or [the chance to serve] miss something."

Yet he's not willing to criticize members of his generation in leadership positions -- men like Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, and former president Clinton -- for failing to serve. "I have infinite respect and love for the guys who served and the bond that we all have, which is unlike anything anyone else will have, but I'm not going to hold it against the other person because they made a different choice," he says. The most he'll say about such people, particularly those who are now hawkish on foreign policy, it that their failure to serve "affects my view of the depth of their understanding." He adds: "It certainly clouds my sense of that person, but I'm not going to personalize it."

Kerry also emphasizes that age differences radically altered the way people approached the war. The war as fought in 1965 -- heavy on advisers -- was different from the war of Tet and Khe Sahn in 1968. And Kerry, who was in college during the Kennedy presidency, experienced the war differently from those who faced the draft under an increasingly discredited Johnson in 1968. By the early 1970s, things had changed yet again. The South Vietnamese faced a largely conventional threat from North Vietnam. Besides, throughout the prosecution of the war, the military gave personnel only one-year tours, which meant that the soldiers and sailors who confronted the enemy came in with none of the institutional knowledge of their predecessors.

An increasingly influential school of thought now sees Vietnam as one battle in the Cold War, along with Korea and other conflicts. In 1999, Michael Lind pressed that point in Vietnam: The Necessary War (Free Press). What does Kerry think of this thesis? "I think in the end you can make an argument that there were some salutary consequences notwithstanding the outcome," he says. "The energy expended in it probably had a long-term outcome for the Cold War." But does this mean that the onetime war protester thinks the war was really worth it? No. "You could make the argument," Kerry says. "I personally think the outcome [of the Cold War] would have been the same. . . . I think you could have avoided a lot of grief by avoiding it in the first place, and I still believe that."

One fact about Vietnam cannot be erased or spun: more than 58,000 Americans lost their lives there. More Marines died in the Vietnam War than in World War II. Kerry still believes that price was far too high. But now, unlike 30 years ago, he's willing to raise the possibility that the hawks may have had at least half a point -- and to talk publicly about Viet Cong wrongdoing. His willingness to discuss the Vietnam era in new terms suggests that America may be willing to think about that period in a new way as well. But we won't know that for sure until 2004.

Seth Gitell can be reached at sgitell[a]phx.com.