by John Kerry
At the same spot where we had previously been hit on the Bay Hap, a massive explosion went off right under PCF-3. The whole boat went a couple of feet up in the air, wrapped in mud and spray, and then splashed back in the river to begin a weird zigzagging course, drifting downstream. At the same time, we came under small-arms fire from the banks. We started to turn toward the bank with the intention of attacking the ambush, but Sandusky, who’d been focused on the 3 boat, said it looked to be in really bad shape. We veered back toward the 3 boat when another mine went off right beside us on the port side where I was standing. The blast threw me backward into the sharp edge of the doorframe, smashing my lower arm around the wrist. During our maneuvering, Army Lieutenant Jim Rassmann, the lead advisor to the Nung, was thrown overboard. Rassmann said he instinctively swam to the bottom to avoid our props and Droz’s boat behind us. While on the bottom he shed his heavy backpack and weapons.
Sandusky maneuvered us closer to the 3 boat. One of the crewmen, Ken Tryner, was in the doorway and bloodied, firing an M-79. I could see the twin .50-caliber machine guns blown up and out of their swivel. Larry Thurlow and his crew were heroically wrestling to get the crippled 3 under control. It seemed every man on board had been wounded.
Then the chaos was penetrated by a shout of “Man overboard!” Fred Short, from his higher vantage point in the guntub, had looked back upstream and could see Jim Rassmann in the water maybe two hundred yards back, under fire from the nearest bank. We immediately turned the 94 and raced back to provide cover fire and try to rescue Jim.
We could see little splashes in the water near where Jim was sighted. He kept diving down to avoid the bullets, trying to minimize the target for the VC, only to reappear, grab a breath and go down again. Sandusky skillfully went from full speed to almost a dead stop, fighting to make sure he didn’t run over Rassmann. Fortunately, we had our landing nets hanging over the bow from the insertion of the Nung, so there was a ready way to get someone aboard. Jim was so exhausted from swimming and diving that the only way to get him aboard was to lean over the bow and grab him. I ran out, praying that the larger target I provided on the deck would not attract a bullet, and then lay on the deck, reaching down to pull him up. My wrist hurt enough to make it hard to grab, but with my adrenaline pumping and his, I got Rassmann rolled on board and we took off.
One of the Swifts transferred the wounded from the 3 boat out to the LST. The 94 and another boat tied up on each side of the 3 boat to help stabilize it, while people were bailing like crazy to keep it afloat. After what seemed like ages, we neared the LST. A damage control team came aboard to relieve the exhausted sailors who’d been bailing. During this entire episode, Bac She De’s body, scrunched in the ponchos, had been lying on the fantail of our boat. His head, what was left of it, had slipped out to make the scene just a little more macabre. Jim Rassmann told me that as he climbed up the rope netting to get to the deck of the LST, Bac She De’s blood dripped on him from the poncho above. As Jim climbed onto the deck of the LST a Filipino steward said to him, “Sir, get out of your uniform and I’ll wash it for you.” Jim felt it was the most decent moment of an indecent day.
All the wounded were treated back on the LST or Coast Guard cutter. They X-rayed my arm—no breaks, no fractures as we had feared, but it had been badly ripped against the sharp edge of the door. The arm was bandaged and then off we went. Once again, we were all lucky. The boat was far more wounded than any of us. Similarly, the 3 boat had been even luckier. What could have been catastrophic turned out to be bad, but not fatal.
Four days later the 94 boat and its crew were back in An Thoi. The boat was undergoing repairs. It was March 17—St. Patrick’s Day. We celebrated with a blowout party onshore at the small base. Commander Elliott informed me I was going home under the “three times wounded and you’re home rule.” Don and Skip Barker both counseled me that it made sense and it was the right thing to do, particularly since I was guaranteed my crew was going to be transferred to Qui Nhon, far from Sealords.
War has always contrasted the real with the absurd. Vietnam was complicated in the motives Americans brought to the fight. Some went there believing they were fighting to save a country or a people. Others were skeptical that we could make another country “safe” for democracy. But for all, it was a tour of duty. We had joined the service. We had taken an oath. We had a job to do and we did it, which meant that the absurdities all around us struck us even more vividly. One moment there was beauty and silence, and the next moment there was horror and chaos. The days melded one into the other. We learned how to put emotions on automatic pilot and not vary the course no matter the input.
By March 1969, I’d seen more of the misery of war—the killing, the faces of terrified civilians, the destruction of homes and hamlets—than I had ever anticipated, enough for a lifetime. On several occasions, I’d come within a whisper of having my own life ended in a random instant. While I carried out my orders—patrolled, boarded and searched junks, returned fire when ambushed—I found myself in good company with many who questioned our tactics. What were we accomplishing on the rivers? How were we winning over the civilians we came in contact with? What were we securing for the long haul? How could we measure the impact of a psychological operation in which ten boats pushed miles up uncharted VC territory to hand out flyers and small packets to children?
What I did learn through interpreters and Army advisors who were living with Vietnamese in outposts and villages was that the average Vietnamese fisherman and farmer, along with their families, were apolitical. They didn’t support the VC or the government. They just wanted to be left alone. When we roared up the rivers and canals, swamping their boats, burning their homes, destroying rice crops, I feared we were inadvertently convincing them that the VC were correct. We were losing hearts and minds.
It was difficult to fit what we were doing into a viable overall strategy in Vietnam. The domino theory, or whether Ho Chi Minh was a communist or a nationalist—it all seemed distant from basic common sense and was being contradicted daily. The blind repetition of missions, which by design couldn’t accomplish much and which were inadequately conceived and supported, was symbolic of our whole failing commitment to a war that I was now convinced was wrong. I began to see Vietnam with the vision of the critical observer rather than the participant. I asked myself what it would be like to be occupied by foreign troops, to bend under force to the desires of fighters from half a world away who could not possibly know what really counted in my country. I was heading home with truths to share, if anyone would listen.
CHAPTER 5
The War at Home
I BOARDED THE FREEDOM Bird, a World Airways charter, at Cam Ranh Bay on March 26, 1969. On takeoff, a restrained clapping echoed through the plane as we left behind the sand dunes, turquoise water and, I thought, the war. With the benefit of the Date Line transition, I arrived in Tacoma, Washington, on the same day. I transferred to the civilian airport and flew to San Francisco to reunite with my younger sister, Diana, before flying to New York City to rejoin Julia.
San Francisco stood out in my memory as a bridge back to more innocent times, training for the Navy by day and overindulging in music, laughter, food and friends by night. But as I taxied into the city from the international airport, I felt like a stranger, disconnected from everything: from the traffic, from people living normal lives. How often did they think about the war where American kids were being killed and killing in their name? Emotionally, I was a lifetime away from that twenty-two-year-old newly minted naval officer who had excitedly taken a similar taxi ride to Treasure Island a little more than two years earlier.
Early the next morning I boarded a flight to New York. I was traveling in uniform since I was on military orders. My arm was still bandaged around my wrist area from the injury I received in the last ambush. I had the entire row to myself and gratefully stretched out to sleep. At some point the plane shook a little in turbulence. I woke up with a start, shouting, �
�Look out! Get down. . . . Move!”—only to find that I was on a half-full airplane and nothing out of the ordinary was happening. The smoke and haze in the air wasn’t from machine guns or wood fires, but from carefree passengers smoking cigarettes. I was hugely embarrassed for my startled outburst, but even more so as I absorbed the stares of folks seated near me and particularly when several people moved seats to be farther away. No one reached over and tapped my forearm to ask “Are you okay?” No offer of help. “Can I do anything?” Message received—they were moving away because the guy in the uniform might be nuts and might hurt you. I felt strangely disconnected and guilty, feeling for a moment that maybe I belonged back on the rivers, or at least somewhere else. I didn’t allow myself to fall asleep again for the remainder of the flight. Julia greeted me at the gate with the longest hug I had ever experienced.
On the East Coast, the next days were filled with reunions, first with Julia and Peggy in New York and then with my parents and brother, Cam, in Massachusetts. The contrast between being in Vietnam and being home was jarring. “Adjustment” isn’t even the right word. It wasn’t some abstract disconnect; it was concrete: to go from life-and-death choices, daily tension, constant adrenaline, the emotional ups and downs of a week on patrol, while surrounded entirely by brothers in combat who understand without even a spoken word everything you’re experiencing—and then suddenly, it all turns off, to be replaced not just by the love and affection of family, but with the freedom to choose where you go and what you do at any given hour of the day, while surrounded by people you love unconditionally but who weren’t there with you on those boats. That was a shift I may have dreamed about but wasn’t really prepared to accept. I certainly wasn’t prepared for how it happened so instantly. It was impossible to put aside the intense relationships we had formed in the rivers, and I didn’t want to. I was home, but my friends and fellow sailors were not, and my opposition to the war had crystallized so firmly that I wanted to find a way to tell the story of what was happening in Vietnam.
I wanted to help end the war and bring my friends home. It wasn’t intended to be cathartic, but in my mind it was purposeful. I channeled all those pent-up energies and emotions onto paper—long legal pads and notebooks filled up with my sideways, slanted, prep school penmanship. Day and night, I wrote furiously, mostly stream-of-consciousness memories of my time in Vietnam while events were still fresh and raw in my mind. What I wrote in those first few months after coming home was neither eloquent nor structured, but it was the freshest of “fresh recollection”—a term of art I was to learn later at law school reflected the best evidence of memory.
My service wasn’t concluded yet. I had been assigned the plum position of aide to Admiral Walter F. Schlech, commander of military sea transport for the East Coast. A desk job. No one shooting at me, no one lurking in mangroves or spider holes waiting to pick me off. I was lucky to be alive, all my limbs intact; lucky enough to have returned home to Julia, who feared I would come home in a box like Persh. But within two weeks the reality of what I had left behind found me again when I ripped open a letter at the apartment Julia and I were sharing in New York. I was stunned to read that one of my closest friends from Coastal Division 11, Don Droz, had been killed. Donald “Dinky” Droz—one of the really good guys with whom I had shared a lot of time, thoughts and hopes was dead. Once again, fate seemed to play out with crushing, grotesque unfairness.
Don was a wonderful human being. He’d grown up in Missouri in a small town where patriotism ran deep, where Memorial Day and Fourth of July parades were command performances. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1966 just as I was finishing up in New Haven. We became fast friends in-country, went through a lot together on the rivers, and, as I departed, we made plans to reconnect after the war. Don was a short-timer. He knew the end of his tour was in sight and he had a lot of reasons to make it home soon. He had just been accepted to a graduate studies program at Dartmouth. We celebrated the news together before I left Vietnam.
He had married his wife, Judy, shortly before going to Vietnam. His daughter, Tracy, was born while he was deployed. In an unexpected gift, only weeks before he was killed, Don was reunited in Hawaii on R&R with Judy. There, in the sweetest encounter of all, he met his newborn, Tracy. He was brimming with plans he shared with Judy for their life after the war: a permanent home, more kids, so much ahead of them. Before he left Hawaii, he kissed Tracy and said, “Be good for Mama, smile pretty.” It was the last time he’d see either of them.
I am always grateful that Don was with me during the battle where we beached our boats and overran the ambushers.
When I opened the letter from Lieutenant Skip Barker, explaining the operation that claimed Don’s life, the pain turned toward anger—deep anger. Don could have been me and I could have been Don:
Dear John,
Thank you for your letter received today. I have been trying to write you since the 12th of April when Don was killed but have found it to be quite difficult to write at all—my mind has suffered a degree of numbness as relates to thinking of my present environment—perhaps a natural, protective response to such an utterly frustrating and infuriating situation about which I seem so unable to effect a reconciliation. I seem now to be just floating along, pushed at will by the whimsical orders of seemingly inhumane superior officers. I have finally learned—or perhaps just realized what it is to be a pawn—an asset—in the hands of authorities whose primary concern seems to be the use of war to further their careers. We, like most men here, are statistics and statistic producers.
I am not sure what all Bill Rood told you of the Battle of the Duong Keo—but as an eye-witness I would like to give you my account—for I would like to have on record with one who cares, what I consider to be a classic example of the completely incompetent leadership that the men of this division are made to endure.
HE WENT ON to describe how twelve Swift boats with two companies of Vietnamese marines embarked were to insert in the Duong Keo River and sweep up along the banks to clear the area of Viet Cong. Skip’s boat was designated tactical command with three key officers on board, including Coast Guard Commander Yost, who’d been in-country for two weeks. It was his “christening” as officer in tactical command, assigned by Captain Hoffmann, even though he had no Swift operational or river warfare experience. A first wave of Swifts entered the river and put marines ashore to start sweeping.
Skip, in a second column of Swifts, said he repeatedly suggested to the three officers in his pilothouse it was time to put their troops ashore and sweep the banks. He wrote: “I began continuously recommending that we beach and begin sweeping. I informed the three officers . . . of the many bad experiences we’d had in the Duong Keo previously and pointed out the many bunkers and trenches we were passing.” Commander Yost kept passing the decision down the chain. Skip got in an argument with the Vietnamese lieutenant, who said, “Keep going.” He told Skip he would check if it “looked dangerous.”
That’s when the banks of the river erupted. Claymore mines detonated; a rocket exploded near Skip’s boat. His forward gunner was hit by an AK-47 round in his lower back that exited his stomach, but he fired throughout the ambush. Because Yost never gave the order for the last boats in the column to turn back, each of them ran the gauntlet of the ambush—or kill zone, as we called it. It was five hundred meters long. As soon as they cleared the zone, Skip recommended beaching and sending the marines after the enemy. Yost said nothing. The Vietnamese lieutenant said to keep going. They finally beached four kilometers upstream, where they could get their wounded medevacked.
At that moment they were informed the 43 boat—Don’s boat—had been hit badly. It was aground at the ambush site! They needed to go back. Skip asked Yost for some troops to put a perimeter around the 43, but Yost told him no, that the Vietnamese lieutenant wanted them all where they were—at the landing zone. So two boats, Skip in the 31 and Bill Shumadine, OINC of the 5 boat, with dead and wounded on board, barely
able to man their guns, headed back to the stricken 43 boat.
Skip described what they encountered:
When we arrived on the scene I was met with the most sickening sight of my 25 years. PCF-43 had run up on the left bank at full bore. 9/10ths of the boat was out of the water. It was listed to the starboard 50 degrees and all survivors, 14, were in the mud and water under her starboard side trying to hold off the VC who were trying to rush them. When we arrived with guns ablaze, the VC re-manned their bunkers and opened up on us—but with little effect. PCF-5 took position slightly downstream astern of 43 to provide cover. 31 went in to the beach alongside 43 and began pulling people on board. My forward gunner was in a constant duel with a .30 caliber emplacement 20 meters off my starboard bow. His shooting was superlative and eventually the .30 caliber was firing at the sky.
As we pulled alongside the 43 the first man I noticed was a grinning Pete Upton—in mud and water to his chest. He started getting the wounded on board. Then we got the bodies of Don and the UDT Chief Corpsman. Don had been killed almost instantly by a B-40 in the pilothouse. The Chief, on the fantail, was hit in the stomach by a B-40. By this time, Captain Hoffman [sic] was overhead in a Seawolf. He radioed down for us to stop firing so the helos could come in to fire—this order was relayed to me by Yost. I told him Bull Shit—“I’m not going to stop firing until we [are] out of here”—and I didn’t. So Captain Hoffman had the helos strike behind the bunkers which almost did us in—but for those strikes and his valiant directions he is being given the Silver Star.
After what seemed an eternity, we pulled out and headed up stream. By this time, the 43 was on fire. Darkness was upon us and all night we could hear her death throes as her fuel, ammo and 800 lbs. of C-4 blew up. We barely got all of the wounded out before darkness. Don spent his last night in a river on the fantail of my boat. The next morning a helo came in and carried out our dead—3 US, 4 VN—and with the Marines sweeping ahead we began a funeral-like procession downstream—out to the LST. In the ambush area, the bodies of two VC were found—although the Press (UPI) later reported we had killed 24 of the enemy. Towing two boats, we reached the LST at 1600 the afternoon of the 13th. Besides the complete loss of PCF-43, 5 boats had been hit by B-40s, two of these by two rounds. Every boat had numerous bullet holes—AK-47 and .30 caliber and every boat had blood on her decks.