by Glen Johnson
That would have to wait.
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OUR SECOND TRIP TO Vietnam came more than a year later, in early August 2015, as the secretary visited to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of US–Vietnamese diplomatic relations. John Kerry had worked with his Senate colleague John McCain, a fellow Navy veteran of Vietnam and former prisoner of war, to normalize relations in 1995.
The centerpiece of the secretary’s 2015 trip was a major speech about the transformation of the relationship during the prior two decades. Among those in the audience was Vietnamese foreign minister Phạm Bình Minh, who also served as the country’s deputy prime minister.
By the numbers alone, the change truly was remarkable: In 1995, there were fewer than sixty thousand annual American visitors to Vietnam. By 2015, the number had grown to five hundred thousand. In 1995, fewer than eight hundred Vietnamese students studied in the United States. By 2015, there were seventeen thousand. In 1995, trade between the two countries was valued at $451 million. By 2015, it totaled more than $36 billion.5
During his speech, the secretary said:
Vietnam and our shared journey from conflict to friendship crosses my mind frequently as I grapple with the complex challenges that we face in the world today—from strife in the Middle East to the dangers of violent extremism with Daesh, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, and dozens of other violent extremists, and also even the dangers of the march of technology with cyber intrusion and potential of cyber warfare. That we are standing here today celebrating 20 years of normalized relations is proof that we are not doomed merely to repeat the mistakes that we have made in the past. We have the ability to overcome great bitterness, and to substitute trust for suspicion and replace enmity with respect. The United States and Vietnam have again proven that former adversaries really can become partners, even in the complex world that we face today. And as much as that achievement matters to us, it is also a profound and timely lesson to the rest of the world.6
After the speech, Secretary Kerry went for dinner at a Hanoi restaurant. He sat with Ted Osius, the US ambassador to Vietnam, and three friends and fellow Vietnam veterans from Massachusetts: Vallely, David Thorne, and Chris Gregory. Joining them was Francis Zwenig, who’d been Kerry’s administrative assistant and staff director of the Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs.
Now gray-haired, the onetime soldiers ate and told war stories in the capital of the former North Vietnam, the city where McCain had spent his five years as a prisoner of war.
I took several photos for their scrapbooks and then waited outside.
Our third trip to Vietnam came the following year, in May 2016. We visited Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City alongside President Obama.
The good news for us staffers was that when the secretary accompanied the president, he was incorporated with the White House delegation. The State Department crew was left with little to do but wait at the hotel.
Most of us slept or gingerly explored the surrounding neighborhood. You never wanted to be left behind, and you never wanted to cause a diplomatic incident by being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. As tempting as the local delicacies may be, you also had to be careful about what you ate on the street.
Our plane was no place to end up sick.
One item on our own schedule was an interview with Margaret Brennan, a CBS News correspondent who covered the State Department. She’d asked to speak with the secretary in Vietnam for a biographical piece she was preparing for CBS Sunday Morning.
During the interview, conducted in Hanoi at dusk on a shiny scarlet bridge over a lake leading to the Ngoc Son Temple, she asked Kerry how serving in Vietnam had affected him.
He said, “[It] gave me a sense of understanding how people in positions of responsibility, when they look at something, misunderstand it and mistake what’s happening, and make the decisions that cost lives, put people’s lives at risk, puts America at risk.”7
Critics had accused him of duplicity, noting he opposed the Vietnam War after fighting in it. They also complained about such proclamations after he voted in Congress to authorize the Iraq War in 2002 but later opposed it.
As both a US senator and secretary of State, Kerry explained he had voted to give President Bush the authority to wage war in Iraq, but only after he’d been promised the administration would exhaust all possible avenues to avoid it. Kerry complained the president hadn’t kept that promise and, instead, had rushed to battle.
Kerry’s opinion of Vietnam, meanwhile, changed after what he saw during his combat tours.
The irony of the Swift Boat Veterans attacks is that Kerry had seen combat, unlike his opponents in the 2004 presidential campaign.
John Kerry and George W. Bush were at Yale University at the same time; but when they graduated, they took divergent paths. Kerry entered the Navy and volunteered to skipper a Swift Boat on the Mekong Delta. Bush joined the Texas Air National Guard and flew training missions over the Gulf of Mexico.
Bush’s running mate, Vice President Dick Cheney, got five draft deferments. He later told The Washington Post: “I had other priorities in the 60’s than military service.”8
Nonetheless, he and Bush were able to turn the Vietnam War into Kerry’s Waterloo.
That whole episode remains, to me, one of the most egregious misrepresentations of duty and honor and service that’s transpired in American politics, because it was committed to the advantage of a president and vice president who’d each found ways to avoid the same risks Kerry confronted head-on.
Brennan asked the secretary if the attacks had taken on an extra “sting” because of his continued connection to Vietnam.
“What took on a sting were the lies,” he said. “I mean, just rank, unbelievably contrived, totally out-of-whole-cloth lies, which were proved again and again were lies, but which people were repeating again and again.”9
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AFTER OUR STOP IN Hanoi, we flew south along the Vietnamese coast. One member of our traveling party, Kerry’s dinner companion David Thorne, pointed out Da Nang, where he’d served during the war.
Thorne was the leader of a State Department economic development team, but he had a unique stature with the secretary, particularly when it came to Vietnam.
The two had been classmates and soccer teammates at Yale. They were reluctant to confirm it, but they also were members of the secretive Skull and Bones Society that counted President Bush and his father, former President George H. W. Bush, among its members.
John Kerry and David Thorne decided as college juniors to join the Navy after graduation, and each finished his military career a combat veteran.
The secretary went on to marry Thorne’s twin sister, Julia, and the couple had two daughters, Alexandra and Vanessa, before divorcing in 1988.
Despite that split, the friendship between John Kerry and David Thorne endured, and Kerry recommended in 2009 that President Obama nominate Thorne to be US ambassador to Italy.
Thorne had grown up in Italy after President Dwight D. Eisenhower picked his father, Landon, to work in the country as administrator of the Marshall Plan. Thorne became fluent in Italian and later ran his father’s newspaper, the Rome Daily American, during what amounted to two decades in the country.10
Thorne was at the bottom of the steps at Ciampino Airport in Rome when Kerry’s plane pulled to a stop during our first trip abroad in February 2013. The secretary smiled and shot him a trigger-finger greeting as he descended the stairs. The two now-diplomats hugged as an Italian honor guard saluted them both.
When his ambassadorship ended, David Thorne came into the State Department fold as senior adviser. In truth, he truly was an ambassador without portfolio. As one of the secretary’s closest friends, he went places and said things others would not. He also was a moderating influence, whether traveling with Kerry, walking with him between offices in the Harry S Truman Building, or sitting next to him at restaurants around the world.
If someone needed to speak truth to po
wer, David Thorne could always do it. He was a constant for the secretary of State, tying together his past and present, his personal and professional lives.
Our group landed in Ho Chi Minh City just before President Obama, who was making his first visit to Vietnam.
The scene confronting us was overwhelming.
There were thousands of people lining the streets along the entire route from the airport to the hotel downtown. They were more than a dozen deep and cheered loudly as our motorcade passed. Some thought they were waving at the president, who was about a half hour behind us, but it was clear when the secretary took a walk later that he was tremendously popular in his own right.
As we crossed intersections or waited at traffic lights during our walk, people recognized the towering man with the thick head of hair. “Kerry,” they yelled, as they cheered and waved enthusiastically.
When we reached the Saigon River, the secretary told me about his first visit. He brought his Swift Boat to the same spot for repairs, docked it at a pier still there, and was picked up by a US Intelligence officer who’d been a buddy in language school. The pal was waiting with a motorbike and a bottle of Champagne, and they set out to tour the city before Kerry rejoined his crew and sailed away.
As we walked, the secretary remarked about the futility of the war: “All that pain, suffering, and killing—and look at it forty years later,” he said.11
By the time we’d walked along the river and up the promenade past the Rex and City Hall, both of us were soaked through our suits from the humidity. We went back to the hotel, put on bathrobes, and immediately sent our jackets and pants out for dry-cleaning. It was the only way to save them.
That evening, the secretary addressed the White House traveling press corps at the request of President Obama’s staff. He spoke again about his own service in the country and the changes that had occurred since the late 1960s.
“I have to tell you that for many years I have looked forward to a time when people would hear the word ‘Vietnam’ or the name ‘Vietnam’ and think more of a country than a conflict,” he said. “And with President Obama’s visit this week, with the crowds that we saw along the street today, the remarkably warm and generous welcome, the unbelievable excitement of people that we are here with a president of the United States at this moment is absolutely palpable, and I think it is a demarcation point.”12
Kerry added: “This is a prime example of the way in which the United States has been able to forge a new relationship out of the ashes of war and to create real peace.”13
The secretary later headed back to the Rex Hotel for beers and cigars with his staff and another special guest. This time it was former US senator Bob Kerrey.
Like the secretary, the Nebraskan had been a Vietnam vet; but the former Navy SEAL left badly wounded after losing part of a leg in a battle just three months into his first combat tour. His bravery earned him the Medal of Honor.
Again I found myself with another pinch-me moment in Vietnam: the secretary of State sitting with a fellow decorated veteran back in a country where they had both once fought. Bob Kerrey had fended off his own war-crime accusations for the deaths in a village raid he led, but there also was no denying he’d displayed heroism on the battlefield.
The former senator and past president of the New School in New York City was in Vietnam for a ceremony the following day encapsulating the essence of what John Kerry had tried to do in the country since returning as a civilian.
Vallely and his Harvard colleague Ben Wilkinson had worked for years to develop a truly independent university in Vietnam. Pivoting off the success of the Fulbright Scholarship program, which had let many top-level Vietnamese officials study in the United States before returning home, the Fulbright University Vietnam was conceived as a place to provide a similar education within Vietnam itself.
Kerry marked various waypoints toward the university’s creation during his four years as secretary of State, but a ceremony on May 25, 2016, was the most significant. Government leaders planned to hand over an operating license to university officials—the veritable keys to the car.
“The single smartest investment we can make in the next generation is education, and that’s what we are doing here today,” Kerry said during the handover ceremony.14
Noting there were 22 million people under the age of fifteen in Vietnam, he added: “The decisions that they make now and the education that they receive now—not in 10 years, but today—will have a pivotal impact on this country’s future and that of the region itself.”15
The secretary closed by saying, “Folks, it took us 20 years to normalize and almost 20 more to move from healing to building. Think of what we can accomplish in the next 20 years.”16
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OUR LAST TRIP TO Vietnam was our most momentous for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that it came in January 2017 during our final trip abroad.
First, the flight in was another of those overnight affairs with another of those sunrise spectacles. This time, the secretary and I were back in his cabin, but not to see the Mekong Delta. Instead, we looked out at Mount Everest—the highest peak on Earth—as we flew along the southern edge of the Himalayas.
He snapped pictures with his iPad. I did the same with my professional cameras.
Then, after we landed, Tommy Vallely and Ben Wilkinson were there again, but this time with a new sidekick: Ed Miller, a Dartmouth history professor specializing in the Vietnam War. He came to the country at Vallely’s request because he’d located maps depicting southern Vietnam during the time the secretary had served in the war.
Over dinner, the secretary ran his fingers over those maps. He retraced his routes up the region’s rivers and tributaries, pinpointing the sites of some of his more ferocious battles.
The plan was to return to the most famous of them all, the place where he chased down that Viet Cong soldier with the shoulder-fired rocket launcher.
For not just John Kerry but also those who’d covered his career and come to know him over the years, the last visit to Vietnam was to conclude with the ultimate step back into history.
We departed from Ho Chi Minh City with practiced efficiency. The group again split in two and boarded yet another pair of propeller planes. The cityscape turned to countryside on the flight south, and again we deplaned in Cà Mau.
We even drove past the same tin houses and Communist flags, to the same dock from which we departed in 2013 for that environmental speech.
This time, though, the secretary quickly left the boat’s bridge and instead stood in a hull opening near the bow. The spot allowed him to lean back on the doorframe and survey the muddy waters of the Bai Hap River as his hair flapped in the rushing wind.
Memories came back to the secretary in bits and pieces, with him again recalling a bridge or turn but especially a village we passed. Ed Miller came forward with his maps and Kerry unfolded them on his lap, struggling to hold down their corners in the breeze.
Unable to sleep the night before, the secretary spent time on Google Earth, searching the contours of the rivers and the recesses of his memory. He called back to the United States, speaking with his Swift Boat turret gunner and asking for his recollections of the area where they got into the firefight.
Then came the moment hours later on the boat when the secretary looked into the riverbanks and back into time, all the way to the moment of the battle. He pointed to the shore, and we realized he’d navigated himself back to the spot of that infamous firefight. To us, it was a thicket of vegetation. To him, it was the place where he almost lost his life.
We bobbed in the water for several minutes as the moment sank in. The secretary stood silently, looking across the water’s edge to a small clearing and the jungle beyond.
Kerry had told us over some of those boozy dinners in Vietnam how he’d worried about the safety of the crew as the firing began, and how that prompted his unconventional decision to turn the Swift Boat, PCF-94, directly
toward the fire.
Steering the boat from broadside to head-on narrowed its profile and let its commanding officer make a beeline to their attackers.
When the boat beached, Lieutenant Kerry jumped off, M-16 in hand, and chased a man who tried to disappear into the thicket with his rocket launcher.
When the soldier stopped and turned back to face him, the lieutenant fired. The soldier fell, dead.
During the 1996 Massachusetts Senate campaign, then Boston Globe columnist David Warsh questioned whether Kerry had delivered the “coup de grace” to a soldier already wounded by another member of his crew—a potential war crime. Some of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and other 2004 campaign critics also suggested the Viet Cong soldier may have actually been a boy, which would be another pox on his killing.
Kerry had disputed such assertions whenever they were made, but they may have ended up costing him the presidency. He was left to take solace in his own integrity, the citations justifying his combat decorations, and the memories held for decades by him and his crew.
But now, in 2016, the rest of us on the boat with him had a chance to see the spot previously known only to them.
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WE MOTORED BACK TO the dock in Cà Mau just as we had in 2013; but this time, Vallely and Wilkinson had a surprise for Kerry.
Working with local Vietnamese officials and the US consulate in Ho Chi Minh City, they’d found a shrimp and crab farmer who said he’d been a Viet Cong soldier whose unit regularly attacked US Navy Swift Boats during the Vietnam War.
Not only had now-seventy-year-old Vo Ban Tam seen action in the region where Lieutenant Kerry had fought, but he said some of it had been on the banks of the Bai Hap River. Some of it, in fact, during the battle on February 29, 1969, when the lieutenant beached his boat and shot the Viet Cong soldier.
Vo Ban Tam said that person was his comrade.
“He was a good soldier,” Vo told Kerry, providing facts that fleshed out a fleeting memory held by Kerry and his crew.