28 January 2010
 
The War Within

ENS John Kerry, top, third from right, at NOB Norfolk, 1967. Official Navy photo.)
 
I am going to embark on a sensitive topic this morning. I know what Rex thought about Senator Kerry, and I know how the (now) Senior Senator from Massachusetts has been a burr under a lot of saddles since he left Vietnam and struck out on a bold political path that almost resulted in his becoming President of the United States.
 
The idea made a lot of the NAVFOR-Vietnam Alumni seethe with anger, since one of the first things that LTJG Kerry did when he returned home was to accuse the Brown Water Navy of committing war crimes.
 
There are some other issues Mr. Kerry has been involved with down through the years, like ranting about Ollie North and Iran-Contra, and providing aid-and-comfort to the legally-elected Sandinistas in Nicaragua, but was a lot of that to go around up on the Hill in those days.
 
Senator Kerry has been a special lightning rod for Vietnam Vets, since he made his early career on the issue of the War and his service there. Later, he was demonized by the families of the missing when he chaired the Select Committee on POW-MIAs during the first Bush Administration. He had some unlikely partners, in the form of John McCain and that nut-job  Bob Smith from New Hampshire. Between the allegations of misconduct against his fellow sailors and accusations that he shredded documents related to the MIAs, you can bet that the fires of resentment were kept burning all these years.
 
My take-away from all this is “don’t lose wars.” It causes way too much heartburn. The corollary to that is that you should strive to win them, and accordingly should pick your conflicts with great care.
 
I was watching the State of the Union address last night. It is almost required homework here in Washington, and it always knocks me out that the thing is actually happening within artillery range of Big Pink.
 
The President looked pretty cool throughout, and managed to keep the military issues pretty much in the background. The First Lady wore purple, signifying the union of Red and Blue for progress.
 
When the camera panned the crowd, it was curious to see Senator Kerry seated with the tight little coterie of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
 
I didn’t get it until near the end of the hour-and-ten-minute address, when the President said that he would work with Congress this year to overturn the "don't ask, don't tell" policy about gays openly serving in the military. Mr. Kerry is in favor of lifting the ban, and I think he smiled when Mr. Obama made the commitment.
 
I have never seen the Chiefs so stony-cold. It was as if they were literally frozen stiff.
 
Mr. Kerry has that affect on people, just like he did on Rex and the Brown Water Veterans.

Here is the disclaimer, and I need to get it on the table right now. I was not in Vietnam. I have no position on whether Mr. Kerry is a hero or a mountebank, or a little of both. We will get to the best evidence of that presently.
 
I will state for the record that the Senator’s politics have irritated me down through the years. Particularly during the time he was Chairman of the Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs.
 
I worked for Tom Wilson then, who had the misfortune to be Director of DIA while the Committee had its heyday. He told me one day that he regularly spent more than half his time answering questions about Gulf War MIA  Naval Aviator Scott Speicher, who had been reported in captivity after Dick Cheney declared him dead.
 
As it turned out, CDR Speicher was killed at the scene of his crash, and there was not much more to it than there was to the reports of live-sightings of dozens of American POWs in SE Asia.
 
Let’s get to it. John Forbes Kerry was born in 1943, which put him in the heart of the envelope for the Vietnam-era Draft when he graduated from Yale university. His family credentials to be an Old Eli from the New England Brahman tradition are unsurpassed, trust me. You can look it up.
 
It is possible that he could have chosen other options to service, but 1966 was still early in the war, and Draft Resistance was not yet viewed widely as a patriotic act. Kerry enlisted in the Naval Reserve that year, and entered active duty in August to attend OCS at Newport. After commissioning he had the usual en route training at destroyer school, where the sardonic motto was “If it wasn’t good enough, it wouldn’t be the minimum.”
 
Fully trained, and with a patrician background in yachting and private aviation that his fellows did not share, ENS Kerry reported to the guided missile cruiser USS Gridley (CG-21) in the summer of 1967. By all reports he did well.
 
Gridley was performing plane-guard duty for the carriers on Yankee Station. His later writings about the period include some graphic recollections of a port visit to Danang in which he may (or may not) have visited Monkey Mountain and heard about Viet Cong dead, though there were none at the time. The locals were concerned about getting Gridely’s shore party to unload their weapons so that no one would be shot by accident.
 
Mr. Kerry’s recollection of Olongopo City in the P.I. appear fevered even from this distance. There were no corpses floating down Shit River in my time there, though that was a little later. I will freely agree that there were some extraordinary things that happened in that amazing city on Subic Bay.
 
Gridley’s XO described the deployment as routine, with a stop in Australian on the way back to Long Beach. During his tour on Gridley, Kerry requested duty in Vietnam. He requested brown water duty, and presumably he knew what he was getting into. The wardroom of a cruiser is a small place, and the JO’s would have heard all the rumors.
 
The way the Senator told it later, it was sort of like the story of Mr. Roberts. You know the one: the bored Ensign who was condemned to sail from Tedium to Apathy in the western Pacific, yearning to get to the real war where heroes are made.
 
In his 1986 book “Tour of Duty,” Senator Kerry said: "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.”
 
Kerry made LTJG in June of 1968 and detached Gridley for PBR training at the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado. There is a Swift Boat at the gate there now, lovingly restored by veterans. It was a wild time in San Diego, and a lot of traffic getting people ready to go to the Show. Naval Intelligence Liaison Officer training and counter-insurgency orientation was conducted on the base as well as small boat operations.
 
Rex reported for duty in Saigon in April 1968, and was present for every second that John Kerry was in Vietnam. You can imagine that he took it personally when LTJG Kerry later told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he personally was guilty of war crimes, and hence, Rex’s whole command was implicated in something immoral and criminal.
 
A lot of other people too it personally, too, but I will have to get to that tomorrow. It sums up why Rex adopted the case of POW-MIA Jack Graf with such a sense of urgency, not long after John Kerry stood up in 2004 and declared he was ready to report for duty as Commander in Chief.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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