[A-List] Kerry: Tour of Duty

["bon moun" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>]

Tour of Duty
John Kerry and the Vietnam War
Douglas Brinkley
William Morrow, 546 pp
  
Boston Globe Monday Jan. 19, 2004
A Review by Michael Uhl
  
John Kerry, Tribune
  
            How little the man celebrated in Douglas Brinkley's Tour of
Duty, John Kerry and the Vietnam War as the quintessential Vietnam
veteran typifies either in educational or social privilege the vast
majority of his contemporaries who also fought in that theater of
conflict.  Christian Appy has demonstrated convincingly in Working Class
War, American Combat Soldiers and the Vietnam War, the precise blue
collar composition of the American fighting forces in S.E. Asia, to
include the corps of young officers, among whom, even in the military
academies, only ten percent came from the professional class or above.  
Yet, like another Senator - the good republican played by Derek Jacobi
in the film The Gladiator - John Kerry might with equal grace proclaim,
"I am with not of the people."
            Therein lies the tale that Mr. Brinkley tenders in a
lengthy, highly readable, and well researched bio-history which draws
generously from the diaries that Kerry, a young naval lieutenant (j.g.),
kept to document his wartime experiences, and from his extensive
correspondence home with family and friends.  We learn that Kerry, a
product of St. Paul's prep school and Yale University chose to fight in
Vietnam and did so bravely.  He led with distinction the five-man crew
of a small craft that patrolled and provoked his Viet Cong enemy in a
web of inland waterways throughout the Mekong Delta.  Kerry was wounded
lightly three times - he might as easily have been killed - and
decorated for valor.  And, like many other GIs in Vietnam, Kerry's
conscience about the war began to trouble him in the execution of his
duties, especially the incessant, indiscriminate fire directed at
apparent non-combatants.
            He witnessed the inadvertent killings by fire power under
his command of an innocent child in a sampan traveling in violation of a
nightly curfew, and of an old papasan farmer who bolted when he should
have froze.  Kerry personally killed an enemy under circumstances that
are not entirely clear, but probably sanctioned by war's ambiguous rules
of engagement.  The incident, finessed somewhat clumsily in Brinkley's
account, surfaced during Kerry's re-election campaign for the Senate in
1996 when he was questioned about having shot a wounded guerrilla who
had already fallen.  Kerry rallied several high profile Vietnam
veterans, including retired Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Senators Max Cleland
and Bob Kerrey, to defend his lightening decision to shoot an adversary
who, while down, remained armed and potentially deadly.
            Coming home, John Kerry, according to his former wife,
suffered nightmares and flashbacks.  In this sharing of, first the
dangers, and now the lasting sorrows of war, Kerry could authentically
personify, if never truly represent, the Vietnam veteran community.  As
for his politics, Kerry had already developed while in-country, both in
his gut and through intense and thoughtful observation, cogent arguments
for opposing the war.  His decision to join Vietnam Veterans Against the
War (VVAW) was a gesture of solidarity with veterans he called
"brothers," as well as a risky tactical move for a man who had begun to
plot his career in public service while still in high school.
            His personal ambitions notwithstanding, Kerry gave clear
public voice to the same ideological position taken by VVAW.  In his
appearance before William Fullbright's Senate Foreign Relations
Committee in April 1971, Kerry volunteered this straightforward
testimony: "I committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of
others in that I shot in free fire zones, used harassment and
interdiction fire, joined in search and destroy missions, and burned
villages.  All of these acts were established policies from the top
down, and the men who ordered this are war criminals."
            Brinkley reports that Kerry parted company with the antiwar
vets in the months immediately following his moment of instant
celebrity, and over the ensuing years has been scored a betrayer of the
cause by some former comrades.  But Kerry had always taken pains to
emphasize that he was "never outside the system."  The difference is
that those Vietnam veterans who have kept faith with Kerry's antiwar
arguments before an august body of the U.S. Senate in 1971 continue to
advocate for that historical interpretation of their war.  Whereas,
Kerry has never been able to bring that piece of his ideals, formed in
action as well as mind, to the table for serious examination within the
system.  And yet, the boogeyman of Vietnam still haunts the corridors of
power where war policy is forged, and its lessons never seem to fall
from fashion.
            Tour of Duty is a fresh and welcome retelling of these
lessons, and of how acutely John Kerry once wrestled with them.  The
book's remarkably broad and representative bibliography is manifest in
the many details David Brinkley inserts throughout the text to enhance
the verisimilitude of his portrait of both the era and the man. 
Nonetheless, a number of gaffes and bizarre formulations underscore a
suspicion that the period in question, the Vietnam era (to include
certain cultural nuances surrounding military service) is not one in
which the author is deeply positioned.  Jolting references to Kerry's
fellow combatants as "colleagues," are one thing.  But the potboiler
rhetoric used to describe the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) and
its political and armed struggles for reunification with Hanoi, is
amateurish.  The Viet Cong (like Native Americans of yore) are dubbed
"treacherous" because they opposed both Saigon and the U.S. invasion. 
Or they are said to "infest" the Delta, where they "extort taxes" from
the peasants, even though they functioned widely throughout South
Vietnam as the de facto government.  At such moments, it's as if the
voice of some diehard cold warrior from the LBJ or Nixon administrations
is being channeled into the narrative against the nap of its prevailing
fibers.
            Skipping Kerry's middle or Senate years, Brinkley carries
the story forward to Kerry's present drive for his party's presidential
nomination.  Voters, it seems, can't decipher Kerry's stance on our
current war with Iraq.  Antiwar folks think he's for it, and pro-war
folks think he's against.  And, indeed, if Mr. Brinkley's skillful and
convincing profile of his subject, a man of complex - often
clear-sighted - thoughtfulness, is accurate, one can easily imagine the
anguished content of Mr. Kerry's interior monologue as he struggles to
disentangle any scruples about Iraq from his memories of Vietnam.  As a
young, disaffected warrior, Kerry once dissolved such ambiguities in a
rush of insightful empathy, asking himself, "What it would be like to be
occupied by foreign troops, to have to bend to the desires of a  people
who could not be sensitive to the things that really count in one's own
country?"  To what degree John Kerry sets his politics today by this
internationalist benchmark, no one, not even he, seems to know.
  
        -30-

Michael Uhl led a military intelligence team in Vietnam with the 11th
Infantry Bde in 1968-69