Between summers in Island Park, I was back in Queens. For the first two years of high school I attended the old St. Ann’s Academy at Lexington Avenue and East Seventy-Seventh Street, commuting by subway every morning to Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The school, with a long, proud history dating back to 1892, was run by the Marist Brothers. But by the time I got there, the building was kind of dumpy and the brothers were already in discussion with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn to pack up and move to Briarwood, Queens. In the summer of 1957, between my sophomore and junior years, that’s exactly what happened, and the name was changed to Archbishop Molloy High School.
The athletic teams kept their old nickname, the Stanners, and the school offered a busy schedule of extracurriculars. But except for playing intramural football and drawing some illustrations for the school newspaper, I wasn’t involved in many out-of-class activities. I had to work to pay my tuition and help with household expenses. I had a job as a messenger at Maclean’s magazine. Then, senior year, my mom got me hired as a part-time Macy’s stock boy. One of the best things about that job was that I got to work the Thanksgiving Day Parade. I was part of the team that held the turkey balloon. Back in those days, it wasn’t as easy as it sounds. You hold on to a cord and fight the wind while the inflated turkey bangs against the light posts down Broadway. By the end of the parade, I was totally exhausted, but it was great fun.
The summer I graduated from high school, I skipped the beach entirely. It wasn’t my choice. I had to take a job as an elevator operator at the Herald Tribune newspaper building at 230 West Forty-First Street. My oldest brother, Leonard, had gotten married, and his new father-in-law managed the building. My family didn’t want to insult the bride’s father when he offered me the job. It paid better than Macy’s and way better than lifeguarding in Island Park. But hour after hour, as I stood in my brown polyester uniform, all I could think of was my friends and family enjoying another sparkling day at the beach. I couldn’t wait to start college, which meant Catholic college, of course. I chose Manhattan College in the Bronx because that’s where my brother Leonard went after he’d gotten out of the Marine Corps as an enlisted man and before he went back in as an officer. He’d majored in business, so I majored in business. That included accounting, statistics, and all the basic tools you would need getting started in the business world. I filled out my program with classes in history, Spanish, psychology, and, of course, theology. I didn’t have a scholarship, so I took out a loan and went back to Macy’s.
Manhattan College boasted top-notch professors, a crowded calendar of student activities, and a beautiful, hilly campus in Riverdale. To graduate I needed 144 credits, 18 per semester. I was always squeezed for time. Joining a fraternity, playing sports, working on the school newspaper—there was no way I could do any of that. I went to class, went to work, and went back home to Queens at night. I received a great education, but because of my situation, I never got the full college experience. Amazingly, in 2014, Manhattan College named the new student commons building in my honor, thanks to the generosity of my classmate Thomas O’Malley and his wife, Mary Alice. Executive chairman of PBF Energy Company, Tom is a titan of the oil-refining industry and a former chairman of the Manhattan College Board of Trustees. Today, the Raymond W. Kelly ’63 Student Commons is the hub of campus life. Governor Andrew Cuomo attended the ribbon cutting on October 15, 2014, and gave a memorable speech. “His life is a testament to the virtue of service taught by the Christian brothers and a commitment to excellence,” the governor generously said about me. “Manhattan College could not have chosen a better name than Raymond Kelly.” It was extremely kind of the O’Malleys and all the others who contributed to the effort. I will always be grateful.
The one activity I did sign up for when I was on campus was Air Force ROTC. It was that or take some course on hygiene. I wore a blue uniform to class one day a week. But I never intended to join the air force. I always knew I’d follow my three older brothers into the Marine Corps. Leonard, Kenneth, and Donald used to tell me stories about their Marine Corps experiences and the tough-as-nails drill instructors who were yelling all the time. They let me read the Guidebook for Marines. It really spoke to me. Lying in bed at night, I could easily imagine myself as a Marine Corps officer, leading men into battle, finding adventures on far-off shores. There was a chapter in that book called “Marine Corps Leadership Traits.” There were fourteen traits: Justice. Judgment. Dependability. Initiative. Decisiveness. Tact. Integrity. Enthusiasm. Bearing. Unselfishness. Courage. Knowledge. Loyalty. And endurance. I could give a class on those leadership traits today.
* * *
Adam Walinsky was a big-ideas guy with a special interest in the criminal-justice system. A young New York lawyer and Marine Corps reservist who worked as an aide to Robert F. Kennedy, he’d grown convinced that America’s police departments needed to be dragged into the modern age. A big part of the problem, he decided, was that the undereducated civil servants were too suspicious of new ideas. Early on, it was Irish immigrants who gravitated toward police work because they could already speak English. The ethnic makeup had broadened over the years, but the closed-minded attitudes hadn’t. Or so Walinsky believed. He wanted to convince bright young college students to consider police work as a professional career. From the work of Walinsky and others grew something called the Police Cadet Corps, a program like ROTC for policing.
The concept drew skepticism from police unions, which imagined a bunch of clueless know-it-alls getting in the way at the station house and, even worse, working for subunion wages. But Police Commissioner Stephen Kennedy embraced an early version of the program that gave local college students an inside view of police work and some hands-on experience. In my junior year at Manhattan College, I saw an ad for the program in the Quadrangle, the student newspaper, and joined the inaugural class. I had no particular interest in modernizing American policing. I was just happy to be out of the children’s department at Macy’s—size 6, size 6X, and all that. There was also some talk of student loan repayment, which sounded all right to me.
The group consisted of 107 students from public and private colleges around New York. We were summoned to Hubert Street on the Lower West Side and the dilapidated police academy, which was probably the worst possible venue for convincing college students to look at policing as a promising, modern profession. The building looked like it might fall down by lunchtime. We weren’t cops, the instructors explained to us. We wouldn’t be carrying firearms. We wouldn’t even wear uniforms, just button-down shirts and neckties. But for $1.60 an hour, we would move around to different parts of the department, learning how things operated on the inside. Our two-week orientation included a mind-numbing attempt to familiarize us with the NYPD’s seemingly endless supply of preprinted, numerically identified, sometimes triplicate forms. No one could possibly learn them all, but we got a fine sample. A UF-61—Uniform Force 61—was a complaint form. A UF-6 was an aided card. A UF-49 was a piece of paper with a letterhead on top. A UF-49A was half a piece of paper with a letterhead. A UF-50 was a plain piece of paper. A UF-50A was half of that. They had forms for everything, including forms for ordering new forms.
That mind-numbing experience prepared me well for my first stop, the lost-property division, hidden away in a decrepit building at 400 Broome Street. The place was every bit as stuck in the past as Adam Walinsky had warned. Many of the full-time officers had been injured or were on what people called “the rubber-gun squad,” having gotten in trouble somehow and had their real weapons taken away. The duties involved filing reports from pawnbrokers, which could then be cross-checked against reports of items taken in burglaries. The concept behind the work was solid, and it might have actually functioned if the file cabinets hadn’t been such a disaster zone. It may have counted as police work, but all that filing was painfully boring. No one wanted to be there. One day, a cop took a fat handful of missing-property reports and tossed them into a gaping hole in one of the dilapidated building’s plaster walls. “Got those filed,” he announced to no one in particular.
Fortunately, I soon moved over to the communications unit on the top floor of police headquarters, one of the most fascinating places I had ever stepped inside. The turn-of-the-century building at 240 Centre Street, just north of Chinatown, was imposing and grand, with a pediment and columns at the entrance and a giant dome on top. You just knew important things were happening there, even if you weren’t sure what they were. In those days, the department didn’t have a single citywide phone number. This was years before 440-1234, the first five-borough number, and the 911 system. Each borough command had its own emergency exchange. SPring 7-3100 was the number for Manhattan. CAnal 6-2000 was the administrative switchboard. The CAnal board must have had a thousand exchanges—lights blinking, wires going in and out, all kinds of connections being made. There was always a lieutenant yelling. You had to keep your cool. Each call could be a life-or-death situation—or some cop’s question about procedures, or a cat up a tree. About 25 officers at a time were assigned to the fast-paced, high-pressure work. The pulse of the city ran through that room, and I loved being in the middle of it.
The cadets were there to augment the cops by manning the phones, patching people together, fielding incoming calls. If there was a real emergency, we were supposed to hand the call over to one of the experienced officers. But the place was wild, and I couldn’t get enough. I felt an adrenaline rush just being there, in the constant whirl of activity. One guy kept running through the room in his underwear with a number on the back. What did that mean? No one seemed to know. But he ran around where the terminals were and everybody laughed. The atmosphere was frenzied but organized. There was no room for confusion. You couldn’t be in there and not feel like you were part of something, right in the center of bustling New York.
A burglary report might come in on one line. Over at another desk, an officer would be dispatching patrol wagons. Then someone would run into the room with a report of a shooting. Every call was hand logged on a card and quickly slapped on a conveyor belt that went to the dispatcher in the radio room. The phone calls weren’t recorded, which was definitely a good thing. Even in a city as huge as New York, with all its crimes and associated problems, we still made time for sophomoric fun. When the lines slowed down, some of the cadets, to entertain themselves, would call eight or ten random city phone numbers, connecting the calls together like a party line. We’d listen in silence while unsuspecting people answered their phones at home and agitatedly talked back and forth. “I didn’t call you. You called me.” “No, I didn’t.” “Yes, you did.” There was no such thing as caller ID, but amazingly some of the people recognized each other’s voices because they lived in the same general areas. Sometimes the puzzled people would stay on the line for fifteen minutes, trying to figure out why they were there. It was just the kind of pressure release all of us needed. We found it hilarious.
Then, as quickly as the juvenile pranks had started, we all snapped back to the latest emergency on the line. Robberies, runaways, knife fights, and then someone called with a report that their house had been egged.
“What kind of egg? Scrambled? Hard boiled?”
We were college students with a front-row seat to the complex human drama of life in the city. How could we not like that?
In order to stay in the program, you had to take the tests for police officer. There was a written test and a physical test, which involved lifting some weights and scaling an eight-foot wall. I went ahead and took those tests, not because of any clear commitment to a future in police work but because I couldn’t imagine a better part-time college job.
I passed.
* * *
In the summer of 1962, between my junior and senior years at Manhattan College, I headed down to Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia for the Platoon Leaders Course, twelve weeks of intense training for college students. Most people did it over two summers, but I did both six-week sessions back-to-back. If you made it through, which a lot of people didn’t, you qualified for commissioning as a Marine Corps officer. I’d heard plenty of talk about the Marine Corps from my three older brothers, but it was still a culture shock when I arrived in Quantico.
We spent the first six weeks living in steel Quonset huts at remote Camp Upshur. I thought I was in excellent shape, but the physical demands of the course were enormous. We’d get up early and go for long runs along the steep Hill Trail. We would return feeling just about ready to collapse, only to have the drill instructors send us right back out on the Hill Trail Extension, which was even more difficult.
The drill instructors were straight from central casting. Zero body fat. At five o’clock in the morning, their creases were perfect. They screamed and shouted endlessly, just as my brothers had promised they would. I don’t believe the DIs had any traditional training as psychologists, but they had their own motivational methods. All of them definitely believed in the character-building power of constant harassment, and that included physical contact.
Some of the drill instructors at Quantico that summer had been at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, on April 8, 1956, for the so-called Ribbon Creek incident. That terrible day, Staff Sergeant Matthew McKeon, pushing with typical DI toughness, marched seventy-four men of Platoon 71 into the water. Six recruits drowned. Since then, the drill instructors had supposedly lightened up, but in my twelve weeks I didn’t see much evidence of that. One sergeant didn’t like the way one of my squad mates was saluting. He bit the kid’s thumb so hard, he broke a bone.
One of my DIs had arms like pencils, yet he could bang out twenty chin-ups hardly taking a breath. The same sergeant would take us out for ten-mile hikes with all our gear on. He did all kinds of things just to harass us. After he barked at you to get to the showers, if he got there first, you had to quickly put your dirty uniform back on and go back downstairs. Once, during a junk-on-the-bunk inspection, a bunk mate of mine was found with a “dirty” belt. The belt looked clean to me and everyone else—everyone but our DI. The sergeant grabbed the offending belt and wrapped it around the kid’s neck until he passed out. I heard later that the sergeant was killed in Vietnam.
The name of the game in the Platoon Leaders Course was to scare the hell out of the college boys so they’d drop out and be bounced down to enlisted rank. I understood that even at the time and vowed they wouldn’t do it to me.
Thanks to the advice I’d gotten from my brothers, I wasn’t surprised by much that happened those three months, and I was already in good physical shape. I’d been running and lifting weights and had upper-body strength. I was a demon on the rope climbs. But they pushed us so hard, those twelve weeks of intense training had a debilitating effect on me. As the days went on, I didn’t get stronger. I got weaker, a cumulative wearing-down. A lot of people DORed, dropped out on request. The number of people who finished was considerably smaller than the number that had started. But I told myself that no matter how tough it got, I was going to do this, and I did. I was even voted squad leader by the other members of my squad. I knew I’d finish and that I’d be getting my commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marines Corps.
* * *
By the age of twenty, I had been inside two of America’s most vaunted institutions, the New York City Police Department and the U.S. Marine Corps. So while most of my fellow Manhattan College business majors were casting their eyes on Wall Street or banking or the large accounting firms, I was mapping out something a little more daring.
I wore marine dress whites for my college graduation on June 11, 1963, which was the second-most important event that day. The first was getting engaged to Veronica. She was eighteen. I was twenty-one.
Our families didn’t necessarily approve of our getting married. They were sure we were both too young. We were just as sure we knew what we were doing. Veronica and I had been going out for three years already, an eternity for people our age. I think she liked my drive and my enthusiasm for trying new things. I was sure she was the one for me. We weren’t the first in our group to make this choice; people around us were getting married. My lifeguard friend Sammy Latini had. I was in his wedding. My brothers Leonard and Donald and my sister, Mary, were all married by then. Veronica was a popular girl. I certainly didn’t want to let her slip away while I was off in the Marine Corps. I wasn’t 100 percent sure she’d wait around. So I asked her and she said yes, and we set a wedding date, December 14, 1963.
I didn’t have much time to relax after graduation. Veronica started planning our wedding, and I was due to report at the Marine Corps’ Basic School in early July. But that wasn’t all. I’d also gotten word that the police department was expecting me—on June 26. Obviously I couldn’t be a brand-new New York City police officer and an active-duty Marine, not at the same time. So I decided I would get sworn in to the police department in June and begin my classes at the police academy, then five days later I’d take a three-year military leave. It certainly wasn’t the typical way to begin a police career. I wasn’t sure how the department would react. But would they really squawk too loudly at a recruit’s military obligation? I hoped not.
June 26 was a steamy early-summer morning. The city was just coming out of a long cold snap, sixteen consecutive days of unseasonably cool temperatures. The ceremony hardly seemed real to me as I sat with my police academy classmates in front of city hall. I didn’t have any relatives or friends in the audience, not even Veronica. I knew I’d be leaving for the Marine Corps in five days. And frankly, I wasn’t entirely certain I’d be returning to the police department. Three years is a long time in the mind of a twenty-one-year-old. A lot could happen.
We all stood at our folding chairs on the plaza in front of city hall. We raised our right hands and declared in unison, “I do hereby pledge and declare to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of New York and faithfully discharge my duties as a New York City police officer to the best of my ability, so help me God.”
And I was officially a member of the New York City Police Department. There was a round of applause and a couple of speeches, and that was pretty much it. Our first official act was to march together as a class to the police academy on Hubert Street. My supervisors didn’t seem thrilled when I explained that I’d be leaving almost immediately for the Marine Corps. But they didn’t try to fight it or say anything that would make me feel bad. I was given some clerical duties to keep me busy for the next few days and told not to bother with classes. I could join a new class of police recruits upon my return. They promised to hold my place for me and gave me thirty days of paid military leave for my first year on the job. What more could I ask? Things were moving quickly. In less than a month, I’d gone from college graduation to getting engaged to joining the NYPD to putting the NYPD on hold. A few short days later, I would kiss Veronica good-bye and head back to Quantico, Virginia, for Marine Corps Basic School.
* * *
I was one of two hundred freshly minted second lieutenants who’d earned a place in this finishing school for Marine Corps officers. The instructors drilled us on discipline, leadership, Corps tradition, and how to behave like officers. They taught us the tactics of infantry warfare—what kinds of weapons and ammunition to use and which formations and principles to apply. The platoon commanders were all captains or majors. To us, the captains were like Jesus Christ. They had unquestioned authority, and they could do no wrong. We all took turns leading the squad and the platoon.
Some of the leadership concepts seemed obvious once you heard them, but the superior officers assured us that if we followed them, we would all be strong leaders. No lightning bolt comes down and makes you a leader, they told us. You behave like a leader and so you become one. I remain a huge believer in the Marine Corps way. I have said this many times, and it’s no exaggeration: virtually everything I know about being a leader, I learned in the Marine Corps. How to deliver clear messages. How to set standards and stick to them. How to treat other people and how to treat yourself. Those are lessons every leader needs to learn and to live by. Like how the officer always eats last. That may sound small, but it isn’t. Even today, I still can’t go through a buffet line until everyone else has been fed.
The Marine Corps has a tradition for almost everything. Beyond our daily khakis and greens, our $300 uniform allowance had to cover two dress uniforms—blues and whites. You also needed a Mameluke sword to drill with, a jewelry box with studs and cuff links, and dress black shoes, impeccably shined at all times. Whatever the occasion called for, we were proud to put that uniform on.
I slipped back to New York a couple of times during Basic School to see Veronica. We attended an express-lane version of the pre-Cana classes her priest wanted us to take. But I had almost nothing to do with planning my own wedding. Veronica and her family took care of everything. My job was to get to the church on time. I bought a new two-door Volkswagen Beetle, the first car I ever owned, and drove the 270 miles from Virginia to New York on the Friday of our wedding weekend. The very next day we had a large ceremony with lots of family and friends at St. Therese of Lisieux on Avenue D and Troy Avenue in Flatbush, Veronica’s family’s parish. I wore my marine dress blues. My brother Donald was my best man. We had a reception in the officers’ club at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The next day, Sunday, Lt. and Mrs. Raymond Kelly got into our new Volkswagen for the trip back to Quantico, though we didn’t get far. After we pulled into the Holland Tunnel, we were slammed from behind by a Cadillac with four men inside. As I veered into the next lane, the car followed us there and hit us a couple more times, slamming us into the car in front of us, just about destroying the VW. I couldn’t believe what had just happened—or that neither one of us was badly hurt. I did have to restrain myself from jumping out and pounding on the men. But that didn’t seem like such a good idea. I was technically a New York City police officer on military leave.
In those days, there were Port Authority police officers in the tunnel. An officer arrived in less than a minute. It was obvious that all four of the men were drunk. The driver was arrested for drunk driving. Veronica and I spent our second night as husband and wife at Manhattan night court as criminal complainants. It was not exactly the beginning we imagined for married life, but it might have been a sign that we shouldn’t expect to be bored in the years to come.
* * *
The Marine Corps was a life-altering experience for me. Up until I joined, I had been a student, worked menial jobs, or been some kind of trainee. Suddenly, at twenty-one, I was a leader of men. I was gaining command experience. I was going to the officers’ club with fellow marines who had rank and experience far beyond mine. People were saluting me.
I attended advanced artillery training at Fort Sill in Oklahoma and then was assigned to H-Battery, Third Battalion, Eleventh Marines at Camp Pendleton, California. At that time, Vietnam was becoming a topic of debate on college campuses. Inside the Marine Corps, however, especially among the officers, getting sent to the Southeast Asian nation was still seen as a perfectly fine posting; Vietnam seemed to be an exotic place where you could go and be an adviser, play at some guerrilla warfare, obtain command experience, learn about a different culture, and get your ticket punched. I don’t remember hearing about anyone who had died there. The media wasn’t even calling it a war. It was the “conflict” in Vietnam. But by 1965, the South Vietnamese guerrillas were proving themselves as fierce, dogged fighters, and President Lyndon Johnson responded by ordering more and more U.S. troops in. I was right in the middle of that. That July, I was ordered to deploy out of San Diego on the USS Gunston Hall, part of a Special Landing Force of the Second Battalion, First Marines, bound for the Republic of Vietnam.
We had just learned that Veronica was pregnant with our first child. Obviously that was a concern for both of us. She had a job in a savings bank in Oceanside, California, and the repaired Volkswagen Beetle. She wasn’t one to complain. But at twenty-one, she was still very young, living on her own for the first time. And now her husband was going off to what everyone had started calling the Vietnam War.
“See you in a year,” I promised Veronica as we said good-bye at the dock. We held a long hug, both of us fighting back tears.
We had a long ride across the Pacific Ocean and into the South China Sea. The Gunston Hall, a World War II–era Ashland-class dock-landing ship named in honor of the estate of founding father George Mason, wasn’t much on creature comforts. I mainly remember that the ship wasn’t air-conditioned and the cool Pacific breezes weren’t nearly what they were cracked up to be.
As an artillery forward observer and fire-support coordinator assigned to a Special Landing Force, I led my team on amphibious-assault landings along the coast of Vietnam. We loaded into amphtracks, large tanklike vehicles launched from the back of the ship. Those things were as claustrophobic as metal coffins, twenty-five marines packed in together with rifles, helmets, and not much else. We couldn’t see where we were going. Water poured in the entire time we were moving. Breathing wasn’t easy. People hardly spoke. Everyone was wet. It was hard not to wonder, How do these things even stay afloat? Then, all of a sudden, we’d feel a sharp thump as the amphtrack pulled up on the beach. Once ashore, we’d take modest sniper fire.
I had two main duties. As a forward observer, I led a team of marines whose job was to scope out potential targets and radio that information back to the marines manning the towed 105 mm and 155 mm howitzers. As a fire-support coordinator, I advised the commander on the appropriate choice of supporting arms. This was all before computer guidance. We were still using slide rules and fire-control tables printed in manuals. After Quantico and my additional training, leading others felt somewhat natural to me, and my urban upbringing helped define my leadership style. I took the direct I’m from New York approach. The men I led hailed from all different backgrounds. Catholics from the northeast and Baptists from the southeast. There were a fair number of African Americans. One thing these young marines all seemed to have in common was an excellent, sometimes subversive sense of humor, which is always helpful in a stressful situation.
I also discovered they liked a certain amount of order and regimentation, even when they grumbled about it. They needed it, actually. We were asking them to operate cohesively in a hostile and dangerous environment. Just winging it was a recipe for disaster. There had to be a system in place—rules, chain of command, a commitment to follow directives—that everyone recognized. They all understood that. It was precisely the culture of the Marine Corps.
Now, if only someone had told us what the mission was. This was an uncertain time in Vietnam. The information was all a little murky. No one knew exactly what we were doing there. America had made a commitment and that commitment was growing, but it hadn’t yet fully formed. So we approached each day with a list of assignments but never with a full understanding of the endgame.
I spent most of my tour in the valleys near Hue and Phu Bai, a mostly rural area dotted with small villages in the northern part of South Vietnam. We shared the jungle with leeches, rats, and fat, round mosquitoes. There were constant chirping sounds interrupted by frequent bursts of artillery fire. The nights were darker than anything I’d ever seen back home, except when the sky was lit by flares or tracer bullets. The famous marine battle for Hue City hadn’t happened yet, but that’s near where we were. I’d never heard any of those names before. Now I lived and breathed them.
In December 1965, we were pulled into Operation Harvest Moon, one of the first major campaigns of the war. We were in the rice-filled Phuoc Ha Valley, south of Da Nang, a longstanding stronghold for the Vietcong. Fresh intelligence said the enemy was amassing to attack a government outpost in Que Son. A company of marines had gotten hemmed in at the end of that valley. Their commander had been killed. We had been helicoptered into the middle of the operation. Because of our haste reaching the area, we were not especially well supplied. We ran out of C rations and, at one point, dug casabas out of the dirt to eat. Back in camp, we slept in strong-back tents, but in the field, it was only poncho liners on the dirt. The vegetation was so dense there, tunnels had been cut through it. We could tell the enemy was present and active from the sniper fire and the punji sticks. Fifty-caliber rounds kept flying overhead, ripping branches off the trees. You could feel their breeze. We took cover in rice paddies and returned fire.
We stuck together, marching in narrow columns, constantly picking our way through the thick foliage. The local culture was almost impenetrable to us. On the edge of a firefight, a Vietnamese family came walking by in a funeral procession, carrying a tiny casket. They seemed not to hear the war going on around them, though clearly it had shattered their lives. We took more sniper fire as we went, suffering several casualties of our own. We had no idea where those shots were coming from or where to shoot back. One night, the enemy tried to penetrate our lines. In a hasty response to that, a marine was shot and killed by friendly fire from another unit.
There is something that comes over a group of marines in an environment like that. I saw it vividly on that march. No one was complaining about the difficult conditions, even as some suffered from immersion foot and had to be evacuated. No one was asking questions about the mission, even though its larger purpose was notably vague. Everyone was laser focused on moving ahead. It was an impressive thing to behold.
The fight was even more challenging in the adjacent valley, where my friend First Lieutenant Harvey “Barney” Barnum Jr. was leading the cut-off marines. The commanding officer had died in his arms. His 110 men were surrounded and outnumbered by the enemy, perhaps twelve to one. It fell to Barney to salvage what he could.
Knowing it would be impossible to hold on through the night, Barney ordered his remaining marines to burst out in four-man fire teams. Taking the Vietcong fighters by surprise, the marines managed to cross several hundred yards of fire-swept terrain and break through Vietcong lines. They rejoined their battalion before nightfall. Barney earned the Medal of Honor for his heroism that day. Operation Harvest Moon was written up in the history books as an early American success in the Vietnam War, thanks in part to Barnum’s heroism.
While the big picture remained murky in Vietnam, the realities of life and death were vividly clear. No one could lead marines in those years and not feel that. As Operation Harvest Moon came to a close, I stood beside a marine colonel named Oscar Peatross and a large pile of body bags, a dead marine in every one. The colonel was smoking, which almost everybody did. Calm, cool, and collected, just puffing away with an attitude I knew he’d earned the hard way. I’m a pro, it seemed to say. This is my business. This is what I do. Could that be me?
There were fresh reminders every day of the stakes in Vietnam.
The marines I led were focused and dedicated. I witnessed them being amazingly kind to the locals and to each other. They fought under dire conditions. Sometimes we had no food. Sometimes we had to drink rainwater. It’s hard to imagine, but because of ground fire, helicopters couldn’t get in to resupply us. If you’d asked these young marines why they fought so valiantly, they wouldn’t speak about patriotism or American values or apple pie. They probably wouldn’t even mention the goals of the mission they were on. They’d tell you they were fighting for each other, doing all they could to make sure everyone came home alive.
That was life early in the Vietnam War. So was this: I got a message from battalion headquarters one day that there were two envelopes waiting for me in my unit. That usually meant bad news from home. One letter would tell you what had happened. The other letter authorized your leave. I didn’t know what to expect, but I walked very slowly back to the battalion. I was expecting the worst. I wanted to steel myself for whatever the tragedy was.
It turned out the second envelope was for someone else. I opened the one addressed to me, and it announced the birth of our son James at Brookdale Hospital in Brooklyn. What an amazing relief that was. Veronica had moved back to New York to be closer to family. Mother and baby were fine. I knew I still had another five months of my deployment. But I did notice that time ticked more slowly after that.
In late February, in a night helicopter operation, we joined Operation New York, a sweep across the Phu Thu Peninsula east of Phu Bai. As we pursued the Vietcong down a sandy peninsula, the tree line suddenly erupted with machine-gun and mortar fire. From fifty yards behind, we watched in awe as marine Second Lieutenant Robert Fellers and his men refused to retreat. Instead, they went rushing toward the fire, doubling back and keeping their wits about them long enough to cut off any Vietcong retreat. Fellers didn’t send his men in alone. Though wounded in the hip, he stayed right with them, crossing the fire-raked paddies toward the enemy.
It defied logic almost, young marines running in front of live fire like that, putting their own lives at such dire and obvious risk. In conjunction with an aerial observer in an OV-10 aircraft, I called in artillery fire. But a captain called it off when a 90-millimeter round from a recoilless rifle landed just a few feet from us. The captain thought it was a short round of ours. It wasn’t. Our round never fired. It was from the Vietcong. Confusion was a constant part of the Vietnam experience. We were often running around in a state the brilliant Prussian military analyst Carl von Clausewitz and U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara both warned about—“the fog of war.”
I know it’s strange to say this, but as June grew near and my days in-country grew short, I really didn’t want to leave. The excitement, the adrenaline, the young marines I was leading, even with a mission as confusing as this one—it wasn’t easy to walk away from. But I had a baby, now five months old. I couldn’t wait to see him. And I knew if I stayed any longer, I might be tempting fate—risking my own survival and Veronica’s continued understanding.
In late June, I flew to Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, near Irvine, California. I borrowed a car and got to Los Angeles International Airport just in time to meet Veronica, who flew in from New York with our new son.
She was wearing a blue knit suit. She looked amazing. The baby was all bundled up in a blanket.
“Here is your son, James,” she said, handing the baby to me. I couldn’t see much, just his little eyes poking out above the very top of the blanket.
I was speechless.
We went to Laguna Beach for the weekend. We took pictures of each other with the baby, sitting at the window of our motel with the beach in the distance.
I’d just spent months in combat with young marines whose lives were in my hands. I wasn’t much older than they were. In service to their country and in service to each other, some of them had been killed. I hated to leave them. Like the colonel with the body bags, I hadn’t allowed myself to think too deeply about it, though I understood somewhere inside me: any one of those men could have been me.
Now I had this new little baby and this amazing and supportive wife. We were going back to New York City with a whole new life ahead of us.