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.
• • •
I THANK GOD Don, Judy and Tracy had that time to share in Hawaii—even though Tracy would only know about it from her mother. The promise of his life to come with his new family juxtaposed with his bloody, muddy death in a river in Vietnam has always been a heavy burden to bear for all who knew Don. Judy would later lead a march in Washington against the war—and, in a sign of the times, be criticized by other war widows for doing so. It was a bitter pill to swallow because Don had often written home about the significant shortcomings of Operation Sealords and his opposition to the war itself.
Twenty years later I had the pleasure of offering Tracy an internship in my Senate office, where I was touched to be able to help her get to know her dad. I was so happy I could do that. It was a way of keeping faith with Don. Tracy went on to produce a wonderful documentary called Be Good, Smile Pretty, the story of discovering her father. Today, she is a well-respected documentary filmmaker.
The letter from Skip triggered a combination of anger and purpose in me. Rage at the way Don died turned to rage about the reasons he died. Everything I had been writing reflected my belief that every man who had served on the riverboats on the Mekong Delta was as courageous as every man who had jumped out of a Higgins boat to take Omaha Beach at Normandy. But this was a different war from World War II.
Don’s death was the spark. I could also feel the anger and frustration of Skip and other friends. But they could not speak out. I could.
My months in-country, beginning with the first moments after I walked off the plane at Cam Ranh and observed the division of labor, steadily instilled in me a sense of the absurdity of our engagement. Like cement drying in the sun, my impressions had hardened into convictions. The guys I served with were amazing. I remain hugely respectful of their sacrifices for our country. They were courageous and innovative, the best our country summoned to service, but the war itself wasn’t right. There was no standard by which it constituted a justifiable use of brave young men’s lives.
Don’s death punctuated those feelings with urgency. It forced me to act. I moved from thinking I had time to write a book to feeling compelled to get out and tell the story of the war publicly. It was then I knew I had to become an activist to try to end the war. I felt a fundamental responsibility to do something. But what—and how?
My sister Peggy was a great connector. She embodied the sixties—and still does. She’s a “movement” person, actually more committed over a lifetime to the women’s movement than anyone I’ve known. In the fall of 1969, she was spending most of her time in the run-down offices of a grassroots organization dedicated to ending the war, the Vietnam Moratorium Committee at 150 Fifth Avenue in New York City. Peggy connected me with Adam Walinsky, one of the band of brothers who had been with his boss, Robert Kennedy, in Los Angeles when RFK was assassinated.
Walinsky was continuing to speak out for peace, as Kennedy had. A day of events—rallies, teach-ins, vigils—was planned for October. There were politicians on the playbill, including Gene McCarthy and New York’s Republican senator Charles Goodell, and Yale’s activist chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, whose eloquence against the war defined just how much the Old Campus had changed since I’d graduated in ’66. It was the young activists, though, who were most stirring, not just Walinsky, but my contemporaries, notably Sam Brown, David Mixner, Marge Sklenkar and John Gage, who showed remarkable leadership and helped change the course of history. They literally organized the country’s campuses against the war. All of them became great friends on the long journey ahead.
Walinsky needed a pilot to get him around New York to speak at as many of the events as possible, but this was the peace movement on a shoestring budget. The group could afford to charter a tiny plane, but it needed a pilot. Peggy knew exactly who to volunteer for the job. Those carefree days spent taking flying lessons at Tweed New Haven Airport during my senior year were about to lead me into an experience I never could have predicted. I took a vacation day and soon enough was flying Walinsky around New York—from the Hudson Valley to Albany and up to Buffalo and Syracuse—usually wherever there was a big campus population. We soared over the fall foliage, dipping into tiny airports in a single-engine plane, then driving to each event while Walinsky, his tie sporting the PT-109 tie clip given to him by RFK, scribbled notes on a dog-eared legal pad, updating the speech he was about to give. In between rallies, I enjoyed listening to Adam talk about the road he had traveled.
Together with Jeff Greenfield, Adam Walinsky had become one of the most important aides to RFK. A graduate of Yale Law School, he was one of a vanguard of young, thoughtful activists committed to changing the country. His passionate, forceful advocacy for justice and an end to the war in Vietnam earned him the nickname “Adamant Adam,” a moniker I would have been proud of in those turbulent times.
I didn’t speak at any of the events. I didn’t even contemplate it. I was there to observe. I was in my civilian clothes, enjoying the anonymity of standing off to the side of the crowd, just absorbing the scene. For the first time since I’d left Vietnam, I felt a sense of common purpose. The feeling of being part of a movement took me back to more innocent days on campus, hearing Allard Lowenstein speak on civil rights, challenging us to care about a cause beyond the comfortable confines of campus. But everything was so different in so many other ways. The Al Lowenstein I first met exhorting us to action on the Yale campus was now a young congressman fighting to end the war in which I’d fought. We’d gone from the excitement of the New Frontier to the political revolution of the McCarthy and Kennedy insurgencies, and yet somehow Richard Nixon had been elected president and seemingly brought at least some of the country back to the 1950s.
Now, the great enterprise of grassroots democracy was in the hands of people like Adam Walinsky, still in his thirties. The times had changed and, as always, the music reflected our mood. Peter, Paul and Mary had gone from the hopeful “If I Had a Hammer” during the civil rights marches when I was a sophomore, to the wistful “Leaving on a Jet Plane” in 1969, with an entirely different meaning for those of us who had boarded planes to the war in Southeast Asia. I looked out across the crowds: young faces, older faces, tears and chants—“End the war.” “Bring them home.” Occasionally an unmistakable whiff of marijuana would waft across the sea of humanity. There was palpable excitement in the air, a feeling that young people could change the world if we organized. It was refreshing to feel a surge of idealism after Vietnam had ripped apart so many of my assumptions and hopes. In a transition that felt a little strange, the next day I put on my uniform and went back to work.
I also continued to write. The idea came to me to turn all my scribbles into an open letter to America, an attempt to lay out the truth I had witnessed in Vietnam and the lies people were being fed at home. Peggy introduced me to the incomparable Pete Hamill, the columnist for the New York Post. We met at the Lion’s Head, Pete’s hangout in the Village. He read my “manuscript” and told me he thought I was onto something, that my personal recollections, details from my journal written when I was in-country and factual input could be an important addition to the debate. But he also had a gentle way of telling me that no book or article, however passionate, was going to make the difference I hoped for. Few writers had that kind of impact. I loved the meeting. Pete was direct and tough. He had no patience for the war and even less for the politicians who seemed at a total loss for what to do with Nixon at the nation’s helm, keeping his secret plan for peace a secret.
One weekend when I was home in Massachusetts, my father invited me to talk to the Groton Rotary, where he was a member. I think he and the audience were a little surprised by the critique that I delivered, just speaking from my gut and from my own analysis, at once the son of Foreign Service Officer Richard Kerry as well as a fully formed twenty-six-year-old whose views of the war had been shaped not in Foggy Bottom but on the Cà Mau Peninsula. It felt right, that I should speak out and that someone should hear it.
My brother, Cam, in 1968 had worked as an organizer for an anti-war candidate who had run against Massachusetts congressman Philip Philbin, a war hawk, twenty-eight-year veteran, and powerful member of the Armed Services Committee. Cam wrote me a letter suggesting I might do the same in 1970. Long shot as it would be, the fight itself could be important. It would be a way of telling the story of Vietnam. If everything broke our way, I’d be there in 1971 with Congressman Lowenstein on the floor of the House, working to end the war. On the other hand, if it landed with a thud, I would have at least spoken out. What’s the worst that they could do to me? Send me back to Vietnam?
There was, of course, one hurdle to running for Congress, and it was formidable. I was still very much in the Navy. I approached Admiral Schlech and asked him if he would support my request for an early release from the Navy so I could return home and start running. He could not have been more supportive. A wonderful “old salt,” a submarine skipper from World War II, he bent over backward to facilitate my departure. I was lucky to have such a boss. He put in the papers right away. I still had obligations to fulfill in the Navy, which I did, even as my mustering-out date crept up fast. I began to look ahead to a wild but exhilarating adventure in Massachusetts.
Just deciding to run without having engaged in many of the normal base-building activities of politics was a little crazy, but I was convinced that I could make the case about the war and, more important, that I had an obligation to do so. Although I enlisted filled with a sense of duty and service, I was now outraged at the deception and immorality of much of the war. I felt I had lived so much change so quickly. When I had signed up it was 1965. I was a son of World War II, and like so many others of my generation, I had been taught bedrock values of service and sacrifice. However, 1968 and 1969 had a profound transformational impact on me: they changed me as they changed my generation and the country. Few were immune to those years.
I had lost too many good friends—from high school, Peter Wyeth Johnson, who loved to read and write poetry and developed a beautiful calligraphy script with which he wrote superb essays at St. Paul’s; Steve Kelsey, the son of Army parents stationed in Paris who traveled with me on motorbikes through the Loire Valley of France, where we learned more than we could ever find useful about the beautiful châteaus of the region; Dick Pershing, friend from prep school and college; John White, my debate team partner, who shared hours with me plotting arguments against Princeton and Harvard; Bob Crosby, my classmate from Swift training in Coronado and fellow Massachusetts citizen; and Don Droz—all of whom were heroes to me. But the rationale for the war, the flawed execution of an unsound strategy, the failures of leadership, both political and military, and the stubborn, myopic impulse that dug us deeper and deeper—none of it ever lived up to the example of their sacrifice.
I was always struck by the fact that Robert McNamara, one of the principal architects of the war, never matched the courage of the men who put their lives on the line. McNamara was smart enough to come to understand the war was wrong, but he, like many others, left the battlefield to slink off to the World Bank, where he remained silent as thousands continued to sacrifice and die, even as his own son protested the war. Why hadn’t he spoken up when it could have mattered? There was in this realization a bitter taste, a leaving behind of the near-mythological awe with which the “best and the brightest” had been welcomed to Washington to set the nation on its new course in the New Frontier. It was jarring that Bill Bundy, the uncle of my roommate and the man I had sat with and been impressed by as a senior at Yale, had been so wrong about a country and a war that cost so many lives and set us on such a disastrous course.
I began to reach out and introduce myself to activists in my congressional district. For Julia, this was about as full immersion as one gets: from the freedom of Italy to the rigors of a campaign in Massachusetts. Here she was, not yet married, being plunged into my passion for ending the war. She took it on heart and soul, knowing how much it mattered with her older brother Lanny serving in the Marines near the demilitarized zone along the border of North Vietnam. We had decided to wait to get married until Lanny returned from Vietnam. By any measure, Julia was remarkably accepting of a completely alien experience.
On January 1, 1970, I received my honorable discharge and was released from active duty as a full lieutenant in the U.S. Naval Reserve. I had just learned that Father Bob Drinan, the dean of Boston College Law School, was being urged by several anti-war Democrats to get into the race for the same congressional seat. Before I knew it, I was in a pitched organizational battle against some formidable veterans of Massachusetts politics. Jerry Grossman, who was supporting Father Drinan, was an activist’s activist. Deeply involved in the Council for a Livable World, he was a force in liberal politics. He had enormous resources of money and influence, but we had youth, the passion of the war and a blind ignorance of the downsides, the last of which always helps. We had about six weeks to enlist any Democrat from the district willing to attend Concord-Carlisle High School on a Saturday in February to participate in a party caucus. We had to get the word out—an open invitation to all activists—it was a gigantic organizational task. The energy was electric. It was fun and ridiculously, but excitingly, quixotic.
I jumped right in, attending Democratic committee meetings whenever and wherever I could. When we could find even a few Democrats gathered together, we tried to persuade them to help us end the war in Vietnam. We assembled a small group of friends who loyally jumped in feetfirst. It was liberating. The fact that I was targeting a guy who supported the war with every old cliché and factless slogan was invigorating. I felt finally that I was doing something to bring the war closer to its end. My argument was straightforward. Freshly back from Vietnam, with war experience under my belt, I argued that I had a better chance than any other candidate of holding Philbin accountable. I was self-confident enough to think that when Philbin said, “Support the troops,” I could look right back at him and say, “Congressman, we are the troops.” I wondered whether Father Drinan, incredibly articulate and qualified as he was, would have a harder time as a priest convincing hard-core folks in parts of the district that he should be in Congress. On many issues, there was no difference between us, but we went at it in a pitched battle of Massachusetts activists all aiming to end the war.
The question many asked was: Who was this upstart who just parachuted in to upset the regular order? For others, there was an excitement over having someone who had been to Vietnam and checked off several normal boxes of politics to challenge a long-term, recalcitrant incumbent.
On February 22, 1970, I made my first speech to an election audience. It was freezing outside, but the auditorium was sweat warm, every seat jammed with the most ardent end-the-war activists Massachusetts could find. It was citizens’ activism at its best and most exciting. I had worked hard on my speech, sitting on the floor of our temporary apartment with my brother, David Thorne, George Butler and Chester “Chet” Atkins, who would later become a congressman. We read it through, edited and read it through again, and now it was time to deliver.
Father Drinan had given his speech. Near the end of his comments, he had visibly paused, taken a deep drink from a glass of water on the podium and then finished up. When I took the podium, you could feel the tension. Who was this young intruder who was taking on the powerful core of the district’s liberal base? For many of the attendees, it was their first introduction to me. I looked out at the tense room of activists, reached for the glass, drank and said, “See, it can’t be that bad. We’re all drinking out of the same glass.”
The laughter and applause that followed broke the ice. The audience listened. I delivered my vision of the choices before the country and how we could win in November. At the end, whether they were with Drinan or me, people were on their feet. The vote was going to be close. It was not going to be the favorite crushing the upstart. There was, notwithstanding the liberal machine’s turnout of people brought to vote for Drinan, great curiosity about the two very different candidates.
The caucus broke into sub-caucuses so candidates could be questioned. Then there was a first-ballot vote that winnowed the field, followed by another, which was split nearly evenly, with a slight edge to Drinan. The question was, What now? Did this caucus mean anything? Was it just the springboard for a Kerry candidacy, or would it unite the progressive, anti-war wing and go after Philbin? The outcome depended on my decision. I could argue that the caucus was an arbitrary, completely ad hoc, tiny representation of the party and the people deserved a choice. I could take my case to the people in a primary and risk reelecting the war hawk, or I could throw my support to Bob Drinan and help defeat Congressman Philbin.
My small team and I retired to a room while those at the caucus waited. I didn’t agonize over the decision. Drinan had won more votes than I had. I wasn’t running just to go to Congress. I was running to end the war and change the politics of the Congress and country. Since we would all be running in the primary, winning there was tantamount to election. It was better for this nascent, anti-war citizens’ effort to come out united rather than split the vote so that Philbin would win again. Certainly there was the option of calling the hand of Drinan (and Grossman) by stubbornly staying in and forcing him to think about whether I ultimately had the better chance. That path seemed completely antithetical to what we were trying to achieve. It flew in the face of the moment and made the whole thing about me and not about the war. The moment needed resolution and it called for the power of unity—for a message that this citizens’ effort had succeeded and this new grassroots energy was to be reckoned with. So I withdrew, throwing my support to Bob Drinan. The grassroots group had produced unity. The concept of the citizens’ caucus was vindicated. Everyone could leave Concord-Carlisle High School with a genuine sense of excitement for the campaign ahead.
I became part of the leadership of the campaign. I helped to win the race that saw the first Catholic priest ever elected to the U.S. Congress. Most important, some of the best friends I’ve made throughout my career came from that campaign, which shaped Massachusetts politics for years to come. Bob Drinan became an important voice in Congress, serving on the Judiciary Committee and helping to craft the impeachment of President Nixon. He and I became friends. I will always look back on that election as a victory of aspiration over ambition.
I did face a practical reality, however. I had mustered out of the Navy early in order to run. Six weeks later I had ceded that option to someone else, so what was I going to do next? I was already an ardent environmentalist. My childhood nature walks in the woods of Massachusetts with my mother had always stuck with me—her somewhat hokey but earnest exhortation to stand silently among the trees, close your eyes and “just listen.” My mother could identify birds by their call.
Later, Rachel Carson awakened all of us with her book Silent Spring. Friends were already busy organizing the first Earth Day in Massachusetts, so I did some events with them, trying to build on the awareness that came through the caucus, including speaking at the Earth Day events in Massachusetts. Again, there was a feeling of belonging, of possibilities. Twenty million Americans rocked the nation that first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Merely by coming out and making a powerful statement of personal concern about the environment, they gave birth to a political movement that turned the environment into a voting issue. They forced Nixon to take note of a powerful new constituency; he even signed the Environmental Protection Agency into law. Before then, it had been okay to vote against the environment. What had been deemed acceptable was now taboo. It was a sea change, a lasting lesson for me of what can happen when important issues become voting issues. Accountability works, but individual citizens must make it work. Only those who decide to work their asses off end up holding public officials accountable.
May 23, 1970, Julia and I were married at her family’s Long Island home looking out on Great South Bay. The ceremony was both traditional and modern; for her dress, Julia chose a family heirloom passed down from generation to generation for close to two hundred years, but in a nod to the times, we chose “witnesses” from among our closest friends and family, not traditional attendants. Before we were whisked away by helicopter for our wedding night in the city, my college friends threw me into the pond. When we arrived back at our apartment, I discovered my new father-in-law had sent us some surprise guests: large brown fish were swimming in our bathtub. Julia wasn’t quite as amused by her father’s idea of a practical joke. The next day we set off for Jamaica, a honeymoon trip with David Thorne and his wife, Rose, and our friends George Butler and his wife. It was an innocent, quirky time.
I’d come up short in my long-shot race for the House, but I was hooked by grassroots politics. Out of uniform, my hair was growing a little longer. A whole generation was transformed. David Thorne and I had gone from short-haired freshmen at Yale to Beatles impressionists. Just out of uniform, we now appeared as shaggy-haired, gangly twenty-six-year-olds, feeling we’d weathered a lot of living in just over a quarter century. But we weren’t alone. Since David and I had met as college freshmen, Bob Dylan had gone electric. The Beach Boys and the Beatles had traveled an electric journey of their own. The Beatles moved fast from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to “Revolution.” Their journeys were helped along by marijuana, acid and Eastern influences; ours by a war and a whole lot of disillusionment, but everything was converging in 1970.
Amid the chaos and constant flurry of life at that moment, I still had to pick my next battle. Only a few months out of the Navy and hearing regularly from my friends still in Vietnam as well as those who’d returned, everything kept coming back to the war, the war, the war. The effort to persuade people during the lead-up to the caucus had underscored the power of our personal testimony about Vietnam. Most Americans didn’t know the reality. They had heard Walter Cronkite turn against the war, but they hadn’t heard from veterans themselves.
Early opposition to the war had seemed relegated to the fringes. The early demonstrations seemed out of sync, the war itself completely distant. However, with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which ultimately led to Lyndon Johnson’s call for five hundred thousand troops in Vietnam, the scope and depth of the protests began to grow. In 1967 the first March on the Pentagon jolted the country. Draft-card burnings became more frequent. America took notice of blood being dumped on the steps of the Pentagon. The shock value of creative, radical protest increased the polarization of the country. Families were torn apart over the war. Life decisions about marriage, possibly going to jail, leaving the country, all reached the heartland. The war shattered a traditional passing of responsibility from one generation to another. It began to change the nation and, for many, made it unrecognizable. Language, music, dance, dress, people at all levels of society—the entire culture of America—were in turmoil, dragged, sometimes willingly and sometimes kicking and screaming, through turbulent upheaval.
I could relate to upheaval because I’d lived it. My decision to go into the Navy shortly after President Johnson’s call for more troops now felt as though it had taken place in another world and time. But by 1970 the change was sweeping and profound. There was no center, and if there was, it clearly couldn’t hold.
There was an infectious certainty in the air that we were onto something transformative. We believed we were defining a new world and thinking bigger than we even had at the dawn of the Kennedy administration. Indeed, it was a different Kennedy—Bobby—whose challenge to Lyndon Johnson seemed revolutionary, even in the bold title of his campaign book, To Seek a Newer World. It was a fitting phrase for our mission now.
I needed to join this parade of activism. Because of my visible anti-war stand at the caucus, I began to be asked to speak at various events, particularly those involving veterans. I noticed an advertisement in Life magazine for Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). The ad featured an image of a rifle with a fixed bayonet on it, planted in the ground with a helmet hanging on top. It was a powerfully evocative symbol. It meant there were a lot of other guys out there who felt as I did. It may have been Peggy who suggested I check out VVAW at the group’s Labor Day events, including a march to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where George Washington and his troops had spent a famous winter after a string of setbacks.
Looking at the flyers for the event, I thought immediately of the powerful link between the Vietnam veterans marching in 1970 and the original revolutionary patriots whose endurance was essential to the survival of a democratic experiment in its infancy. Both the men in uniform in 1777–1778 and those in 1970 who’d served or were serving still were all trying to put their country on course.
I signed up as a speaker. I was not particularly enthusiastic to join other parts of what was a weekend-long, eighty-six-mile demonstration of sorts. Operation Rapid American Withdrawal, or RAW, as it was called, included guerrilla theater to convey the brutality of war. I thought that would just scare people off. Part of me flashed back to the reaction of passengers on that flight home to New York. It made me think about the need to know our audience and to communicate who we were, not who they might fear we were. At the same time, I realized, even then, that if I was going to have any say about what this group did, I had to be willing to sign up and help organize. In many ways, the culture of the VVAW was still a military one: I would have to prove myself to those men already on the front lines of the anti-war movement, the same way I did when I inherited my crews on Swift boats who had been fighting long before I showed up. The vets felt abused by the politicians who had sent them off to this war. Some were in terrible shape, physically and emotionally. Many carried a story they were burning to tell, a story that could spill out in tears and cries of pain, but also with remarkable eloquence. Many had never known the welcome home I had received, the tenderness of a family and a fiancée who perhaps didn’t understand everything we all went through but embraced us—especially me—with open arms. For many veterans and even their families, protest was therapy and catharsis.
While, on reflection, I almost certainly did return with some PTSD, I was lucky to get immersed immediately in efforts to help other veterans. I think that helped me as I saw so many guys seriously messed up. Perhaps I was also conditioned—a product of a buttoned-up education and family where I was taught as a kid to keep a “stiff upper lip.” But I had to tell my story. So I spoke at Valley Forge, expressed the anger I felt for the incompetence and stubborn myopia that I had witnessed, expressed the outrage of all veterans against the war who heard politicians tell us it wasn’t patriotic to oppose it, when in fact better men than they had spent a winter at Valley Forge to win for all Americans exactly that right.
And we had earned the right to speak our mind and to set our country back on course. It was liberating. Valley Forge reinforced in me just how important it was for our voices to be heard. I couldn’t yet speak about Don Droz or Persh or my other friends who were in graves, gone far too soon for a war gone wrong. I just couldn’t speak their names. It was still too raw, but I found purpose in saying to anyone there who was listening that it was immoral to send thousands upon thousands of men to die for a mistake.
I started to throw myself more into the life of a full-time activist. The invitations to speak at local gatherings piled up. As I spoke publicly about the war, I became more effective at articulating the combination of anger and facts that wove a compelling argument. I had to tread carefully. There was the war itself, about which we were unanimous, and then there were other issues—injustice, rank discrimination against African Americans and Hispanics, the inequities of the draft among them—that were intertwined with the war but on which there was no unanimity. We all felt a level of alienation from our government. That was ironic for me. Eight years earlier I’d sailed with a president of the United States, and now I was dedicating my time to protesting a policy that had been escalated by his own vice president and that was being expanded even further by a new president, the man he’d defeated in 1960.
We veterans were particularly turned off by the bromides of politicians who talked about supporting the troops but forgot us by the time we came home. I heard story after story about VA hospitals in New York and elsewhere where the care was an insult—unsanitary conditions, suicides, a parade of horrors. I was lucky. You always tell yourself, “There but for the grace of God go I,” but there were guys in VVAW in wheelchairs, their spines severed by bullets; guys missing eyes and limbs; men looking troubled and vacant, with wounds that weren’t so visible. All too often we found that if it wasn’t you yourself, you had a friend who couldn’t adjust to being home. There was a lot of self-medication. In all this agony of transitioning out of war and into civilian life, few of us felt as if the government was on our side. Many vets could no longer relate to their father’s generation at the Veterans of Foreign Wars or the American Legion. Thus, without a singular moment of decision, without debate, we coalesced into a new fighting force determined to do battle for the veterans—for our own agenda, not just against the war.
We connected with a leading, innovative therapist, Dr. Robert Lifton at Yale University, and together we helped veterans build their own support groups, pioneering “rap sessions,” where vets could share their painful stories with other vets. It was part of the healing process, and it was part of the process that probably previous generations—the “stiff upper lip” generation—couldn’t relate to, but it was saving lives. We started raising money for this kind of therapy. We even worked to raise money to support a rehabilitation farm for veterans who were really struggling, horribly haunted by the experience of combat. There were times when I wasn’t certain of the approach, but I came to understand we all heal in different ways. My healing required activism. What was critical to me was, as it has always been, the act of just getting up in the morning and pressing forward, but different people are motivated differently. And, in fairness, different branches of the service saw different wars. It is in many ways remarkable that as many veterans from different units, in different parts of Vietnam, carrying out different missions, all saw the war as similarly as they did.
And no matter how one saw the war, I thought it was essential we give a damn about each other, because the government wasn’t living up to fundamental promises. We were losing vets at home—to alcohol, narcotics, depression, PTSD, unemployment, inadequate benefits and, perhaps mostly, a complete indifference across the nation—if not hostility—to our service. In the end, we lost more returning vets to these curses than there are names on the Wall of those lost in Vietnam. Rather than addressing these concerns, our “leaders” were playing to the divisions, to the lowest common denominator of politics. Right out front was Vice President Spiro Agnew blasting away, trying to define who was American and who wasn’t. The administration’s rhetoric became more and more frantic, more divisive. We knew there were many ways to be patriotic. Telling the truth was prime among them. In the end, Agnew neither told the truth nor lived up to his own rhetoric. He resigned as a confirmed crook, having betrayed his office and his nation.
Almost to a member, VVAW consisted of men who hated the war but still loved their country.
I was invited to attend the next big VVAW gathering, Operation Winter Soldier, set for January 1971 in Detroit, Michigan. I was told the Midwest had been chosen as the venue in order to try to reach people—voters—in the heartland, perhaps a chance for veterans to give their “testimony” about the war they’d seen and to appeal to those who might be receptive to their message. I went as a kind of observer. All attendees were instructed to bring their discharge papers—DD-214s—as proof of their service. What I heard and saw in Detroit was disturbing, raw and human. Grown men breaking down in anguish, describing terrible, terrible things that they’d seen and done, actions they said had robbed them of their youth and their innocence. It was painful to listen. It wasn’t what we’d seen on the Swift boats, though we had our share of haunting memories and sorrow—for example, machine-gun fire aimed into an oncoming Vietnamese fishing junk that had failed to heed our command to stop, only to discover that a woman or a child was caught in the cross fire. Free-fire zones, harassment and interdiction, burning thatched huts and villages in VC areas despite knowing that the VC would rebuild and indoctrinate an angrier population—that was the war many of us resented. That’s certainly the war I brought home and could speak to. But these men in Detroit were speaking to something different and even more horrifying: throwing one prisoner out of an airplane in the hope of making his terrified comrade confess, a necklace of VC ears worn around the neck like a trophy. Much was written about the My Lai Massacre and the Phoenix Program and other places where the war went wrong. These weren’t examples of what the average veteran experienced, but they weren’t complete outliers either. We all knew horrible things had happened. My heart hurt for these broken young vets, many of whom had gone abroad for the first time to a country they didn’t understand to kill an enemy they didn’t know for a cause that seemed dubious or out of reach. So many were fresh out of high school, off a farm or out of a small town in the Midwest or South.
Some have speculated as to whether everyone there was telling the truth. I don’t know. PTSD, nightmares, catatonia—I can’t tell you if everyone there was sharing his own experience or some amalgamation of what he had experienced, heard or seen. We wondered even at the time whether there were Nixon plants and moles inside the group to discredit and disrupt the meeting, something Nixon advisor Chuck Colson would one day confess to me was true.
I thought the depths of pain released during those three days, coupled with the continuity between testimonies, all documented by each person’s official papers certifying his service in Vietnam and corroborated in many cases by others from the same units, all combined to provide a remarkable validation of what they were saying. As with any testimony in any situation of proving something, witnesses are judged in the totality of their presentation. Anyone legitimately there to listen and learn could not see young men bare their souls so painfully, with such obvious grief and guilt, without being profoundly concerned about what they were saying.
Veterans would break down, leave the room to smoke or come back drunk or high. None of it appeared contrived. But I did wonder whether there was any possibility the country could “hear” and “digest” the rawness of what the veterans were saying.
Activism is about one thing and one thing only—a goal. The stated goal was to persuade Americans about the war. I couldn’t see how this would really help end the war. The media response confirmed my reaction. There was close to total silence. It angered me that such obviously searing testimony couldn’t be processed. I think the media just didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t believe everything I heard, but there was more than enough corroboration, more than enough linkage to incidents we had heard about and more than enough veracity in the presentations for the veterans to be taken seriously. These veterans deserved to be heard. But most of the media apparently thought otherwise. Someone from the press shared with my friend that for reporters to come, “you need more amputees.” Appalling. When veterans couldn’t be heard because of what they looked like, something was wrong.
I proposed to VVAW that we try something new. It was a risk, in part because it ran against the instinct of many who genuinely and justifiably felt alienated from Washington and had given up on the government. But I argued we should take the fight directly to Washington and make Congress hear us, go door-to-door in the Senate and House, demand meetings, march on D.C. the way the Bonus Army had once marched. After some debate, everyone agreed to give it a shot. VVAW being VVAW, it was given a name—Operation Dewey Canyon—after the last major Marine offensive mission in Vietnam. It was planned for the third week of April 1971.
We had to rush like hell to pull the damn thing together. The organization was unalterably democratic—except when it wasn’t. Everything seemed to be put to a vote—except when it wasn’t. I learned quickly that we were in a financial hole and was slightly irritated to find out that something like $100,000 had been blown on a series of print ads without appropriate authorization. So it was a mad scramble to raise the money to bring the veterans to Washington, to “bivouac” on the Mall.
A dignified march into Washington through Virginia, past Arlington National Cemetery, joined by Gold-Star wives like Judy Droz was agreed to with unanimity. Some fights weren’t winnable: the guerrilla theater and the painted “ghost faces” of some activists, which I thought scared folks, were going to be a part of the days in Washington whether I liked it or not. A demonstration to reach the hearts and minds of the country by “returning” our decorations from Vietnam was a particularly fraught debate. I agreed with the idea of “returning” our decorations. I thought it captured our anguish. But what bothered me was I couldn’t look at a Silver Star, a Purple Heart—whatever decoration—without thinking of Persh, or Don Droz, or families of other deceased for whom the medal they had was their final connection to their loved one. It was all that was left of some people. Return it, yes, I thought, but return it the way the military returns a flag to a war widow: with dignity, with solemnity. I proposed having a table covered by a white tablecloth, with each veteran approaching solemnly to lay his medals down, and then we could collect them to be officially delivered to the Pentagon. I was outvoted. Instead, the other vets wanted to leave them on the steps of the Capitol.
I was aware always that I was one of thousands, speaking and acting not just as an individual with individual opinions, but for a group. We pressed on. The whole enterprise almost crumbled when I was informed that we still didn’t have the money to pay for buses. Unless we found $75,000 quickly, the buses wouldn’t roll. I had to make a last-minute trip to New York to see if we could find this emergency infusion. We had no credit, but thanks to good friends and strong opponents of the war, Adam Walinsky, Seagrams CEO Edgar Bronfman Sr. and Jerry Grossman all helped us raise the money to pull it off.
Once we arrived in Washington, it sometimes seemed as though everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The National Park Service refused to issue us permits to camp on the Mall. The sense of indignity was profound and made a lot of the veterans angry. President Nixon’s Department of Justice actually sought an injunction to prevent us from camping. The court ruled we could stay, but not remain overnight. We counted down anxiously as the sky darkened and night crept in. At midnight, an alarm clock went off loudly, to cheers. We stood our ground, pitched tents and laid out sleeping bags. We gave the police a choice: arrest us or let us be. The police never moved in.
As we met during the day with members of Congress, we told them of our precarious situation on the Mall. To this day, I remember how some pulled closer to us while others backed away. Some no doubt worried about being associated with so-called shaggy-haired rabble-rousers, while others bought into rumors of drugs or worse being used in our encampment. Still others thought that the occupation of the National Mall could turn violent. There are many ways to measure character. Even as the police threatened to arrest us, I saw Senator Ted Kennedy come down to the Mall. I was impressed. He spent an hour among the veterans, listening, learning and cheering us on. His commitment to the cause was bigger than politics. I was at a VVAW fund-raiser at Senator Phil Hart’s house in Georgetown one night—keeping the lights on and paying our bills was never far from our minds—when, unbeknownst to me, someone from Foreign Relations Committee chairman William Fulbright’s staff heard me speak. Fulbright was courageous, an opponent of the war even though his home state of Arkansas was conservative. Not soon after, I was asked to take a phone call: Would I be willing to come to the committee to testify the next day?
My answer was yes. Now I just had to encapsulate in brief testimony not just everything I felt, but everything the men of VVAW felt. I holed up in the temporary VVAW office in northwest Washington, pulled out my sheaf of papers from the last year and a half, from the “Letter to America” I’d shared with Pete Hamill to my notes from speeches, and I started writing. The sun was coming up over Washington when I finished. I showered, shaved, went to the encampment to check signals and touch base and then headed toward the Dirksen Senate Office Building. I was locked and loaded when I passed the Supreme Court and saw a few VVAW vets in an argument with the police. It looked as if they were being arrested. It was the one occurrence we’d managed to avoid thus far. I walked up to them and tried to calm the situation. The police were nice guys. They had a job to do, but the last thing they wanted to do was handcuff a bunch of young veterans who could have been their kids. In the end, we worked it out, but now I was late.
To my right was a cub reporter for the Boston Globe, Tom Oliphant, a kid about my age straight out of Harvard. “Let’s run,” I said to him. I entered the hearing room breathless and sweating. It was packed. Senators stood behind the dais talking. Apparently, they were waiting for me, as, unbeknown to me, I was the only witness. I apologized for being a few minutes late and sat down at the witness table. I’d had no idea what I was walking into. Adrenaline took over. I spread my notes out in front of me and described why we were there and what we hoped to accomplish.
At the end, I summarized, at one point posing a question:
How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
We are also here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We are here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatric and so many others. Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they never leave even their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They have left the real stuff of their reputation bleaching behind them in the sun in this country.
Finally, this administration has done us the ultimate dishonor. They have attempted to disown us and the sacrifice we made for this country. In their blindness and fear they have tried to deny that we are veterans or that we served in ’Nam. We do not need their testimony. Our own scars and stumps of limbs are witnesses enough for others and for ourselves. We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us.
But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbarous war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more and so when, in thirty years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say “Vietnam” and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.