The war-torn soul of John Kerry

From biographer Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, we get this powerful portrait of young John Kerry's anguish, quoting a lengthy letter he wrote to his sweetheart (pp. 82-83; boldface mine):

Judy Darling,

There are so many ways this letter could become a bitter diatribe and go rumbling off into irrational nothings.... I feel so bitter and angry and everywhere around me there is nothing but violence and war and gross insensitivity.  I am really very frightened to be honest because when the news [of the combat death of his college friend, Dick Pershing] sunk in I had no alternatives but  to carry on in the face of trivia that forced me to build a horrible protective screen around myself....

The world I'm a part of out there is so very different from anything you, I, or our close friends can imagine.  It's fitted with primitive survial, with destruction of an endless dying seemingly pointless nature and forces one to grow up in a fast — no holds barred fashion.  In the small time I have been gone, does it seem strange to say that I feel as though I have seen several years experience go by....  No matter [where] one is — no matter what job — you do not and cannot forget that you are at war and that the enemy is ever present — that anyone could at some time for the same stupid irrational something that stole Persh be gone tomorrow.

You can practically hear the mortar rounds shriek overhead Kerry's foxhole, can't you?  Everything around him "is nothing but violence and war" — "endless dying," the enemy "ever present."

Except that this letter was written in Febuary 1968, while Kerry was an ensign aboard the missile cruiser U.S.S. Gridley as it plied the dangerous waters of war-torn Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.  The Gridley was still almost 6000 miles and many weeks away from the waters offshore of Vietnam.  Certainly Kerry already knew that once there, he would remain aboard that large ship, on which his own risk of death or injury through combat would be essentially nill.  (During its entire service, the Gridley had only one combat fatality, Petty Officer William J. Duggan, who was killed while aboard a helicopter flying a search and rescue mission in 1967.  Kerry flew no such missions.)

I have no doubt that young Kerry felt genuine grief at the report of his college friend's combat death — certainly everyone who knew and loved Dick Pershing felt that.  Sadly, there were many deaths to mourn.  Nor do I mock or denigrate the notion that serving aboard the Gridley was important and patriotic.  [Update: And as a veteran of the Gridley aptly pointed out in my comments below, there were very real noncombat dangers in that service, as in much of military life even during peacetime.] 

But what's striking — and yes, what I frankly do mock — is the incredible self-aggrandizement and exaggeration of this letter.  Brinkley reports this with a straight face and, seemingly, a completely tin ear.

On to Kerry's shore patrol duties when the Gridley was at Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines.  This came after a brief patrol in which, as Brinkley reports, "[every] day that the Gridley patrolled the Gulf of Tonkin an enemy attack was remotely possible."  (That would be from the North Vietnamese Navy's combined battleships-and-aircraft-carriers task force, one presumes.)  At Subic, Kerry had Shore Patrol duty.  But even in that duty, Kerry and his biographer must find the seeds of Candidate Kerry's future greatness and nobility (page 88):

Kerry was both amused and surprised by the squalid life of this liberty city.  His "beat" was the bars and brothels part of town.... On [one] occasion he came upon a woman passed out on the floor of a bar, a sailor standing above her muttering, "Please don't let her die," over and over.  Kerry felt for her pulse and tried to bring her back to consciousness.  He succeeded.

Well, damn!  He woke up a drunk bar girl, isn't that worth another Bronze Star at least?

Later Brinkley writes breathlessly of the Gridley's return to Vietnamese waters, where Kerry came "only forty miles away" from "North Vietnam's treacherous Haiphong."  Now, again, I'm not suggesting this was trivial duty or that the Gridley should have turned off its radar and sonar and sent all its crew to bed drunk around 11pm.  But of this duty, we find Kerry writing to his parents (page 94-95):

The Viet Cong have tremendously increased their counter batteries along the coast and there is not a ship on the shore bombardment that does not encounter opposition.  Most of the shore effort is down south — in the I Corps area where Persh was killed.

I guess that must've been pretty much exactly like The Guns of Navarrone, wasn't it?

A couple of Brinkley's short passages about Kerry's service aboard the Gridley do resonate, so to speak — if not in ways Brinkley may have intended.  From page 84, describing the Gridley's voyage from Long Beach to Honolulu:

Every few days while at sea he would write an 800-word vignette about World War II battles that he would then read over the intercom in his best Edward R. Murrow stentorian tones.

And from page 86:

One time [Ensign Kerry] was directing helicopters during an exercise from the Combat Information Center.  [Robert E.] Jack, who was the watch officer that day, said, "Captain Harper (who had been listening to the radio chatter on the bridge) burst into CIC and asked me who was that person talking to the helos with the great voice.  So, I guess the skipper did at least give John a compliment on one occasion."

Too bad Kerry didn't have a chance to tell his shipmates about "Jeng-jhis" Khan, but I think we can all be sure that both his vignettes about naval history and his instructions to the helo pilots must have been "seared — seared" into their memories nonetheless.

Kerry's service aboard the Gridley has drawn almost no attention in the current SwiftVets controversy, and he's rarely mentioned it during his campaign — even though he spent three times as long assigned to that ship as he did in the Swiftees.  It's well worth your time to read the reactions to the chapter from ToD about his Gridley time from those who served with him then on the Gridley's website.  You'll find comments there detailing more of Kerry's consistent self-aggrandizement and exaggeration as reported by Brinkley in ToD — Kerry claiming responsibility for "motivating 400 swabbies," when his actual responsibilities were for 30, for instance.  The Gridley's website home page has a very understandable reaction: 

When questioned about [the relative lack of reporting in his biographical materials about Kerry's greater time aboard the Gridley], Kerry told Douglas Brinkley that "nothing much of note happened during his tour aboard the vessel."  So much for us!

I say again:  I do not mock or belittle Kerry's service aboard the Gridley.  It's something he should be very proud of — even if it wasn't the stuff of which Hollywood movies are made.  There are a whole lot more vets (and friends and family of vets) whose military service has resembled Kerry's aboard the Gridley, and can you not imagine how positively they'd have reacted if, instead of ignoring his time there, Kerry had made that service at least some small part of the balloons-lights-and-magic routine at the Democratic National Convention?

Instead, the only way he's used his Gridley service in his campaign has been as a basis for claiming that he served "two tours in Vietnam."  If anyone's mocking and belittling the Gridley, it's John Forbes Kerry.