Kerry In Vietnam II

by Alexander Cockburn

The incident that won U.S. Navy Lieutenant John Kerry his Silver Star, thus lofting him to the useful status of "war hero," occurred on Feb. 28, 1969. His Swift boat was fired on by a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Here's where accounts of the event diverge markedly, depending on the interests of the various narrators. The citation for Kerry's Silver Star describes the event this way: "With utter disregard for his own safety and the enemy rockets, he again ordered a charge on the enemy, beached his boat only 10 feet from the V.C. rocket position, and personally led a landing party ashore in pursuit of the enemy. Upon sweeping the area, an immediate search uncovered an enemy rest and supply area, which was destroyed."

This citation, issued by Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, was based on the incident report, written by John Kerry. Missing from the Zumwalt version was a dramatic confrontation described by Kerry 27 years later in 1996, in the heat of a nasty reelection fight against Republican William Weld, when Kerry was seeking a third Senate term. Kerry disclosed to Jonathan Carroll, writing for the New Yorker, that he had faced down a Viet Cong standing a few feet from him with a B-40 rocket launcher; "It was either going to be him or it was going to be us," Kerry told Carroll. "It was that simple. I don't know why it wasn't us -- I mean, to this day. He had a rocket pointed right at our boat. He stood up out of that hole, and none of us saw him until he was standing in front of us, aiming a rocket right at us, and, for whatever reason, he didn't pull the trigger -- he turned and ran."

Two of Kerry's crew members, Mike Medeiros and machine-gunner Tommy Belodeau, found no mystery in why the V.C. soldier didn't fire his B-40 RPG launcher. The Vietnamese was effectively unarmed. He hadn't reloaded the RPG after the first shot at Kerry's boat as it headed down the river.

Later that year of 1996, Belodeau described the full scope of the incident to the Boston Globe's David Warsh. Belodeau told Warsh that he opened with his M-60 machine gun on the Vietnamese man at a range of 10 feet after they'd beached the boat. The machine gun bullets caught the Vietnamese in the legs, and the wounded man crawled behind a nearby hooch. At this point, Belodeau said, Kerry had seized an M-16 rifle, jumped out of the boat, gone up to the man, who Belodeau says was near death, and finished him off.

When the Globe published Warsh's account of Belodeau's recollection, essentially accusing Kerry of a war crime, the Kerry campaign quickly led Madeiros to the press, and he described how the Vietnamese, felled by Belodeau's machine-gun fire, got up, grabbed the rocket launcher and ran off down a trail through the forest and a disappeared around a bend. As Kerry set off after him, Medeiros followed. They came round the corner to find the Vietnamese once again pointing the RPG at them 10 feet away. He didn't fire, and Kerry shot him dead with his rifle.

On March 13, 1969, Kerry earned the Bronze Star by pulling another lieutenant out of the water after the latter's Swift boat had hit a mine. That same mine's detonation caused enough wake to throw Kerry against a bulkhead, bruising his arm. This was classed as a wound, which meant the third Purple Heart. Then, amid rifle fire, Kerry maneuvered his boat toward Lieutenant Jim Rassman and hoisted him onto the deck.

Both boats had been on a mission ferrying Green Berets, U.S. Navy SEALs and Nung assassins to a village. They had mistakenly targeted a friendly village, where they opened fire on South Vietnamese troops who were interrogating a group of women and children lined up against a wall.

When the Green Berets and SEALs opened fire, the South Vietnamese soldiers jumped the wall, and at least 10 of the women and children were killed. Meanwhile, against orders, Kerry had again left his boat and attached himself to the Nung and was, by his own words, "shooting and blowing things up." One of the Nung threw a grenade into a hut, which turned out to be filled with sacks of rice. Kerry got grains of rice and some bits of metal debris embedded in his backside, the most severe wounds he sustained in Vietnam.

With three Purple Hearts, the Silver and Bronze Stars, Kerry now applied for reassignment as a personal aide to a senior officer in either Boston, New York or Washington, D.C. Soon he was running for Congress, in an initial bid that failed.

A former assistant secretary of defense and Fletcher School of Diplomacy professor, W. Scott Thompson, recalled a conversation with the late Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. that clearly had a slightly different take on Kerry's recollection of their discussions:

"(T)he fabled and distinguished chief of naval operations, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, told me ... 30 years ago when he was still CNO (chief naval officer in Vietnam) that during his own command of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam, just prior to his anointment as CNO, young Kerry had created great problems for him and the other top brass, by killing so many non-combatant civilians and going after other non-military targets. "We had virtually to straitjacket him to keep him under control," the admiral said. "Bud" Zumwalt got it right when he assessed Kerry as having large ambitions ... but promised that his career in Vietnam would haunt him if he were ever on the national stage."