For Kerry, Bonds Forged With Wartime Crews Hold Strong

February 24, 2004

By JOHN KIFNER

Four thin-hulled swift boats came down the Bay Hap River at the end of another bloody operation. Their mission was to transport American commandos, ethnic Chinese Nung mercenaries and the reluctant South Vietnamese forces known as Ruff Puffs on raids in the Vietcong-controlled Mekong Delta.

Suddenly a mine went off under the lead boat, recalled Del Sandusky, who was a quartermaster first class on another of the boats.

"The boat just flew up in the air," Mr. Sandusky said in a recent telephone interview. "The gunner's mate was tossed off still holding his guns. A firefight started. There were bullets, rockets flying through the air, mortars."

Michael Medeiros, manning the .50-caliber machine gun on the fantail of the same boat, shouted, "Man overboard!"

A Green Beret lieutenant, Jim Rassman, was in the river, ducking underwater as bullets from both shores slapped the river.

"We turned around with the engines screaming against each other - one full astern, the other full forward - and then charged the several hundred yards back into the ambush," Mr. Sandusky's Navy skipper, Lt. j.g. John Kerry, wrote in his war diary. "Everyone on board must have been firing to keep the sniper heads down."

Another explosion had injured Mr. Kerry's right arm. But he ran forward to the bow, reached over with his good arm and pulled Lieutenant Rassman - weighted down with wet clothes, equipment and heavy boots - to safety.

"It was a brave thing to do," Mr. Sandusky said. "We had been in firefights with John before. We already knew he has unfailing instincts. We owe him our lives, and he owes us his. We were a boat crew. We were tight."

There was a strikingly strong bond between Lieutenant Kerry, who has often been portrayed as aristocratic and aloof, and the enlisted sailors on the two swift boats he commanded.

Though some of the men were stunned when their hard-charging commander turned so publicly against the war in 1971, the boat crews Lieutenant Kerry led have now become an integral part of his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Of the nine surviving crewmen, seven, including Mr. Sandusky, have made campaign appearances for Mr. Kerry. Another, Mr. Sandusky said, supports Mr. Kerry but wants nothing to do with politics. The crew has lost touch with the remaining man.

Two of Mr. Kerry's fellow swift boat skippers have also campaigned, and Mr. Rassman, a Republican, stunned the candidate last month when he joined the campaign in Iowa.

"I love John Kerry," said James R. Wasser, who in fall 1968 was the lead petty officer, or second in command, on Mr. Kerry's first boat, P.C.F.-44, for patrol craft fast. "He's my brother. I would do anything for him."

This is not the first time Vietnam veterans have come to Mr. Kerry's aid. In his first race for the Senate, in 1984, he was challenged as a hypocrite by his Democratic primary opponent, Representative James M. Shannon, for strongly opposing the war yet fighting in it. Mr. Kerry said the comment impugned the service of veterans. Mr. Shannon replied, "That dog won't hunt, John."

Vietnam veterans were furious. They formed a group known as the Doghunters to heckle Mr. Shannon at his rallies. And they held their own rally in support of Mr. Kerry, helping turn the tide for him.

Again, in 1996, when a Boston Globe column attacked Mr. Kerry, who was locked in a tight re-election race, his shipmates and other veterans, including his former admiral, came to his defense.

In the current campaign, Mr. Kerry sharply challenged Mr. Bush over the weekend to a debate on the Vietnam War era. Mr. Sandusky is to appear in an advertisement scheduled to go on the air beginning today in Georgia, Ohio and upstate New York.

Douglas Brinkley, a historian whose "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War" was recently published by William Morrow, said he had interviewed hundreds of veterans and was struck by their support for Mr. Kerry's candidacy. Many see him as restoring a sense of honor to Vietnam veterans, he said.

"They never had their parade, these Vietnam veterans," Mr. Brinkley said.

Mr. Sandusky noticed the same support. "All of a sudden, word spread among the vets," he said. "It was like a movement."

Mr. Kerry's time in combat was relatively short – four months - but it was intense, with forays into rivers and canals while under constant threat of ambush from Vietcong on the banks. Mr. Kerry was wounded three times, and anyone with three Purple Hearts qualified for transfer to a safe post.

Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., who devised the swift boat operation, said officers on the boats had a 75 percent chance of being killed or wounded by enemy fire.

Respect and Affection

The 25-year-old Lieutenant Kerry was a product of St. Paul's and Yale, while his crewmen were from decidedly more humble backgrounds. Nevertheless, swift boat veterans said during telephone conversations, in a war where officers were often disliked, Lieutenant Kerry quickly won their respect and affection.

The usual distinctions between officers and enlisted men blurred on the tense boat patrols, when an officer-commander shared close quarters with five crewmen for days and nights at a time.

"It's like they are members of the same family," said Wade R. Sanders, a swift boat skipper who went on to become deputy under secretary of the Navy under President Bill Clinton. "There's no lieutenant. The traditional military Mickey Mouse breaks down rapidly. And that's one of the greatest challenges to a leader. You can't maintain that normal distance.

"John had a great relationship with his crew," Mr. Sanders added. "They weren't afraid to go into battle with him. The skipper has to have the same confidence in his crew. Any one of them failing can result in the death of all."

While Mr. Kerry made a reputation as a bold commander who would charge into an ambush, he poured out the growing disillusionment that would make him a prominent opponent of the war into a tape recorder, war diaries and long letters to family and friends.

Mr. Kerry's war record was examined in great detail by Mr. Brinkley for his book. He had access to Mr. Kerry's voluminous wartime correspondence and diaries; he also conducted interviews with other swift boat personnel, including the crews of Mr. Kerry's two boats.

"I thought I would find dissension in the ranks," Mr. Brinkley said. "Most of them are Republicans. But they all vouched for Kerry in such a singularly high fashion."

After Officer Candidate School and other training, Mr. Kerry served aboard the guided-missile frigate Gridley, which had a relatively uneventful deployment off Vietnam, from February to early June 1968. But while on shore leave in that period, he saw the small swift boats, reminiscent of the PT-109, commanded by his idol John F. Kennedy, and volunteered for duty on the boats.

A Very Different Mission

The mission of the swift boats changed drastically just as Mr. Kerry arrived back in Vietnam in November 1968. Originally, they patrolled off the coast, relatively safe duty. But Admiral Zumwalt ordered the boats to enter the shallow waters in the Mekong Delta, territory that was a main Vietcong infiltration route. "It was an absolutely different ballgame," said Elliott Barker, a fellow swift boat skipper who is now a lawyer in Selma, Ala.

Mr. Kerry took command of P.C.F.-44 with a veteran crew headed by Mr. Wasser, a radarman second class. "Always, when there's a new guy on the boat, you check him out," Mr. Wasser said. "It only took me a few days. We knew that we had somebody special that cared for us. We bonded."

Combative and politically conservative, Mr. Wasser, from Kankakee, Ill., had a pair of American flags tattooed on his shoulder and still loathes Jane Fonda. The other crew members on P.C.F.-44 were Boatswain's Mate Third Class Drew E. Whitlow, a country boy from Oklahoma; Gunner's Mate Stephen M. Gardner, who has lost touch with the others; William M. Zaldonis, the engineman, who loved Harley-Davidson motorcycles and doo-wop music; and Stephen W. Hatch of Altoona, Pa., with four tattoos, who says he supports Mr. Kerry though he wants no part of politics.

But the young officers also had doubts about their orders. Soon after Mr. Kerry arrived, Mr. Sanders told him, "What we're doing is really crazy."

Complicating matters, the boat's twin engines were so loud that guerrillas could hear them from as far as three miles away.

"You would run into these areas, draw fire," Mr. Barker said. "You would land troops, burn things down. Then you would load up and come home. The next day everything you destroyed was back, maybe three kilometers away. We were being put into a dangerous, hostile situation without achieving anything permanent."

Some of the young officers began to feel that certain tactics, particularly blindly raking river banks with gunfire, only created more enemies.

"There was a mandate to expend a certain amount of ammunition, like you were feeding this machine, the McNamara numbers crunchers," Mr. Sanders said, referring to Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara. "There was concern about what was going on in the free-fire zones, destroying structures, making more enemies than friends. Some of us didn't do it. That was the policy on my boat and I know it was on John's."

As the discontent grew, the swift boat commanders were summoned to a meeting in Saigon with Admiral Zumwalt and Gen. Creighton Abrams, the overall American commander in Vietnam, on Jan. 22, 1969.

The meeting did not go well.

"I left this whole Saigon operation just a little bit sicker and a little bit more depressed than when I came in," Mr. Kerry wrote in his journal. "Even the intelligence officer there told us that he thought what we were doing was a mistake, but he couldn't control his boss and that was that."

Shortly after the meeting, Mr. Kerry took command of P.C.F.-94, whose skipper had been badly wounded.

"We were sitting ducks," Mr. Sandusky, the lead petty officer, recalled of the days when they steamed up the rivers, blasting the Doors' "Light My Fire," Mr. Kerry's favorite song. "Some places they would be friendly during the day and put on their black pajamas at night. There, they had their black pajamas on all day and all night. It was Charlie's territory."

The boatswain's mate on P.C.F.-94 was Mr. Medeiros, the son of a California millworker and so patriotic that he remained in the Naval Reserve until 1983. The engineman was Eugene Thorson, the son of a farmer from Fort Dodge, Iowa; the gunner's mate was David M. Alston, an African-American who grew up in segregated South Carolina; and the radarman was Thomas M. Belodeau, from outside Boston.

It was on P.C.F.-94 that Mr. Kerry experienced his fiercest weeks of fighting: he won the Silver Star for leaping ashore, chasing down and killing a guerrilla with a rocket launcher, and the Bronze Star for saving Mr. Rassman.

Defying Orders

There was another incident for which Mr. Kerry received no medals - he acted against orders – but which the crew members and the other swift boat skippers remember with pride.

The crewmen saw some mysterious dirt mounds near the shore and shouted repeatedly over loudspeakers for anyone there to come out. No one did. Mr. Kerry jumped ashore with his M-16 and discovered 42 emaciated women, children and old men. Disregarding orders, the swift boats brought them in for treatment.

"He did something I wouldn't do, putting himself at risk to find out who was there," said Mr. Barker, whose boat accompanied Mr. Kerry's on that mission.

In 1971, when Mr. Kerry went to Washington with other veterans to demonstrate against the war and made his now-famous speech to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, some of his former crew mates were stunned.

"When I turned on the TV back in 1971, my true feelings were I felt betrayed," Mr. Wasser recalled. "At that time I was very hawkish. I support him today."

Mr. Sandusky, who often introduces Mr. Kerry at rallies, was not surprised by the change. He was one of the few crewmen to whom Mr. Kerry confided his doubts when they were alone in the pilothouse.

"As a C.O. you can't let your doubts or fears be communicated to the crew for the good of the boat," Mr. Sandusky said. "But I was disillusioned with the war. It was crazy to us. We couldn't get Saigon to give us the support we needed. We shouldn't have been there. The people didn't want us, we were just another occupier."

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