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After Kerry laid a wreath before Bronson's name, he stepped away from the media. The public show was over. He began to scan the names etched along the panels. "Who are you looking for?" John Hurley, a longtime friend, asked quietly. "Persh." Over to the left, on Panel 39 East, Kerry found it: Richard W. Pershing. He wiped the mist from Pershing's name. In the polished granite, Kerry could see his own reflection. "I miss him," Kerry whispered.
By the time the war ended, five of Kerry's friends had died in Vietnam, including his childhood soul mate. Pershing was struck by a grenade while searching for a wounded comrade. When he heard the news, Kerry wrote to his friend David Thorne: "Mama wrote me and said that time would heal it. I don't think so." Pershing had died in a rice paddy, alone.
Kerry explained recently in an interview that he was running for president "with a remembrance for what they gave for the country. A huge responsibility for the rest of us to do well." His voice deepened, preemptively stern: "For anyone who thinks I'm too serious about it, I don't think you can be too serious."
Kerry laughed his hardest with Pershing, whose irreverent humor was the perfect antidote to Kerry's intensity. He was the grandson of John Joseph "Black Jack" Pershing, the World War I general. The boys had met in middle school, and remained close at Yale. In 1965, the start of their senior year at Yale, when Vietnam was beginning to cast an increasingly dark shadow, they talked about enlisting. Pershing's attitude was straightforward: When duty calls, one answers. Kerry's father had served in the Army Air Corps in World War II and shared his friend's sense of honor. And yet, much as Kerry's heart stirred him to service, his head kept questioning it.
Kerry, by nature a debater, was the first among his friends to question the war. In June of 1966, he delivered a commencement speech casting doubt on U.S. policy: "What was an excess of isolationism has become an excess of interventionism. . . . We have not really lost the desire to serve. We question the very roots of what we are serving." Though ambivalent, Kerry that fall entered Navy Officer Candidate School in Rhode Island. "We had the naive reasons college kids would have," said his friend Daniel Barbiero. "We thought, let's go and see what's really happening." Kerry had read the military adventures of Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and he fantasized about becoming a soldier-statesman, said Douglas Brinkley, author of "Tour of Duty," a Kerry biography.
In high school, Kerry said in an interview, he had become interested in a career in politics: "Because that was where you made a difference -- whether you go to war, or don't go to war." His positions would be more credible, he reasoned at the time, if he spoke from experience. After further training in California, Kerry served for a year as an ensign aboard the USS Gridley, a guided-missile frigate. In the spring of 1968, the ship pulled into Wellington, New Zealand. Over pints of ale, Kerry chatted with another officer, Wade Sanders. "He was upbeat. He was unsure. He was ravenously curious," said Sanders. "He'd been reading the history of Vietnam. What are we doing here? What does this all mean? He talked about having seen a Swift boat. Weren't they neat? I told him I'd try to get one. He decided he wanted a closer look. He wanted to know if the war was justified."
Kerry requested a transfer to a "Swift" boat, a 50-foot gunboat that patrolled the coast of Vietnam. He was inspired by his hero, John F. Kennedy, who had served on a PT boat in World War II. Kerry carried a pillowcase full of books, from Dwight Eisenhower's "At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends" to "Gone With the Wind." "I joked with John it was Hemingwayesque of us, like 'Farewell to Arms,' " said Sanders. "We couldn't find ambulances to ride in the Alps, so we got small boats in Vietnam. . . . John is a journal keeper, he had a sense of his own history."
But Kerry sensed, even then, that if he engaged in -- rather than observed -- a war, he'd get trapped inside a narrative he could not control. The first time the USS Gridley approached Vietnam, he wrote about it to his fiancee, Julia Thorne: "One can talk and talk about the meaning of war and the dangers and the horror and all the sensations that a man has when he gets near the possibility of dying. But until you actually sense them somewhat, you do not really know what you are talking about. And once you have sensed them, you tend not to want to talk about them at all."
As Kerry's airplane descended over Cam Ranh Bay in November 1968, he spotted a rainbow that ended in a
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