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splotch on the runway. He arrived just as the military changed the Swifts' mission from patrolling the coastline to churning up the Mekong Delta, baiting the enemy and destroying its encampments. Within two weeks Kerry was wounded in his arm and received the first of three Purple Hearts. Kerry described himself in a letter as in "an uncertain state of confusion. . . . I am quite suddenly, really, in the middle of a war."
Day after day, his men roared along the jungle, through clouds of diesel and mosquitoes, blasting the Doors' "Light My Fire" to quiet their fear of snipers. Kerry, a Catholic, kept his childhood rosary beads in his pocket. "We called it 'the days of hell,' " said Kerry's helmsman, Del Sandusky. "Going into the jaws of death." "The thing you have to remember about Kerry," said Chris Greeley, a friend, "is the government [expletive] with him -- they put him in rivers without the right boats." His men would radio for air support, and were promised backup that wouldn't arrive.
After three months, Kerry and other skippers petitioned their commanders in Saigon. "I left with the feeling that we were destined to be further cannon fodder for the task force commander -- Mad Dog Hoffman as he is known," Kerry wrote. "There is no way to explain the empty butterflies that haunted one's stomach that evening." Kerry said in another letter that he felt homesick for the first time since he had been left alone at a boarding school when he was 11 years old. He wrote that he felt "completely, starkly removed from the familiar and the warm."
He responded to abandonment by reversing it, by turning it inside out. He became a rescuer. After a firefight with the Viet Cong, Kerry touched each of his crewmates. "He'd put his hand on my shoulder and say, 'You okay?' " said David Alston, the gunner. "There was such an adrenaline rush, sometimes he'd have to get me to stop shooting."
One day, they came across 42 sick and starving Vietnamese. Despite orders to leave the villagers, Kerry ferried them to an American base for relief. He told Brinkley, "For an afternoon, it felt good to really be helping the Vietnamese instead of destroying their villages." Kerry even rescued a puppy, Victoria Charlotte, or VC. His crewmates bought it from villagers who were planning to cook it for dinner. "Once the bullets started flying, he'd put the dog in his flak vest against his tummy," said Sandusky. "In the middle of an ambush, she'd start shaking and she'd pee on him." Until today, the puppy stars in Kerry's war stories. Kerry's daughter, Vanessa, 27, explained: "He wanted there to be a good VC." He had bad dreams and walked in his sleep.
One night, he cried out, "I've been hit, I've been hit." Across the bunk another sleeping officer yelled, "Hang on, John, we're coming in to get you." In his waking hours, though, it was Kerry who would shout, "Hang on!" He received a Silver Star by chasing and killing an insurgent who had aimed a grenade launcher at his men. He was awarded a Bronze Star for saving James Rassman, a Special Forces officer, who'd been blown off Kerry's boat by a mine.
Never Alone Again
Kerry joked, played guitar, took off his shoes and wiggled his toes through a hole in his blue sock during a recent interview. With kid-like confidence he demonstrated the hop-and-jump cannonball dive of Sen. John Edwards's 4-year-old son. He seemed at ease while chatting about war in the abstract. But when asked what it felt like to kill a man in combat, it was as if all of Kerry's 60 years rushed to his face at once. There was a shift from the intellectual to the emotional, and his voice withered: "I don't talk about that stuff."
When Kerry returned from Vietnam, his face had changed. His brother, Cam, noticed it in the creases in his brow. Kerry's friends said his eyes looked sunk back in his head. His uniform was baggy. It was March 1969, and the lieutenant had come home. After he was awarded three Purple
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