[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Three Decades Later, Vietnam Remains a Hot Issue

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Three Decades Later, Vietnam Remains a Hot Issue

August 29, 2004
 By DAVID M. HALBFINGER 



 

John Kerry and George W. Bush started out the tumultuous
late 1960's in exactly the same place, young men of
privilege with a scant two years separating them at Yale. 

But they were worlds apart in outlook, and they made
starkly different choices after graduating that now, more
than three decades later, continue to reverberate loudly in
their presidential contest. At times the debate has grown
so loud that it has nearly drowned out the issues of the
moment, particularly in the week leading into the
Republican National Convention. 

One young man, Mr. Kerry, had misgivings about the Vietnam
War but volunteered anyway, took and saved lives and won
medals for valor, then came home and led other veterans
trying to stop the war - while antagonizing countless
others in uniform. The anger over his antiwar period
remains on fire to this day, consuming a group of veterans
who have lobbed unsubstantiated charges that he did not
earn his medals and are questioning his fitness to be
president. 

The other young man, Mr. Bush, supported the war but
avoided combat by landing a coveted spot as a National
Guard pilot. He struggled in his powerful father's shadow
to find his own place in life and tried his own hand at
politics, going to work for a Republican candidate trying
unsuccessfully to capture a Senate seat from Alabama. 

It was that period of politicking, when Mr. Bush left his
Texas Air National Guard unit to transfer to Alabama, that
has led Democrats to question how and where he performed
his prescribed military service from May 1972 to May 1973.
The White House says he fully performed his service and
took an honorable, and early, discharge in October 1973 to
attend Harvard Business School. 

As 1968 began, Mr. Bush was a senior at Yale and a
congressman's son who was grappling, as were his
classmates, with a decision "each of us had to make:
military service or not," he wrote in his autobiography.
For Mr. Bush, who wrote that his inclination was to support
the war, "leaving the country to avoid the draft was not an
option." 

Volunteering for combat was not an attractive option
either. "Did I think about going to the Army post and
saying, 'Send me to Vietnam?' '' Mr. Bush asked in an
interview in 2000. "Not really. I wanted to fly, and that
was the adventure I was seeking." 

Mr. Bush, then 21, had inquired about getting into the
Texas Air National Guard while home for Christmas; back at
school, he took the Air Force officer's qualifying test on
Jan. 19, 1968. He scored in the 25th percentile for pilot
aptitude but the 95th for "officer quality," according to
The Dallas Morning News. 

On Feb. 10, Ensign John F. Kerry, 24, a day out at sea on a
frigate in the Pacific, sent off a request for duty in
Vietnam. He wanted to see the war up close. 

"I consider the opportunity to serve in Vietnam an
extremely important part of being in the armed forces," Mr.
Kerry wrote. He asked to command a Swift boat, and offered
to extend his hitch if need be. 

Mr. Kerry had graduated from Yale in 1966, having signed up
for Officer Candidate School in February of his senior
year. His classmate David Thorne, who followed him into the
Navy a month later, recalled talking with Mr. Kerry about
joining in the idealistic terms of a generation that had
not yet lost its innocence. 

"It felt like the right thing to do, and I made the
decision for the same reasons," Mr. Thorne said. "This was
the war that our generation needed to fight." 

Two weeks after asking to be transferred, Mr. Kerry learned
that his best friend from Yale had been killed in action. 

In late May, Mr. Bush met with the Texas Air National Guard
commander, who recommended him for a direct commission to
second lieutenant - a departure from the usual route of
R.O.T.C. or Officer Candidate School - and for pilot
training. 

Mr. Bush has consistently said he never requested special
treatment, though Ben Barnes, who was speaker of the Texas
House in 1968, said in 1999 that he had been asked by a
Houston businessman - not by the Bush family - to recommend
Mr. Bush for a pilot's slot, and that he had done so. Mr.
Bush was given a spot in an F-102 fighter-interceptor
squadron sometimes called the "champagne unit" for its sons
of important people. (Mr. Barnes told a group of Kerry
supporters that he was "ashamed" of having helped Mr. Bush
and other wealthy or well-connected people get into the
National Guard.) 

Mr. Bush graduated from Yale on June 10, and a month later
entered basic training in San Antonio. The next week, Mr.
Kerry, by then a lieutenant junior grade, left the frigate
Gridley to train for Swift boat duty in Vietnam. 

The two young men were taking similar-sounding steps, but
on very different tracks. In November, Mr. Bush went to
Valdosta, Ga., for pilot training. He was given time off to
work in the Florida Senate campaign of Edward J. Gurney,
whose consultant, Jimmy Allison, had long been Mr. Bush's
father's top political operative. 

Mr. Kerry, meanwhile, finished his survival training;
became engaged to Mr. Thorne's sister, Julia, in late
October; and soon found himself in Cam Ranh Bay, South
Vietnam. On Dec. 2, he volunteered for a nighttime patrol
on a Navy skimmer and was wounded lightly by shrapnel,
according to his military records. His injury won him his
first Purple Heart. 

In Georgia, Mr. Bush started out on the military equivalent
of Cessna 172's for about six weeks, said Norman Dotti, a
classmate who recalled that other trainees, most of them
headed into the regular Air Force, did not resent the
congressman's son. 

"If there was any envy, it was because he was in the Guard,
and he was going to go fly a fighter," Mr. Dotti said,
while Air Force pilots would have their aircraft chosen for
them. 

Mr. Bush did well, Mr. Dotti said - "I'd fly with him
again" - and moved on to subsonic jet trainers in February,
then to supersonic jets. 

By mid-March, Mr. Kerry, who had been wounded three times
and whose records credited him with killing 20 of the
enemy, had already asked to transfer out of Vietnam. 

Halfway around the world, he was learning hard lessons
after taking charge of his first Swift boat, PCF-44, in
early December 1968. In his letters and journals, he told
of deadly ambushes and the fog of war: ducking from
American gunfire and air strikes; losing a friend to
friendly fire; being ordered in night missions to "shoot
indiscriminately at a target we couldn't see." 

He wrote of watching a South Vietnamese soldier die of
multiple wounds, and of shooting up a sampan, unwittingly
killing a child on board. 

He also described cruising along the Cambodian border on
Christmas Eve. 

By March 17, when he asked to leave Vietnam, he had won
three Purple Hearts, one Silver Star and one Bronze Star.
He was wounded for the last time on March 13, after a Green
Beret on his own boat, Jim Rassmann, fell overboard in an
ambush. An explosion had knocked Mr. Rassmann off the boat
and hurt Mr. Kerry's right arm, but Mr. Kerry steered back
into the ambush and pulled Mr. Rassmann to safety. On the
recommendation of Mr. Rassmann - who campaigns at Mr.
Kerry's side these days - Mr. Kerry won the Bronze Star. 

While Mr. Bush made his way through jet pilot training in
1969 - and became the buzz of his air base when he was
flown off to a dinner date with Tricia Nixon, the
president's daughter - Mr. Kerry made his way to a job as
an admiral's aide in New York. Another close friend's
death, he said, "galvanized" his urge to speak out against
the war. 

He had learned to fly at Yale. And that fall, he rented a
plane and flew Adam Walinsky, a former speechwriter for
Robert F. Kennedy, to antiwar rallies across New York
State, pestering him with questions about politics. 

A month later, Mr. Kerry asked for an early discharge from
the Navy so he could run for Congress. His admiral wrote
that "the country and the Navy will be better served" if he
won. 

In January 1970, released from active duty, he nearly upset
the favorite in a pre-primary caucus to pick an antiwar
candidate for Congress. He helped out in the winner's
campaign, married Ms. Thorne and, on a trip to Paris that
summer, met on his own with North Vietnamese delegates to
the peace talks. 

He also joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and gave a
speech at a Labor Day rally in Pennsylvania that so
impressed other members that they made him their spokesman.


Mr. Bush finished his pilot training in June 1970 and
shifted to weekend duty, flying alert missions with his
F-102 squadron outside Houston. His father was running for
Senate, and the Texas Air Guard proudly sent out a release
saying that "fighter planes are Lt. Bush's 'thing.' " 

That fall, his father lost his Senate race and moved to New
York to become ambassador to the United Nations. Mr. Bush
stayed in Houston and got a job at an agricultural company
run by a family friend. 

Mr. Kerry was immersing himself in the antiwar movement. In
January 1971 he attended the poorly publicized Winter
Soldier Investigation in Detroit, where other veterans told
of torture, gang rape and the killing and mutilation of
women and children. His televised testimony to the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee in April instantly made him the
most celebrated antiwar spokesman of his day. But in
recounting what he had heard in Detroit, he also
antagonized countless other soldiers and veterans who said
they saw his descriptions of "atrocities" and war crimes as
libelous and treacherous. One of them was a fellow Swift
boat veteran named John E. O'Neill, now the co-author of a
book saying that Mr. Kerry is unfit to be president. 

In Texas that summer, Mr. Bush was preoccupied with his own
future, his bosses at the agricultural company recalled.
Peter Knudtzon, his supervisor, said in an interview that
Mr. Bush had been fascinated by the mechanics of politics
and power, and was mulling a run for the State Legislature
- gauging the value of his father's name, but also looking
for a way to "do it on his own." 

By late 1971, both Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry were looking
ahead. Mr. Kerry began to pull away from the increasingly
radical Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and quit the
group in an acrimonious meeting where some talked of
assassinations. He had his eye on Congress again and,
looking at the political landscape, took aim at an open
seat in blue-collar Lowell, Mass. 

Mr. Bush went to Alabama, where Mr. Allison was managing
the long-shot Senate bid of Winton M. Blount, a
construction magnate challenging an entrenched Democrat,
John J. Sparkman. Mr. Allison hired Mr. Bush as political
director after the May 1972 primary. 

That month, Mr. Bush requested a transfer to Maxwell Air
Force Base, outside Montgomery, but his Texas unit denied
it. In September 1972, he submitted a new application and
was granted a temporary transfer to an Alabama Air National
Guard unit at Maxwell, though he was not qualified to fly
its Phantom II jets. 

Mr. Bush had moved to Alabama in May. In August he missed a
physical and was suspended from flying by his superiors in
Texas. White House officials said earlier this year that he
had skipped the physical knowing he would not be flying in
Alabama. 

The campaigns that Mr. Kerry ran and Mr. Bush worked on in
1972 had some things in common. Mr. Kerry was lambasted for
spending record sums and raising most of it from outside
the district; Mr. Blount, for trying to buy a Senate seat
and bringing in "hired guns" from Texas. 

The Lowell newspaper tarred Mr. Kerry as all but a traitor
for his antiwar activity. In Alabama, Mr. Bush's man
accused his rival of being soft on North Vietnam and
coddling draft dodgers. 

Both contests became one-sided in the end, and Mr. Kerry
and Mr. Bush's man were both trounced. 

In defeat, Mr. Kerry withdrew from politics, went to law
school and started a family. Mr. Bush got his M.B.A. and
married Laura Welch. There would be plenty of time for
comebacks. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/national/29vietnam.html?ex=1094792864&ei=1&en=e5f4f25d527e0fff


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