NY Times: 'Tour of duty': The Other JFK

[La_Serpiente]

'Tour of duty': The Other JFK



John Kerry, age 27, testified before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington, April 22, 1971, when he was a former Navy lieutenant and organizer of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Peace demonstrators applaud him from behind.

If the novel of John Kerry's life had been written by, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald -- a plausible fictive scenario, chronological discordance notwithstanding, since Kerry comes from the sort of stock that was Fitzgerald's metier -- its protagonist would surely have taken a bad turn somewhere down the road. He would have squandered his good breeding. Passed too many years in dissolution. Relied on his social connections or his father's friends to set him up in business. The end would not have been a happy one (although in today's nonfiction America, that sort of person ends up president, but I digress).

But Fitzgerald is dead, and Kerry, despite the most sincere efforts of Victor Charlie in the Mekong delta, is very much alive. This grandson of a successful (though unhappy -- he took his own life) Boston shoe merchant and son of a Foreign Service diplomat intuited his calling from a very early age. He watched and learned as his father did his part in the cold war, moving the family around Europe. He was enrolled in prestigious private schools when the family came back to the States. Summers at the Auchincloss place in Newport blended into Yale, thence to enlistment in the Navy in 1966, when he pined to go to Vietnam and, once he got there, requested the most dangerous assignment a naval officer could get.

And that's just the official stuff. In between, it seems that on every third page of the opening chapters of Douglas Brinkley's ''Tour of Duty,'' Kerry is flying an airplane, hang-gliding, mountaineering, lining up prominent speakers as the head of Yale's Political Union, winning speech prizes, hanging out in Greenwich Village with the future rock impresario Felix Pappalardi or scoring goals for Yale's soccer team (he was in the middle of a game when he learned that John F. Kennedy, his idol, had been shot). He seemed to know at every moment that he was moving through those formative years in preparation for some future test of will. No Fitzgerald needed; the novel of John Kerry's life has been written by Kerry himself.

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'Tour of duty': The Other JFK

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[molly]

1. There are some that question his "short" tour

"The two incidents for which Kerry received his Silver Star and his Bronze Star for heroism occurred two weeks apart, in late February and mid-March 1969. It was in the second of these that he rescued Jim Rassmann, a member of his crew, when his P.C.F.-94 came under a hail of small-arms fire at the same moment that another P.C.F. traveling alongside Kerry's boat struck a mine. Kerry was injured in the arm by another mine (he has three Purple Hearts), but ''Christ knows how,'' Kerry recalls to Brinkley, ''somehow we managed to get him on board. . . . I didn't get the bullet in the head that I expected, and we managed to clear the ambush zone.''

[Octafish]

2. Behold a True Democrat

Take a moment and read about why Kerry's supporters stand behind this guy. Every time he was tested, he's met the test and emerged from the crucible a better person. No one is better qualified to lead the nation than John Kerry.

BTW: The late Felix Pappalardi was the guy who wrote all the spacey lyrics to the Cream's songs, like "White Room," "S.W.A.L.B.R." and "Tales of Brave Ulysses." He later formed his own band, Mountain. A great man, much missed by all those who know his work.