The Blood-Soaked Resumé of a Peace Broker What John Kerry Really Did in Vietnam by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR With John Kerry currently in full Henry Kissinger regalia, parading around the Middle East, brow-beating the Palestinians and their allies in the region and Europe into signing onto a deeply flawed peace accord that primarily serves Israeli and American interests, it may prove a useful exercise to inspect the curriculum vitaeof this putative peace-maker, especially during those formative years when the Secretary of State first carved out his name in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Though Kerry has a reputation as an anti-war activist, his brief tenure in Vietnam and Cambodia was notable both for acts of casual savagery and his striking lack of contrition for his own participation in atrocities that in a rational society might easily be classified as war crimes.–JSC In his senior year at Yale in 1966 John Kerry enlisted in the US Navy, with his actual induction scheduled for the summer, after his graduation. Already notorious among his contemporaries for his political ambition, he’d maneuvered himself into the top slot at the Yale political union, while also winning admission to Skull and Bones. While George W. Bush, two years behind Kerry, was seeking commercial opportunity at Yale by selling ounce bags of cocaine, (so one contemporary has recalled) Kerry was keeping a vigilant eye on the political temperature and duly noted a contradiction between his personal commitment to go to war and the growing antiwar sentiment among the masses, some of whom he hoped would vote for him at a not too distant time. It was a season for important decisions and Kerry pondered his options amid the delights of a Skull and Bones retreat on an island in the St Lawrence River. He duly decided to junk his speech on the theme of “life after graduation” and opted for a fiery denunciation of the war and of an LBJ. The speech was well received by the students and some professors. Most parents were aghast, though not Kerry’s own mother and father. Unlike Bill Clinton and George Bush, Kerry duly presented himself for military service. After a year’s training he was assigned to the USS Gridley, deployed to the Pacific, probably carrying nuclear missiles. Beset by boredom, Kerry received the news that once of his best friends, Dickie Pershing, grandson of “Black Jack” Pershing had been killed in Vietnam. Kerry seethed with rage and yearned, as he put it years later to his biographer Douglas Brinkley, for vengeance. (Brinkley’s highly admiring biography, A Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, offers many telling vignettes to an assiduous reader. It’s based almost entirely on Kerry’s diaries and letters of the time.) Kerry engineered reassignment to the Swift boat patrol. In Vietnam the Tet Offensive had prompted a terrible series of search and destroy missions by the US, plus the assassination program known as Phoenix. As part of the US Navy’s slice of the action, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt and his sidekick Captain Roy “Latch” Hoffman had devised “Operation Sea Lords”, in which the Swift boats would patrol the canals and secondary streams of the Mekong Delta, with particular emphasis on the areas near the Cambodian border. The basic plan, explicitly acknowledged by many Swift boat veterans, was to terrorize the peasants into turning against the National Liberation Front, aka Viet Cong. The entire area, except for certain designated “friendly villages”, was a free fire zone, meaning the Americans could shoot at will and count anyone they killed as VC. >>>>> The rest of this article is at
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