Sitting duck in the Mekong: John Kerry's war years.

• Author: Perry, James M.
• Position: Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War - Book Review

Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War By Douglas Brinkley William Morrow, $25.95

If there is one main reason Democratic primary enters have flocked to Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), it is the belief--greatly encouraged by his campaign--that his valiant service in Vietnam will give him the stature necessary to defeat President George W. Bush in November. Between now and then, however, the country will wrestle with two big questions about Kerry's Vietnam experience.

First, why exactly did he choose to fight? Why would someone who publicly professed (as Kerry did as a college student) great skepticism about the war, volunteer--not only to serve, but also to take on one of the Navy's most hazardous assignments, engaging the Viet Cong in the Mekong Delta." And why, once in theater, did he fight with such boldness that he earned a chest full of medals and the admiration of his more gung-ho colleagues?

In his new book, popular historian Douglas Brinkley provides a wealth of material to intensify this debate. He has mined Kerry's wartime correspondence; interviewed friends, family, fellow veterans, and the senator himself; and woven together a fascinating (and flattering) tale of Kerry's Vietnam years. Yet, the book provides no definitive answer to these questions; Kerry's motives and reasons, then as now, remain complex.

The second big question is why, after having fought the war so energetically, did he go on to protest it with equal vigor? Here, the book gives a much clearer answer: Kerry's Vietnam experience fully confirmed his earlier suspicions. The particular combat missions his superiors sent him on were--like the war as a whole--ill-conceived, bloody, and pointless.

"I have been thinking a lot about Vietnam and the reasoning of the uncommitted soldiers," Navy Ensign John Forbes Kerry wrote his parents early in 1968. "How one can oppose the war and still fight it?"

Kerry at the time was serving in the Pacific aboard the destroyer USS Gridley. A few days after writing this to his parents, he learned that his best friend, Dick Pershing, grandson of famed World War I general "Black Jack" Pershing, had been killed in combat in Vietnam. Kerry was devastated, writing to Julia Thorne, who would become his first wife, that he was prepared to do everything he could "to bring to people the conviction of how wasteful and asinine is a human expenditure of this kind."

Yet instead of rounding out his service in the relative safety of the Gridley, Kerry volunteered to command one of the little boats called Swifts, and so went...