Tour Of Duty

I've been consciously avoiding the whole Swift Boat Liars for Obscuring the Truth crap that the wingers are flinging, especially the "Christmas in Cambodia" thingy¹ because I think it's a non-issue. Anyway, in some discussions about Kerry's service in Vietnam, I quoted some material from Chapter 10 (Death in the Delta) of my copy of Kerry's biography, Tour of Duty:

Christmas Eve, 1968, turned out to be memorable for the men of PCF-44 though not in the jingle-bells sense folks were enjoying back home. The only concession to the holiday spirit was that morning's rare breakfast of scrambled eggs, after which the crew header their Swift north up the Co Chien River to its junction with the My Tho only miles away from the Cambodia border. Because they were only an hour away from that neighboring country, Kerry began reading up on Cambodia's history in a book he had borrowed from the floating barracks at An Thoi...He even read a 1959 Pentagon study titled "Psychological Observations: Cambodia"...The Pentagon report went on to state that Cambodians "cannot be counted on to act in any positive way for the benefit of U.S. aims and policies."

Lieutenant Kerry kept that last point in mind as PCF-44 patrolled the watery borderline between Cambodia and Vietnam. After all, Norodom Sihanouk himself - installed as king of Cambodia in 1941... - complained to the White House about Mike Bernique's cowboy antics on his country's rivers...Raids through his rivers...were not conducive to preserving Cambodia's official neutrality.

Kerry was keyed up that Christmas Eve by PCF-44's position; he had never been that far up the rivers before...He and his crew were deep within enemy territory. "The Swift seemed to sense the spirit of exploration as she kicked a symmetrical wave out behind us, breaking an even spray on both sides of the bow," he wrote in his notebook.
...
Kerry recorded his thoughts that day in a philosophical, second-person, present-tense voice:

...You wish you could be transformed into that itinerant nothingness that lets you watch the world pass by with all its gross trimmings but which demands nothing of you. To be free so that you can comment or not comment as you see fit and then just hop on a breeze and be blown restlessly to some new horizon with new hope and strength.

...
Kerry and his men left Sa Dec as soon as they completed a routine intelligence investigation of village leaders.

[Explosions and lots of other combat stuff, and they head back to Sa Dec...]

Kerry wrote in his notebook: "You call down to one of your men and ask him to draft a message to the Admiral in Command of all Naval Forces in Vietnam and also to the commander of market time. It says, 'Merry Christmas from the most inland market time unit.'" He meant to be clever and point out to his superiors the incongruity of a U.S. Navy Coastal Surveillance Force boat crew spending their holiday on a river canal not far from the Cambodian border..."We were getting close to Cambodia," Wasser explained later. "We were out there all alone in the darkness."

Kerry wrote home that night..."[The] night soothes everything...and the people and things that are close to you dart through your mind and bring the only warmth and peace that there is. Visions of sugarplums really do dance through your head and you think of stockings and snow and roast chestnuts and fires with birch logs and all that is good and warm and real. It's Christmas Eve."

FWIW.

ntodd

1 - If you have no freaking clue what I'm on about, look here, here, and here. I've been entertaining myself by arguing with trolls at Washington Monthly. What the hell else am I going to do on sabbatical?