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Skriven 2004-08-21 22:11:46 av Fred Noon (1:275/312.1)
     Kommentar till en text av Stan Hardegree
Ärende: (3) This is Hurting
===========================
Part Three

Living that War Another Time

By William B. Rood
Chicago Tribune

It was also well within the aggressive tradition that was embraced by
the late Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, then commander of U.S. Naval Forces,
Vietnam.  Months before that day in February, a fellow boat officer,
Michael Bernique, was summoned to Saigon to explain to top Navy
commanders why he had made an unauthorized run up the Giang Thanh River,
which runs along the Vietnam-Cambodia border.  Bernique, who speaks
French fluently, had been told by a source in Ha Tien at the mouth of
the river that a VC tax collector was operating upstream.

Ignoring the prohibition against it, Bernique and his crew went upstream
and routed the VC, pursuing and killing several.

Instead of facing disciplinary action as he had expected, Bernique was
given the Silver Star, and Zumwalt ordered other swifts, which had
largely patrolled coastal waters, into the rivers.

The decision sent a clear message, underscored repeatedly by Hoffmann's
congratulatory messages, that aggressive patrolling was expected and
that well-timed, if unconventional, tactics like Bernique's were
encouraged.

What we did on Feb. 28, 1969, was well in line with the tone set by our
top commanders.

Zumwalt made that clear when he flew down to our base at An Thoi off the
southern tip of Vietnam to pin the Silver Star on Kerry and assorted
Bronze Stars and commendation medals on the rest of us.

My Bronze Star citation, signed by Zumwalt, praised the charge tactic we
used that day, saying the VC were "caught completely off guard."

There's at least one mistake in that citation.  It incorrectly
identifies the river where the main action occurred, a reminder that
such documents were often done in haste and sometimes authored for their
signers by staffers.  It's a cautionary note for those trying to piece
it all together.  There's no final authority on something that happened
so long ago -- not the documents and not even the strained recollections
of those of us who were there.

But I know that what some people are saying now is wrong.  While they
mean to hurt Kerry, what they're saying impugns others who are not in
the public eye.

Men like Larry Lee, who was on our bow with an M-60 machine gun as we
charged the riverbank, Kenneth Martin, who was in the .50-caliber gun
tub atop our boat, and Benjamin Cueva, our engineman, who was at our aft
gun mount suppressing the fire from the opposite bank.

Wayne Langhoffer and the other crewmen on Droz's boat went through even
worse on April 12, 1969, when they saw Droz killed in a brutal ambush
that left PCF-43 an abandoned pile of wreckage on the banks of the Duong
Keo River.  That was just a few months after the birth of his only
child, Tracy.

The survivors of all these events are scattered across the country now.

Jerry Leeds lives in a tiny Kansas town where he built and sold a
successful printing business.  He owns a beautiful home with a lawn that
sweeps to the edge of a small lake, which he also owns.  Every year,
flights of purple martins return to the stately birdhouses on the tall
poles in his back yard.

Cueva, recently retired, has raised three daughters and is beloved by
his neighbors for all the years he spent keeping their cars running.
Lee is a senior computer programmer in Kentucky, and Lamberson finished
a second military career in the Army.

With the debate over that long-ago day in February, they're all living
that war another time.

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William B. Rood is an editor at the Chicago Tribune. 



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