William Rood, Swift Boat skipper : Anti-Kerry vets not there that day

Anti-Kerry vets not there that day

By William B. Rood
Chicago Tribune
Published August 21, 2004


Rood and Kerry: http://images.chicagotribune.com/med...8/13907885.jpg

Rood's citation: http://images.chicagotribune.com/med...8/13909195.jpg

There were three swift boats on the river that day in Vietnam more
than 35 years ago—three officers and 15 crew members. Only two of
those officers remain to talk about what happened on February 28,
1969.

One is John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate who won a
Silver Star for what happened on that date. I am the other.

For years, no one asked about those events. But now they are the focus
of skirmishing in a presidential election with a group of swift boat
veterans and others contending that Kerry didn't deserve the Silver
Star for what he did on that day, or the Bronze Star and three Purple
Hearts he was awarded for other actions.

Many of us wanted to put it all behind us—the rivers, the ambushes,
the killing. Ever since that time, I have refused all requests for
interviews about Kerry's service—even those from reporters at the
Chicago Tribune, where I work.

But Kerry's critics, armed with stories I know to be untrue, have
charged that the accounts of what happened were overblown. The critics
have taken pains to say they're not trying to cast doubts on the merit
of what others did, but their version of events has splashed doubt on
all of us. It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were
there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they
come from people who were not there.

Even though Kerry's own crew members have backed him, the attacks have
continued, and in recent days Kerry has called me and others who were
with him in those days, asking that we go public with our accounts.

I can't pretend those calls had no effect on me, but that is not why I
am writing this. What matters most to me is that this is hurting
crewmen who are not public figures and who deserved to be honored for
what they did. My intent is to tell the story here and to never again
talk publicly about it.

I was part of the operation that led to Kerry's Silver Star. I have no
firsthand knowledge of the events that resulted in his winning the
Purple Hearts or the Bronze Star.

But on Feb. 28, 1969, I was officer in charge of PCF-23, one of three
swift boats—including Kerry's PCF-94 and Lt. j.g. Donald Droz's
PCF-43—that carried Vietnamese regional and Popular Force troops and a
Navy demolition team up the Dong Cung, a narrow tributary of the Bay
Hap River, to conduct a sweep in the area.

The approach of the noisy 50-foot aluminum boats, each driven by two
huge 12-cylinder diesels and loaded down with six crew members, troops
and gear, was no secret.

Ambushes were a virtual certainty, and that day was no exception.

Instructions from Kerry

The difference was that Kerry, who had tactical command of that
particular operation, had talked to Droz and me beforehand about not
responding the way the boats usually did to an ambush.

We agreed that if we were not crippled by the initial volley and had a
clear fix on the location of the ambush, we would turn directly into
it, focusing the boats' twin .50-caliber machine guns on the attackers
and beaching the boats. We told our crews about the plan.

The Viet Cong in the area had come to expect that the heavily loaded
boats would lumber on past an ambush, firing at the entrenched
attackers, beaching upstream and putting troops ashore to sweep back
down on the ambush site. Often, they were long gone by the time the
troops got there.

The first time we took fire—the usual rockets and automatic
weapons—Kerry ordered a "turn 90" and the three boats roared in on the
ambush. It worked. We routed the ambush, killing three of the
attackers. The troops, led by an Army adviser, jumped off the boats
and began a sweep, which killed another half dozen VC, wounded or
captured others and found weapons, blast masks and other supplies used
to stage ambushes.

Meanwhile, Kerry ordered our boat to head upstream with his, leaving
Droz's boat at the first site.

It happened again, another ambush. And again, Kerry ordered the turn
maneuver, and again it worked. As we headed for the riverbank, I
remember seeing a loaded B-40 launcher pointed at the boats. It wasn't
fired as two men jumped up from their spider holes.

We called Droz's boat up to assist us, and Kerry, followed by one
member of his crew, jumped ashore and chased a VC behind a hooch—a
thatched hut—maybe 15 yards inland from the ambush site. Some who were
there that day recall the man being wounded as he ran. Neither I nor
Jerry Leeds, our boat's leading petty officer with whom I've checked
my recollection of all these events, recalls that, which is no
surprise. Recollections of those who go through experiences like that
frequently differ.

With our troops involved in the sweep of the first ambush site,
Richard Lamberson, a member of my crew, and I also went ashore to
search the area. I was checking out the inside of the hooch when I
heard gunfire nearby.

Not long after that, Kerry returned, reporting that he had killed the
man he chased behind the hooch. He also had picked up a loaded B-40
rocket launcher, which we took back to our base in An Thoi after the
operation.

John O'Neill, author of a highly critical account of Kerry's Vietnam
service, describes the man Kerry chased as a "teenager" in a
"loincloth." I have no idea how old the gunner Kerry chased that day
was, but both Leeds and I recall that he was a grown man, dressed in
the kind of garb the VC usually wore.

The man Kerry chased was not the "lone" attacker at that site, as
O'Neill suggests. There were others who fled. There was also firing
from the tree line well behind the spider holes and at one point, from
the opposite riverbank as well. It was not the work of just one
attacker.

Our initial reports of the day's action caused an immediate response
from our task force headquarters in Cam Ranh Bay.

Congratulatory message

Known over radio circuits by the call sign "Latch," then-Capt. and now
retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffmann, the task force commander, fired off a
message congratulating the three swift boats, saying at one point that
the tactic of charging the ambushes was a "shining example of
completely overwhelming the enemy" and that it "may be the most
efficacious method of dealing with small numbers of ambushers."

Hoffmann has become a leading critic of Kerry's and now says that what
the boats did on that day demonstrated Kerry's inclination to be
impulsive to a fault.

Our decision to use that tactic under the right circumstances was not
impulsive but was the result of discussions well beforehand and a
mutual agreement of all three boat officers.

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.

Error in citation

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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