He also earned a Bronze Star and a Silver Star, the latter for beaching his patrol boat and jumping ashore to chase down and kill a Viet Cong guerrilla who used a rocket launcher to fire on his men.
Kerry, a graduate of Yale University and son of a foreign-service officer, was keeping a journal to privately voice growing reservations about the war. What he could not openly share with superiors or comrades he penned into spiral notebooks or typed up diary-style while on leave.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday February 28, 2004 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 83 words Type of Material: Correction
John F. Kerry -- An article Feb. 17 in Section A about the Vietnam War's legacy and Sen. John F. Kerry said that in his April 1971 testimony before Congress he accused fellow servicemen of committing wartime atrocities against Vietnamese civilians. In fact, Kerry was citing first-person accounts by veterans. The article also said that Kerry "later acknowledged" that he did not witness the alleged incidents. Kerry had said at the outset of his testimony that he was reporting the accounts of others.
Not only did he lose his five best friends in Vietnam, he says he witnessed events he could not forget -- including watching in despair as a crewmate killed a boy who may or may not have been an innocent villager.
"There were two sides to John Kerry," Brinkley said. "The outward good soldier and the inward self-doubter wracked by a moral dilemma."
Once discharged from the Navy in 1970, he moved home to Newton, Mass., to make an unsuccessful run for Congress. Months later, Kerry became a leading voice in the nation's antiwar protest. He attended numerous rallies, including the Winter Soldier Investigation of 1971 in which 150 Vietnam veterans met at a Detroit hotel to trade stories of what they termed wartime atrocities by U.S. servicemen.
It was not the first time that Americans heard of war crimes. That same year, Army Lt. William Calley and 15 others were charged in connection with the 1968 attack on the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai in which 347 villagers were slain.
On April 22, 1971, the day before he threw away his combat ribbons, Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, delivering a powerful message that Brinkley says convinced many Americans their country was waging an immoral war.
Kerry's testimony was the lead news story on all three networks that evening, making him one of the faces Americans attached to the antiwar movement.
Dressed in his combat fatigues and ribbons, he told Congress that U.S. soldiers had "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads ... randomly shot at civilians ... in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan." He later acknowledged that he did not witness the crimes himself but had heard about them from others.
The speech prompted the Nixon administration to open a file on Kerry, who was placed under FBI surveillance. It also brought him lasting enmity among some Vietnam veterans who say Kerry broad-brushed them as a group of maladjusted, dysfunctional losers.
