It had been nearly 20 years since the war, so the helicopter that swept down on the village held no menace. Indeed, the children were so curious that they swarmed around the big chopper. And when the tall American with the deeply lined face emerged from inside, they clamored to get closer.
"Hello, hello. Hey, you No. 1 man," the children called in pidgin to the stranger, tugging at his sleeve and reaching to hold his hand.
Sen. John F. Kerry and the other Americans visiting Vietnam soon were asking the children and their elders a crucial question: Had they seen any other Americans, in recent years?
"You could tell by their expressions," Kerry recalled recently, "it was like, 'Where is this question coming from?' "
It is other landings in Vietnam that have come to dominate the Kerry biography -- dangerous river forays as commander of a Navy swift boat. Those stories recount the young lieutenant's willingness to charge enemy positions; the daring and courage that brought him the Bronze and Silver Stars. And, then, on coming home, the turnabout that made him into an outspoken opponent of the war.
But those close to Kerry say the man running for the Democratic presidential nomination is more precisely defined by his return visits to Vietnam in the 1990s and, especially, the year he spent leading a Senate committee in the wrenching task of pursuing answers to the question: Were American soldiers left behind as captives in Vietnam?
Kerry doggedly questioned onetime enemies, visited once supersecure prisons and fought for consensus on a deeply divided investigative committee.
His willingness to take on that thankless task helped pave the way for the normalization of U.S. relations with Vietnam in 1995.
His work also earned the junior senator from Massachusetts, whose obsession with television publicity once led critics to dub him "live shot," new respect in the Senate for his bipartisanship and his diplomacy.
"This is when he becomes a peacemaker, not just an antiwar advocate," says Thomas Vallely, director of the Vietnam Program at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "He switches gears and says, 'I am not going to be just against something. I am going to deal with the people who are against me and I am going to work this out.' "
Kerry was born into a blue-blood family, and from his earliest days he seemed to invite high expectations. He impressed friends at Yale as so substantial that they ruminated about who among them might serve in his Cabinet, as they fantasized that he one day would become president.
