He sidestepped the draft by applying to the highly competitive Navy Officer Candidate School in Newport, R.I. As U.S. troop levels escalated and fierce fighting flared, college graduates flooded the Navy OCS with applications because duty aboard a ship was seen as far safer than being a junior officer in the Army or Marines.
But sea adventure also held allure, and Kerry shared the noblesse oblige of his social set. "In our circle, duty was a strong consideration," said Kerry intimate George Butler. "He knew what was expected."
The sons of New England's elite prep schools emulated fathers and heroes. Richard Kerry had been a World War II test pilot. John F. Kennedy, whose path Kerry talked of following and whose initials he shared, won renown on PT-109 in the South Pacific.
On training duty off Vietnam's coast in 1968 aboard the missile frigate Gridley, Kerry fixated on the 50-foot aluminum boats on patrol nearby. Shallow Water Inshore Fast Tactical craft were speedy oil rig transports modified with grenade launchers and .50-caliber machine guns.
"We were just enamored of those boats," said former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy Wade Sanders, who trained with Kerry. "It was cool; it was what Kennedy did."
Avoiding brutal warfare was also a factor, Kerry has admitted. Swift boat training prepared him for coastal duty, targeting junks and sampans that supplied the Vietcong. He expected a gentleman's war, with skirmishes and some casualties, not an infantryman's grinding combat.
But by his November arrival at the U.S. base at Cam Ranh Bay, Swift boat duty had grown hazardous. Frustrated at the Vietcong's ease at moving through the Mekong's web of rivers and canals, the Navy was probing inland. The Navy's new top officer in Vietnam, Vice Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., had launched Operation Sealords, a plan that relied on Swift boats to seek out and destroy enemy vessels and hamlets.
Nosing past rice paddies and elephant grass, the noisy, thin-hulled boats were vulnerable to ambush by guerrillas with rocket launchers. "People started getting wounded, and boats were getting shot up. They needed a steady stream of replacements," recalled Stephen Hayes, a former Swift boat officer.
Kerry arrived "intent on living up to standards." But "from my first week in country," he said, he was disturbed by the "lack of taking territory. Strategically, it didn't make a lot of sense."
