Apparently, some readers of Atlantic Monthly are skeptical of the final passage in Douglas Brinkley’s laudatory book excerpt on John Kerry’s Vietnam experience that appeared in the December issue:
A whole line of mercenaries had already formed in the ditch, all shooting madly back at what seemed like nothing. However the whiz of bullets over our heads was clearly lethal. And Bac She De lay in front of us crumpled in the poncho while this holocaust went on. His feet were sticking out of one end and I couldn’t take my eyes off the boots—one going one way and the other the opposite direction—and the whole thing just silhouetted where he had been dropped suddenly when the shooting began. The alive shooting over the dead to remain alive.
I was amazed at how detached I was from the whole scene. I just lay in the ditch, not firing because I wanted to save ammo and because I couldn’t see what I was firing at and I thought about what was happening in New York at that very moment and if people really felt that I was doing something worthwhile while they went down to Schrafft’s and had another ice cream sundae or while some fat little old man who made another million in the past months off defense contracts was charging another $100 call girl to his expense account. And then, when the shooting stopped, I came back to where I was.
One writer thinks Kerry made this up to sound philosophical, noting that it’s amazingly evocative of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. More telling was this:
Ordinary combat officers, when pinned down by enemy fire, tighten their sphincters and wonder 1) How the hell am I going to get out of this? and 2) What’s the best thing I can do now for my men and my mission?
One wonders what Lieutenant Kerry’s men wondered while he wondered about higher matters.
No joke.
I’m not sure what to make of the passage. My guess is it’s one of those things where, in hindsight, Kerry the war protestor found a situation in which Kerry the warrior found himself in quite absurd. Maybe Kerry thinks that he should have thought about something like that in that circumstance. I can’t imagine he actually did.
Hat tip: Craig Henry
