Struggle With Conscience Was Gore’s Biggest Vietnam Battle

Albert Gore Jr. was 21 that summer of 1969 when he confronted Vietnam, the draft and an early test of his manhood.

He had just graduated from Harvard, where he joined in anti-war protests that had split college campuses across the country. He had spent his summers on the family farm outside of this small town, and he knew that many of the local boys were heading off to the Army.

Over the next two months Gore would struggle with a decision:

Should he follow his ideals and defy the draft, or join the tens of thousands of other young men gone to war?

On a more personal level, should he refuse to go and risk hurting his father’s next reelection bid to the U.S. Senate, where Albert Gore Sr. was one of the nation’s leading critics of the war? Evading the draft might make his father look unpatriotic.

His search for an answer would take him from the family farm in Tennessee to the doorstep of a Harvard instructor on Cape Cod, Mass. It would plunge him into a series of long, wrenching debates that failed to ease his dilemma.

Finally, it delivered him, about to be drafted, to the federal building in Newark, N.J., where surprised Army recruiters listened as he told them who he was and what he intended to do--sign up.

Those crucial months in 1969 offer insights into the man who would become vice president of the United States--and who now aspires to the presidency.

What emerges is a portrait of a young man discovering the cruel contradictions between his beliefs and sense of duty, between loyalty to family and commitment to a cause. His deliberations show the slow and painstaking approach that has become a trademark of his decision-making style as a political leader.

Gore’s anguish over the decision also provides a glimpse into his unsettled place in the world of privilege; he would not exploit his special advantages but would not fully reject them either.

Unsettled Place Amid Privilege

Many young men with famous names or elite educations--and many without them--were able to avoid the war in Vietnam if not always active duty. In 1969, 21.8 million men from the ages of 18 to 26 were eligible for the draft. About 283,000 were inducted into the armed services that year.

Rather than seek an out, Gore went voluntarily. He became Spc. 5 Gore in Vietnam, where he was stationed with the 20th Engineers Brigade headquarters near Saigon. In some ways, he was one of the guys, playing poker and drinking, smoking cigarettes and sometimes marijuana with his buddies.

But in other ways, he was apart from the fray. He served as a news reporter and not a combat soldier. His reporting duties took him to potentially dangerous spots. But like some other servicemen in support specialties, he was never in actual combat, his fellow soldiers say.

Several of his colleagues remember they were assigned to make sure this son of a prominent politician was never injured in the war. After five months, he returned home at his own request when his job was being phased out.

Nevertheless, Gore the politician over the years sometimes has been inclined to describe his Vietnam days as though he was in the thick of the war.

On the campaign trail today, while he suggests no combat heroics, he nonetheless mentions his service in Vietnam proudly. Addressing 4,000 veterans last month at the national American Legion convention in Anaheim, he spoke of the curse of that war and how “few respected our service, much less welcomed us home.”

But Gore also said, “Some of the greatest times of my whole life were times spent with my buddies in the Army.”

Gore declined to be interviewed for this article.

In the 2000 presidential campaign, the Vietnam draft experience continues to be a benchmark for Gore’s generation of national leaders. The old themes of the war surface so often that it is clear they never left.

John McCain, the son and grandson of Navy admirals, is a Republican senator from Arizona. But he is better known as a war hero; his book about his 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, issued in conjunction with his campaign, is a bestseller.

McCain’s main rival for the Republican nomination, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, missed Vietnam by serving in the Texas Air National Guard--a slot critics say he received through connections from his father, then a U.S. congressman.

Gore’s opponent in the Democratic contest, former Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey, served in the Air Force Reserve from 1967 to 1978 and saw no active duty.

Harvard Brimming With Anti-War Fervor

Gore, the youngest of these candidates, was still in college when public support for the war began to sour. Harvard, like many campuses, was a caldron of anti-war fervor.

John Tyson, one of Gore’s Harvard friends, said he and Gore both signed anti-war petitions in the dining hall, attended rallies and talked for hours about what they saw as the misguided pursuit of an unwinnable conflict.

“He was against the war,” Tyson recalled, “but he wasn’t one of those guys who considered himself a revolutionary, who was against America.” He became “enraged,” Tyson recalled, when some protesters talked about securing some dynamite.

Gore, viewing Vietnam as more than a local conflict, worried about whether it would become a flash point for nuclear war. “He had scope,” Tyson said. He added that Gore “listened to his father. He emulated him.”

In the summer before his senior year, Gore helped his father write his landmark speech against the war at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The senator noted that 25,000 U.S. soldiers--less than half the final death count--had died in Southeast Asia. “What harvest do we reap from their gallant sacrifice?” he asked.

Outside, anti-war protesters clashed with police in what became a major turning point for the peace movement at home.

Martin Peretz, who taught Gore in a seminar on the political culture of post-World War II America, said “very, very few” of Gore’s classmates went into the service. Many sought other ways to stay out of the service.

So few made the journey from Harvard to Vietnam that when one of Gore’s friends, freshman Denmark Groover III, interrupted his studies to join the military, many of his classmates ridiculed him.

Gore wrote his girlfriend, Tipper Aitcheson, that, while he admired his friend’s “courage and rashness,” he did not know whether his own views would allow him to follow Groover’s example.

“It’s wrong, we’re wrong,” he wrote, according to letters published last week in Talk magazine. “A lot of people won’t admit it and never will, but we’re wrong.”

By the time Gore graduated in June 1969, anti-war sentiment drove a hundred angry students to walk out of the commencement ceremony. Others tore up their diplomas; half of the senior class raised clenched fists.

When Gore left school, his student deferment expired. He was staring straight into the draft. Like others opposed to the war, his options were stark. He could apply for conscientious-objector status. He could try to land a spot in a reserve or National Guard unit, although the waiting lists were long. He could flee to Canada or end up in jail.

Many of the sons of Carthage were already in Vietnam. One of them, James H. Wilson, had been killed earlier that year, on Gore’s 21st birthday.

“I don’t want to spend any more time over here than I have to,” Wilson had written in his last letter home. In all, eight young men from Carthage and surrounding Smith County--whose population then was 15,000--died over there.

“This is a small rural county, and there always seemed to be a load of them going, five or six or seven at a time,” said Edward S. Blair, a boyhood chum of Gore’s.

“A lady ran the local draft board, she was the supervisor, and she would send notices out. Then a group of boys would catch the bus at the Trailways station near the old river bridge and go to Nashville for their exams.

“It would have gone down badly had he [Gore] not gone,” said Blair, now the U.S. marshal in Nashville.

But Gore was a product of two worlds: rural Tennessee and political Washington. If the norm for boys from the Volunteer State of Tennessee was to enlist, the standard was much different for the sons of lawmakers.

A report from that time by Congressional Quarterly showed that 234 sons of senators and congressmen had reached draft age during the Vietnam era. Half of them received deferments. Of the rest, only 28 went to Vietnam, 19 into combat.

The subject of privilege was all the more apparent in a hit song in 1969 by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Gore loved rock ‘n’ roll and memorized the lyrics of many songs, including “Fortunate Son.” He told friends the refrain haunted him:

It ain’t me, it ain’t me,

I ain’t no senator’s son, son.

It ain’t me, it ain’t me,

I ain’t no fortunate one, no.

But now was decision time, and Gore began to turn to those closest to him. Sometimes he seemed on the brink of a decision but then would suddenly reach out for more guidance.

A first stop was at the family farm.

Sen. Al Gore Sr., interviewed in a video for use in his son’s current presidential campaign, recalled the visit.

“He and I took a walk back on the farm. Then we came back in here and had lunch.” Suddenly, the father remembered, his son stood up and announced, “I believe I’ll take a walk. Alone.”

“So,” the senator recalled, “he walked to the bluff back of the farm and came in and his mother and I were seated in here, continuing to discuss the matter.

“We asked him and recommended to him to use his own judgment. His mother and I assured him we would support his decision whatever it was. But it was his decision. And I particularly asked him to not take into consideration any political matter as his decision might affect me. Whether he did take that into consideration, I don’t know. I hope not.”

After his solitary stroll, his son walked back into the house and blurted out, “I’ve made up my mind. I’m going. I’ll volunteer tomorrow.”

But he hesitated, and, joined by Tipper, next sought out his former instructor Peretz at his home on Cape Cod.

It was the weekend of the first moonwalk. When Gore wasn’t watching television, he asked Peretz how he could be true to himself without endangering his father’s anti-war position--or the life of someone he knew from Tennessee.

“ ‘My draft board is small,’ ” Peretz quoted Gore as saying. “ ‘If I don’t go, someone I played baseball with or went to church with or shoveled horseshit with will go in my place.’ ”

Peretz, now chairman of New Republic magazine, said he never advised students on how to handle the draft, and Gore left, still uncertain.

Soon after, he took a train to Newark, N.J., where he joined Harvard pal Tyson at a downtown diner. They ate lunch, then talked long enough to get hungry again.

Gore was eating one French fry at a time. Should he go or shouldn’t he?

Abruptly, Gore sprung to his feet, Tyson said. “He was ready.”

They hurried the few blocks to the nearby federal building and up to the Army recruiting station on the fourth floor.

Astonishment at Recruiting Office

Sgt. Dess Stokes ran the office, and he and his recruiters were astonished to see who walked in, he recalled. They all knew of Sen. Gore, especially Stokes, who had already done one tour in Vietnam and, like many soldiers, shared the senator’s opposition to the war.

In the recruiting station, Stokes handed Gore some paperwork and explained how volunteering for the draft, rather than waiting to be inducted, could keep him out of the infantry. Noting that Gore was a Harvard man, Stokes told him he could get into communications, maybe become an Army reporter.

Having reached the moment, Gore stepped away and telephoned his father. When he returned, he signed the papers. He was in the Army.

His two-year hitch was to run until August 1971, and his first assignment after basic training was in the Army media pool at Ft. Rucker, Ala. There he learned to write press releases and short newspaper stories.

Richard Abalos, who bunked with Gore at Ft. Rucker, had a tan 1962 Chevy four-door, and many in the unit would pile in and drive to Panama City, Fla., renting a dilapidated beach house for the weekend. They would play bridge and poker, barbecue steaks and drink cheap beer and wine, including one inexpensive label called Tickle Me Pink.

Gore has admitted that he smoked marijuana in the Army; there was plenty of pot to pass around. “It usually was on the beach in Florida,” said Guenter “Gus” Stanisic. “But hell, the MPs [military police] smoked. Just about everybody in the Army smoked.”

In April 1970, Gore was named Post Soldier of the Month, a citation awarded to soldiers who demonstrated leadership qualities. The honor came with a $50 savings bond.

A month later, in a ceremony at the National Cathedral in Washington, he married Tipper.

By summer, his father--who died last year--was being challenged for his Senate seat by Rep. William Brock, a Chattanooga Republican and supporter of the war.

Brock said that young Gore’s decision to enlist did not appear to help or hurt his father. “I didn’t see any change with what young Albert did,” Brock said.

But the Gore campaign tried its best to show that Sen. Gore, while against the war, was still a patriot. The team produced a television commercial in which the senator rode up on a white horse and told Al, dressed in Army fatigues, “Son, always love your country.”

When Gore received his orders for Vietnam, just five weeks before the November 1970 election, his father announced it publicly: “Like thousands of other Tennessee boys, he volunteered. . . . Like other fathers, I am proud.”

But the orders to Vietnam were delayed, and Gore would not ship out until Christmas. The family believed President Nixon postponed the orders to deny Sen. Gore any political boost from having a son in Vietnam on election day.

After three decades in Congress, Gore lost to Brock by 4% of the vote. And by the end of 1970, his son was in Vietnam.

Gore arrived in Vietnam nearly three years after the Tet Offensive, the so-called turning point in the war. By that time, the U.S. troop withdrawals ordered by Nixon had begun, and South Vietnamese forces were taking over a larger share of the fighting.

But U.S. forces were continuing their bombing campaign against North Vietnam and also conducting raids into Laos and Cambodia. Although both sides had reached a stalemate, the war would drag on several more years.

Though far from the action, young Gore was shaken by what he saw. “When and if I get home from Vietnam,” he wrote his friend Abalos, “I’m going to divinity school to atone for my sins.”

Other soldiers with long experience in Vietnam said that Gore was treated differently from his fellow enlistees. Two of them recalled that before Gore arrived Brig. Gen. Kenneth B. Cooper advised them that a senator’s son would be joining the outfit.

H. Alan Leo said soldiers were ordered to serve as Gore’s bodyguards, to keep him out of harm’s way. “It blew me away,” Leo said. “I was to make sure he didn’t get into a situation he could not get out of. They didn’t want him to get into trouble. So we went into the field after the fact [after combat actions], and that limited his exposure to any hazards.”

Cooper, however, said Gore “didn’t get anything he shouldn’t have.”

Gore covered the 20th Engineers Brigade, based 30 miles northeast of Saigon, as it cleared jungle and built and repaired roads and bridges in the war zone.

In his most ambitious piece, he re-created a battle at a fire support base code-named Blue near the Cambodian border, which a group of Viet Cong had tried to overrun.

“On the night of February 22nd, there was no moon,” Gore wrote. “The men sacked out early as usual, soon after the movie was over--’Bloody Mama’ with Shelley Winters as the maniac murderess--the guards were posted as usual--the password was ‘four.’ ”

‘He Took Risks’ During Tour

Fire Support Base Blue was as close as Gore came to combat. Mike Roche, editor of the engineers’ Castle Courier newspaper, said it took courage to go to the fire base, even if the battle was over.

“He was tanned and he had the bleached-out fatigues and . . . he was doing war-related stories,” Roche said. “He took risks.”

Veterans said a standard tour in Vietnam was 12 months; Gore was out in five. Early releases were not uncommon at the time, though. The 20th Engineers was departing Vietnam, which meant the Army no longer needed a reporter assigned to the brigade.

Gore also was approaching the last months of his two-year commitment. In March, with less than three months in Vietnam, he requested an early release and was told the next day he could leave in May to return to school.

When he left Vietnam, Gore flew to Oakland, along with Army pal Bob Delabar. At the airport bar, they hoisted drinks and parted ways. “We both got smashed,” Delabar remembered. “And it wasn’t on beer.”

Gore enrolled in Vanderbilt University’s divinity school but stayed only a year and left to take a job in Nashville as a reporter for the Tennessean, where he worked for four years.

When the House seat from his dad’s old district opened up in 1976, Gore ran and won. He later was elected to his father’s old Senate seat. The Army and Vietnam came up in his campaigns; he often portrayed his experience as more dangerous than it truly was.

In 1988, running for president, he told Vanity Fair magazine, “I took my turn regularly on the perimeter in these little firebases out in the boonies. Something would move, we’d fire first and ask questions later.”

He told the Washington Post: “I was shot at. I spent most of my time in the field.”

“I carried an M-16 . . . ,” he told the Baltimore Sun. “I pulled my turn on the perimeter at night and walked through the elephant grass and I was fired upon.”

For the Weekly Standard, he described flights aboard combat helicopters. “I used to fly these things with the doors open, sitting on the ledge with our feet hanging down. If you flew low and fast, they wouldn’t have as much time to shoot you.”

Any location in Vietnam was potentially dangerous during the war. But eight men who served there with Gore said in separate interviews that he was never in the middle of a battle. Gore himself has toned down descriptions of his wartime activity during the current campaign; he now emphasizes that he was in Vietnam as a news reporter and not as a combat soldier.

As he runs for the presidency this time, old Army pals sometimes show up at political events. Abalos appeared at a Gore rally in San Antonio; Delabar sat in the front row at the American Legion convention in Anaheim.

His enduring ties to his Army buddies appear to reflect an inner connection between Gore the reluctant soldier and Gore the national politician and presidential candidate.

At the American Legion convention, he told the veterans, “There will always be the bond between who we were and who we are.”

Times researchers John Beckham and Edith Stanley and staff writer Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

How They Served All presidential contenders except for Elizabeth Hanford Dole were eligible for the draft during the Vietnam War. The following are their records, or lack of them, and the reasons:

Republicans

Gary Bauer: No military service; student deferment

Patrick J. Buchanan: None; student, medical deferments

Texas Gov. George W. Bush: Texas Air National Guard; no overseas duty

Dole: None; not subject to draft

Steve Forbes: New Jersey National Guard, 1970-76; no combat duty

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah: None; sole remaining heir deferment

Alan Keyes: None; student deferment, then high draft number

Sen. John McCain of Arizona: Navy pilot; prisoner of war in North Vietnam for 5 1/2 years

*

Democrats:

Former Sen. Bill Bradley: U.S. Air Force Reserve, 1967-78; no active duty

Vice President Al Gore: Army journalist, 1969-71; six months in Vietnam; no combat duty

*

Independent

Sen. Bob Smith of New Hampshire: Navy, 1965-67, including one year in Vietnam; Naval Reserve, 1962-65 and 1967-69; no combat duty

*

Sources: Time/CNN and Houston Chronicle