War Turned Sleepy Hamlet Into a Pivotal Place in Kerry’s Career

For John Kerry in 1969, this was the battlefield: the dark, dense mangrove swamps of the Mekong Delta, with their serpentine waterways and blistering sun and free-roaming bands of Viet Cong guerrillas.

That Feb. 28, just around the canal’s bend, Kerry, then a 25-year-old Navy lieutenant, earned a Silver Star for bravery when he beached his swift boat after it had been ambushed and charged ashore like an infantryman. He killed a Viet Cong who had a loaded B-40 rocket launcher -- and, his crewmen have said, perhaps saved their lives.

No one in Dong Cung remembers Kerry, or knows of him or his political career. Thirty-four years is a long time, and the American War, as it is referred to here, which followed a war against France and the World War II occupation by Japan, is not something people think or talk about anymore.

But Doug Reese, a former Army lieutenant who had been in the February battle with Kerry, remembers. Reese, 56, a Virginia travel consultant specializing in trips to Vietnam, particularly for former U.S. servicemen, returned recently for the seventh time in 15 years to renew acquaintances in a place where he had served as an advisor to South Vietnamese militiamen.

“The area was totally VC, except within the confines of Dong Cung and a couple of villages,” Reese said. “The VC didn’t have to carry their food with them when they moved through here. If they wanted dinner, they just knocked on anyone’s door.”

Reese recalls the Feb. 28 battle essentially as Kerry has recounted it: a brief, fierce firefight with guerrillas protecting a munitions depot. “I remember John later expressing embarrassment” that he had received the Silver Star within a week of the action, an unusually brief interlude, Reese said.

In the delta, then as now, the waterways are life’s blood. Kids travel on them to school, vendors in sampans sell their wares on them, some of the munitions that helped defeat the United States slipped over them after long journeys from Haiphong and Halong Bay in North Vietnam. Until late 1968, virtually by U.S. default, the waterways and the southern delta belonged to the Viet Cong.

Then, two weeks after Kerry got to Vietnam, the United States shifted tactics. The mission of the 50-foot, aluminum-hulled, high-speed swift boats was changed from passive patrolling to drawing enemy fire and engaging the Viet Cong. Kerry went from having one of the safest combat jobs in Vietnam to having one of the most dangerous. Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., chief of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam, later estimated that three of every four swift-boat sailors might have been killed or wounded.

The area around Dong Cung on the Bai Hap River was declared a “free-fire zone” and almost everything that moved was considered a “target of opportunity.” Swift boats raked the shores with .50-caliber machine gun fire on what were described as “harassment and interdiction” missions.

“I was only 7 or 8 then,” said Co Minh Ban, the son of a Viet Cong guerrilla and now Dong Cung’s popularly elected commune chairman. “So I don’t remember much, except how difficult life was. We worked in the rice fields at night because the days were too dangerous. And we moved our houses inland, away from the river banks, looking for safety.”

Although 3,500 sailors served on swift boats during the war, the Ca Mau Peninsula remained largely in the hands of the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong). In the early 1970s, after Kerry had gone home with three Purple Hearts and two medals for bravery and become an antiwar activist, the Americans turned their vessels over to South Vietnam and withdrew. Today, except for some crumbling concrete posts once used for mooring in Ca Mau, there is nothing to suggest the U.S. Navy ever operated here.

“The swift boats came a lot and it was easy to attack them if you had a B-40 or B-41 rocket,” said Vo Hoang Hai, 74, a former Viet Cong. “I don’t think the Americans could have ever defeated us in the delta. They marched in big groups with heavy weapons and long clothes. We went in twos and threes, barefoot, wearing shorts, and we knew how to hide well. The geography was ours.”

Approaching Dong Cung the other day, Reese wondered aloud, “Where did the sleepy hamlet go?” The village he and Kerry had known during the war had spotty electricity, impoverished farmers and fishermen in makeshift homes covered by coconut-palm leaves, one television set and no school because the teacher had fled.

Today, a mammoth seafood-processing plant stands on the rutted road outside Dong Cung. A thousand people from here and neighboring villages work in it preparing locally raised shrimp for export to the United States and other countries. Rooftops bristle with television antennas and homes again line the river banks.

The open air shops on the main street and in the floating sampans are stuffed with produce and merchandise. Under parasols that bring welcome shade, two merchants sell gold jewelry -- a favorite investment for Vietnamese suspicious of banks. U.S. dollars are exchanged freely and ads for Pepsi adorn coffee shop walls. In the last five years, local officials said, the per capita income in Dong Cung (population 1,200) has about doubled to $400 a year.

“I have everything I need today,” said shrimp farmer Truong Minh Minh, a former South Vietnamese soldier who fought here for the U.S.-backed Saigon regime and spent a month after the war in a reeducation camp. “The only thing I’d like is a car, but I’m going to wait to buy one until the road is paved next year.”

Nguyen Anh Xuan, the elementary school teacher, gratefully accepted the notebooks and pencils and crayons Reese had brought from Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, as a gift. She said 99% of the children were in school, adding, “We’re still remote, so life is more difficult than in the cities, but it’s much, much better than before.”

The irony of Dong Cung is not lost on Reese: The Americans had come with well-meaning intentions and promises of stability, security, growing prosperity and ensuring the people’s right to choose local leaders.

For a variety of reasons they could not deliver. It was only after they left, well after, that the goals were largely met, delivered by a new generation of leaders -- the now-grown children of Viet Cong guerrillas whom the Americans had fought.