VICTORY CELEBRATION: Kerry (seated, center) and the ''Doghunters'' in 1985, after he won his first Senate seat. The Doghunters are a group of about a dozen Vietnam War veterans who marshaled their forces to support the candidate then and have been fixtures on the Kerry campaign circuit ever since.
By JASON ZENGERLE
Two months ago, on the eve of the Georgia presidential primary, John Hurley was crisscrossing the state in a Ford Econoline van, looking for votes -- and for veterans. Hurley, a silver-haired 61-year-old Boston lawyer, is the veterans' coordinator for John Kerry's presidential campaign and like the candidate is a Vietnam vet. Together with five other veterans of that war -- including Max Cleland, the triple amputee and former Georgia senator, and two men who served on a Swift boat that Kerry commanded on the Mekong Delta 35 years ago -- Hurley formed what he called a Veterans Brigade for Kerry, which traveled to nine Georgia cities in four days. Along the way, at small rallies in restaurants and union halls, the brigade championed Kerry as a military hero and a steadfast leader. ''John Kerry saved our lives in Vietnam, and we saved his life,'' Del Sandusky, one of Kerry's former crewmates, told a crowd of about 20 people outside Macon's City Hall on a Sunday afternoon. ''We have a special bond, and we call ourselves the Band of Brothers.''
Veterans emerged as something of a political force at the beginning of the year, in Iowa, when Kerry was down in the polls and looking like an afterthought in the presidential race. As Hurley, Cleland, Sandusky and other veterans trooped through Iowa's snows to visit American Legion halls and to work phone banks, they breathed new life into the campaign. Soon Kerry was surging in the polls. Two days before the caucuses, a former Special Forces officer named Jim Rassmann showed up at a rally in Des Moines to embrace Kerry, who in 1969 saved Rassmann's life in Vietnam, and the stage was set for Kerry's victory in Iowa. A week later, when Kerry won the New Hampshire primary, he dedicated his victory in large part ''to the veterans who marched with us.'' Now, in March, Hurley and a few other vets were barnstorming across Georgia, one of the 10 Super Tuesday states, trying to put the finishing touches on Kerry's remarkable comeback.
On the final day of the Georgia tour, as the brigade traveled to Augusta for a rally at a union hall, Hurley received a call on his cellphone with bad news from the advance man: only 13 veterans had shown up for the event. He placed an urgent phone call back to the campaign's state headquarters. ''We need to get some more veterans,'' he said. By the time the brigade rolled into Augusta, the campaign had managed to round up about a dozen more vets.
After the rally in Augusta, Hurley and the freshly augmented group of 25 or so veterans piled onto a bus for the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Atlanta for another rally, where Kerry himself would be present. Hurley passed out index cards on which he asked each veteran to write his name, his branch of service, the era in which he served and the medals he had earned. I took the opportunity to ask some of the vets why they were supporting Kerry. Most said it was because of Kerry's positions on veterans' issues like pensions and disability benefits, but several veterans confessed that they weren't actually Kerry supporters. Randy Potter, who served in the first gulf war, said he was on the bus because one of his friends had called him that afternoon to ask if he wanted to go to Atlanta to see Kerry speak and, if he did, to bring along his desert-camouflage hat. ''I didn't have any plans for tonight other than watching 'Antiques Roadshow,''' Potter told me, ''so I said sure.''
When the veterans arrived at the downtown concert hall where the rally was being held, they were taken backstage. Just before the candidate arrived, the rally's two masters of ceremonies introduced the veterans as a sort of opening act to hype the crowd. ''On Friday,'' one M.C. said, Senator Max Cleland, Kerry's crewmates ''and other American heroes began a journey across Georgia reaching out to other veterans about John Kerry.'' The other M.C. continued: ''They have just arrived here tonight after logging 1,114 miles on the Band of Brothers tour of Georgia. Here they are, led by Senator Max Cleland. Let's welcome the John Kerry Veterans Brigade!''
Martial music blared over the P.A. system, and Hurley pushed Cleland, in his wheelchair, onto the stage. Parading behind them, wearing their camouflage hats and fatigues, were the two dozen veterans from Augusta who, of course, had joined the Band of Brothers tour just a few hours and 150 miles earlier. Some of them looked a bit startled to be facing more than 1,000 people, but as an announcer listed their medals and the music swelled, Potter and the other veterans got caught up in the excitement, pumping their fists and saluting the crowd, which had risen to its feet and was yelling Kerry's name.
After the rally, I found Potter in the parking lot. What had he thought of the event? ''He's got my vote,'' Potter said, flashing a thumbs up before he disappeared onto the bus for the ride back to Augusta.
Presidential candidates who served in the military have been making political capital out of their wartime experiences since at least 1868, when campaign rallies for Ulysses S. Grant featured speeches and marches by his fellow Union Army veterans. But John Kerry has gone further in this vein than perhaps any presidential candidate in American history, and the prominence of vets in his campaign has become one of its most recognizable tropes. For Kerry, his experience in Vietnam is a political talisman, a ready answer to any and all criticisms leveled against him. Attack him as a wealthy patrician, and he will respond that unlike many of his economic class, he volunteered to go to Vietnam; deride him as aloof, and he will trot out his former crewmates, who offer glowing testimonials about his human touch; paint him as a weak liberal, and he -- or his campaign -- will remind you of his Silver Star, Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Indeed, in a presidential contest being waged while the nation is at war, Kerry likes to point out that he is the only candidate in the race who has the experience of physically leading men into battle.
To Kerry's detractors, though, his Vietnam experience -- specifically his postwar activism as spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War (V.V.A.W.) -- is as much a political vulnerability as an advantage, and the Bush campaign and its allies have repeatedly tried to make an issue of it in this election. ''I remember watching Senator Kerry, back when he was against the war . . . and I was very troubled by the kind of allegations that he hurled against his fellow veterans, saying that they were guilty of all kinds of atrocities,'' Karen Hughes, one of Bush's closest aides, recently said on CNN.
In the battle over the question of Kerry's wartime legacy, the answers that carry the most weight, both sides seem to acknowledge, are those that come from the nation's 26 million military veterans. Earlier this month, a newly formed group calling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth held a news conference in Washington to condemn Kerry's antiwar statements and, even more provocatively, to question whether his three combat wounds were worthy of Purple Hearts. The Kerry campaign immediately responded that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, despite its grass-roots appearance, was ''the ugly face of the Bush attack machine.''
It's true that the group's founder is John O'Neill, a former Swift boat commander who three decades ago was drafted by the Nixon administration to debate Kerry about the war, and it is also true that its publicist is Merrie Spaeth, who worked in the Reagan White House, has ties to Bush and has contributed to the Bush campaign. At the same time, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth consists of about 200 members, many of whom have no connections to the upper echelons of the G.O.P., like a Vietnam vet named Richard O'Mara, who traveled across the country to Washington on his own dime to attend the group's news conference after finding out about it on a veteran-related listserv.
I met O'Mara in March at his home near Monterey, Calif. He is stout and barrel-chested, with a gray beard and a quick laugh, and when I visited him we sat and talked in his living room, where he had a fire going in the fireplace and a scented candle burning on the coffee table. I'd come over to watch archival footage of John Kerry's 1971 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which C-Span was broadcasting that evening. We turned on the TV and saw Kerry, the V.V.A.W. leader, then 27, pose his famous question: ''How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?'' It wasn't long before O'Mara had put down his tea and was gesturing at the giant image of a shaggy-haired Kerry on the screen.
''Lies!'' he practically shouted when Kerry recited a list of atrocities he said American soldiers had confessed to committing in Vietnam. ''Those are lies what he said!'' As Kerry's decades-old testimony was replayed over the next hour, O'Mara grew only angrier. ''Lies, lies, lies,'' he muttered. When Kerry's testimony ended, the C-Span anchor invited viewers to call three 800 numbers -- one for Democrats, one for Republicans and one for veterans. O'Mara grabbed the phone and repeatedly punched in the number for veterans, but he couldn't get through.
O'Mara isn't the only veteran who is angry about the Kerry campaign. Kerry's antiwar activism may have jump-started his political career -- it was only a few weeks after his Senate testimony that Morley Safer asked him on ''60 Minutes,'' ''Do you want to be president?'' -- but it also made Kerry a target for some of the many Vietnam vets who were hurt by the chilly reception they received when they came home from the war. Another Vietnam veteran opposing Kerry is a former Green Beret named Ted Sampley, who was a leading P.O.W.-M.I.A. advocate in the 80's and 90's and was furious with Kerry when a Senate committee headed by Kerry concluded that there were probably no living P.O.W.'s or M.I.A.'s in Vietnam. Sampley now runs a Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry Web site that accuses Kerry of a litany of sins that go well beyond his antiwar activities, from the debatable to the ludicrous -- from claims that Kerry engineered an early transfer out of Vietnam by putting in for three Purple Hearts he didn't deserve to charges that he committed war crimes. As soon as Sampley put up the Web site in late January, those charges spread like wildfire on veteran listservs and other veteran-related Web sites.
O'Mara, when we first met, wanted to talk about Kerry's three Purple Hearts, which, per Navy policy, allowed Kerry to cut short his Swift boat tour by eight months. He led me into a small study, where perched on an antique wood table he keeps a plastic model of a Swift boat. Like Kerry, O'Mara served on a Swift boat in Vietnam, so he knows better than most the dangers Kerry faced. (The admiral in charge of the Swift boats once calculated that ''Swifties,'' as the sailors on these boats were called, had a 75 percent chance of being killed or wounded.) But O'Mara wasn't inclined to give Kerry any credit. ''He was only on the boat for four months,'' he said. Using the model as a visual aid, he explained how he believed the wound to Kerry's arm, which earned him his first Purple Heart, came from brass casings discharged from the boat's two 50-caliber machine guns. ''That was a very common thing on the boats,'' he said. ''Brass burns were just part of the norm.'' He theorized that the second Purple Heart -- which Kerry received for a wound to his leg -- resulted from Kerry's banging his thigh on a door. And the third Purple Heart? ''That's anybody's guess,'' he said. (Even after Kerry, a month later, released military and medical records showing that his wounds were more severe than brass burns or a bruised leg, O'Mara refused to relent. ''I'm convinced his first Purple Heart came from a self-inflicted wound,'' he said.)
When I first asked O'Mara why he was so opposed to Kerry, he told me that it was because of how Kerry had made him and other veterans feel after the war. ''There were a number of years where I didn't tell many people I was a Vietnam veteran,'' he said. ''I was worried they'd think I was a monster.'' O'Mara doesn't have those fears anymore. His pickup truck is decorated with Vietnam veteran bumper stickers, and he carries in his wallet a shrunk-down copy of his DD-214 form, the standard military discharge document, just in case anyone ever challenges him on his status.
Later, when I asked O'Mara if he thought being a Vietnam veteran still carried a stigma, he conceded that it didn't. Indeed, it was an identity he wore with pride. But the more he talked about Kerry, the more it became clear that he viewed Kerry as a threat to that identity. If Kerry becomes the first Vietnam veteran elected to the White House, he said, Kerry will come to symbolize all Vietnam veterans. ''I didn't come back from Vietnam and join the antiwar movement,'' O'Mara told me. ''I didn't come back and denounce my country in the harshest terms.'' It went without saying, but then O'Mara said it anyway: ''I don't think Kerry is a typical Vietnam vet.''
After the news conference for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, O'Mara told me that it was only the beginning of his activism: he planned to go back to Washington later this month for an anti-Kerry veterans' rally at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. ''This is one of the most important things I've ever been involved in,'' he said.
The anti-Kerry movement among veterans is a relatively recent development, but mobilizing vet support for Kerry dates back to 1984 and his first Senate campaign. That year, Kerry's opponent in the Democratic primary was James M. Shannon, a congressman from the working-class city of Lawrence, Mass. It was a hard-fought primary, and things got particularly nasty at a debate late in the campaign when Shannon, who did not serve in Vietnam, criticized Kerry for fighting in a war he didn't believe in. In their final debate, Kerry demanded that Shannon apologize for the remark. Shannon refused, telling Kerry, ''That dog won't hunt.''
Thus were born the Doghunters, a group of about a dozen Vietnam veterans, including John Hurley, who rallied to Kerry's side. Hurley first met Kerry in 1970, after both men had returned from Vietnam and Hurley was attending Boston College Law School; the two veterans bonded and became friends. By helping to create the Doghunters, Hurley made himself an indispensable part of the Kerry political machine. ''We were enraged that Shannon thought that going to Vietnam was optional,'' Hurley recalled recently, ''as if all those guys who had their names on the Wall had a choice.'' The Doghunters stalked Shannon across the state and disrupted his events. When Kerry narrowly beat Shannon, many on Kerry's staff credited the Doghunters.
Hurley and the Doghunters were fixtures in Kerry's Senate campaigns. In 1990, after Kerry's Republican opponent, Jim Rappaport, criticized the senator for an insufficiently hawkish response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the Doghunters heckled Rappaport at news conferences. During the 1996 campaign, The Boston Globe ran a column questioning Kerry's actions in the battle for which he won a Silver Star. Hurley was part of an effort, involving thousands of phone calls, to track down some of Kerry's crewmates, most of whom Kerry hadn't spoken to since 1969, and invite them to Boston for a reunion -- and a news conference to offer their eyewitness accounts of Kerry's valor in the battle in question.
It was only natural, then, that in late 2002 Kerry asked Hurley to head up a Veterans for Kerry effort in the presidential campaign. The idea of a Democratic presidential candidate reaching out to veterans in this day and age was unorthodox: Bill Clinton, who dodged the draft, did not actively court veterans in either of his campaigns; even Al Gore, who did serve in Vietnam, didn't have a veterans' desk on his campaign until a few months before the November election, and then it consisted of just one paid staff member, a Vietnam veteran named Tom Keefe, who claims that he was mostly ignored. But Hurley was undaunted by this recent history. ''There's a sense that the veterans' community is so big that it's unorganizable,'' he says. ''But no one's ever tried on this scale before.'' His efforts to date have paid off: nearly 17,000 veterans have signed up as potential volunteers on a special Kerry Web site for vets, and the campaign plans to have Veterans for Kerry operations in all 50 states.
One of the most ardent veterans for Kerry is Bobby Hanafin, whom I visited not long ago at his home in the shadow of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. A military man through and through, Hanafin enlisted in the Army when he was just 17 and later spent 17 years as a military intelligence officer in the Air Force, finishing his career with a stint in the Pentagon.
Since 1980, Hanafin had been voting for Republican presidential candidates, but a few days before the Iowa caucuses he traveled to that state to man phone banks the Kerry campaign had set up for its war veteran supporters to call Iowa vets. (''A supporter calling a supporter is like a telemarketing call, but a vet calling a vet is like a friend-to-friend call,'' Hurley says.) It was only a six-hour drive from Dayton to Davenport, where the campaign had arranged for Hanafin to stay with a college professor, but for Hanafin the journey was epic. He suffers from a disability -- ''I'd rather not go into the details,'' he said, ''but suffice it to say it's service-related'' -- that requires him to take 10 medications a day, some of which prevent him from driving. To get to Iowa, he had to have his wife accompany him -- and even then it was a struggle. But for Hanafin, Kerry's surprise victory made the trip well worth the effort. ''When we pulled out of the driveway to go to Iowa, I had a premonition that a miracle was going to happen,'' Hanafin said. ''And I saw one.''
After Iowa, Hanafin decided that he didn't have it in him to make many more campaign trips, so these days he volunteers for Kerry from the comfort of his home. There, using a D.S.L. line the campaign pays for, he moderates the veterans' section of Kerry's Internet forum and ''infiltrates'' other veterans' sites to post pro-Kerry messages. ''You could say I'm John Kerry's secret weapon,'' Hanafin said.
A large man with a jowly face and an eager demeanor, Hanafin proudly showed me his copy of Douglas Brinkley's book about Kerry's Vietnam experience, ''Tour of Duty,'' which Brinkley, Kerry and one of Kerry's crewmates had signed for him in Iowa. But as Hanafin explained his passion for Kerry, he didn't dwell on Vietnam or Kerry's service there. Instead, he talked mostly about Kerry's positions on veterans' issues and how he believed the Massachusetts senator would treat vets better than the Bush administration has. Most important to Hanafin was the issue of concurrent receipt, or what he called the ''disabled-veterans tax'' -- a provision that prohibits disabled vets like Hanafin from collecting a full military pension on top of their V.A. disability benefits. Kerry has pledged to grant disabled veterans ''full concurrent receipt'' -- in other words, he would allow them to collect full disability and full retirement -- which for Hanafin would mean an additional $1,500 a month. ''Veterans just want the things the government promised them when they went into the military,'' he said.
Indeed, in its efforts to court veterans, the Kerry campaign is offering them things much more tangible than the candidate's biography. In the past three years, many veterans have grown increasingly frustrated with the Bush administration's approach to veterans' issues; in February, Edward S. Banas Sr., the commander in chief of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, went so far as to label Bush's proposed V.A. budget for 2005 a ''disgrace and a sham.'' The Kerry campaign has sought to capitalize on this discontent. Kerry has denounced the Bush administration's attempts to rein in spending by increasing user fees and prescription-drug co-payments for some veterans in the V.A. health care system. Kerry has also pledged to remove veterans' health care from the discretionary budget process entirely and turn it into a mandatory federal entitlement like Social Security and Medicare -- a move that the Congressional Budget Office estimates could cost $211 billion over a nine-year period. ''As much as the vet-to-vet, you-served-I-served kind of thing is important,'' one Kerry aide says, ''the thing that matters most to veterans is Kerry's track record and his position on veterans' issues.''
I saw this firsthand at a veterans' town hall meeting in Columbia, S.C., just before that state's primary, where I watched the assembled veterans politely applaud when Kerry spoke about the bonds he forged with his crewmates in Vietnam. But when Kerry attacked President Bush for the ''41,000 veterans waiting some several months to see a doctor for the first time to get their prescription drugs signed off on'' and the ''90,000 veterans waiting to get into the V.A.'' and the ''400,000 veterans'' who ''have been denied access to the V.A.,'' the veterans let out raucous cheers.
Will Kerry's support from veterans be significant enough to matter in November? In terms of pure numbers, probably not. Although the nation's 26.4 million veterans do constitute a sizable voting bloc -- making up about 12 percent of the adult population and accounting for an even greater share of the electorate in crucial states like New Hampshire and Washington -- most of that voting bloc is likely to belong to President Bush. ''Veterans tend to be conservative, they tend to be Republicans,'' says Peter Feaver, a professor at Duke University who studies the political culture of the military. ''Kerry will probably be able to make some inroads because of his own service and because of the anger some veterans have at the Bush administration. I expect that he will do better among veterans than Gore-Lieberman or Clinton-Gore. But I still don't think he will get more veteran votes than Bush.'' Indeed, in a national survey that Feaver and his colleague Christopher Gelpi conducted in April, veterans favored Bush over Kerry 57 to 36 percent. (In the same poll, Kerry and Bush were tied among nonveterans, with 46 percent each.)
But Kerry doesn't necessarily have to win a majority of the veterans' vote for veterans to help him in November. That's because the veterans who do support Kerry offer more than just their votes; they offer Kerry their symbolic power. Just as the Bush campaign often surrounds the president with blacks and Hispanics -- not because it thinks this will get Bush many black or Hispanic votes but because it hopes that this inclusive gesture will make the president more appealing to moderate whites -- the Kerry campaign recognizes that the veterans who visibly and vocally support Kerry, even those who do so for the most prosaic reasons, send a powerful message to nonveterans about Kerry's military experience. Which is why the campaign goes to great lengths to surround Kerry with his veteran supporters at every opportunity, having groups of them greet the candidate on the tarmac when his plane touches down for a campaign stop and inviting them onstage at rallies and speeches. ''Veterans are not only voters, they're centers of influence,'' says Rick O'Dell, a Vietnam veteran and Democratic activist who is organizing veterans for the Kerry campaign. ''When you get veterans on the side of a candidate, they're going to influence a lot of other voters.''
And yet in a presidential campaign that has made a fetish out of veterans, some vets feel they are being overlooked. The pro-Kerry hagiographers and the anti-Kerry demonizers have left little room for those Vietnam veterans who, like Kerry, protested the war with radical words and actions but who, unlike Kerry, never returned from the ideological extreme to which the war had driven them. Affected by their military experiences in ways that don't just influence but in fact dominate their lives today, these veterans, in the context of this presidential campaign, are simply too small in number to be courted for their votes and too radical in their views to be courted for their symbolism.
One weekend not long ago, I went to see a Vietnam vet named Brian Willson in Humboldt County, Calif. It was a warm Saturday afternoon, and Willson, who is an active member of the local chapter of Veterans for Peace, was leading a march to protest the war in Iraq. Willson has long, white hair and pale, waxy skin, and though with two prosthetic legs he is fully ambulatory, he prefers to travel on his three-wheeled, hand-powered bike. As he slowly rode through the streets of downtown Eureka, the county seat, more than 3,000 protesters, including about two dozen of his fellow veterans, marched behind him.
Willson first encountered Kerry in 1971 at a V.V.A.W. protest in Washington. When Kerry gave his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Willson watched from the hearing-room doorway and wept. ''My whole experience as a Vietnam veteran was validated in that speech,'' he told me. Years later, when Willson was living in Massachusetts and Kerry ran for the Senate, Willson became a Doghunter.
But as Kerry moved away from his antiwar radicalism, Willson did not. Indeed, Willson's disability was caused not by a wound suffered in Vietnam but by an incident in 1987, when, protesting American policy in Nicaragua, he tried to stop a train at a naval weapons station in California. The train ran him over, mangling both of his legs below the knee. Kerry, by contrast, voted to authorize humanitarian aid to the contras.
After Kerry voted to grant President Bush the authority to use force in Iraq in October 2002, Willson wrote him an open letter in which he stated that ''veterans have reorganized throughout the nation'' as part of a re-energized peace movement and warned, ''Know that we shall work hard for your defeat.''
When the march arrived at the town square in Eureka, Willson addressed the crowd. ''The power of the people is the antidote to the power elite,'' he said. ''But we have to recognize that we have the power and exercise it every day, every day, every day from now on!''
Earlier, Willson told me that his marginal role in this election ''was kind of depressing to me,'' but after his speech he was fired up. As we were driving back from the march in his electric-powered pickup truck, Willson delivered another peroration, only this one was not his own. Speaking from memory, he recited the last lines of Kerry's Senate testimony from 1971: ''So, when 30 years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say 'Vietnam' and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.'' Willson paused and looked out the window. ''I'm still working for the turning of America,'' he said. ''I'm still living by John Kerry's words.''
Jason Zengerle is an associate editor at The New Republic.
