They were copies of Tour of Duty, Douglas Brinkley’s account of Senator John Kerry’s Vietnam war experiences. Rassmann, 56, could not resist picking up a copy. Some 35 years earlier, Kerry had fished him out of the muddy Bay Hap river in the Mekong Delta after their Swift patrol boat was ambushed by the Vietcong.
Rassmann looked through the book for the incident that earned Kerry a Bronze Star for valour. Sure enough, he found it, starting on page 315. His name was spelt wrong — Rassman — but most of the story was there.
The account started with an exploding mine that knocked the young Green Beret lieutenant from the boat. He thrashed around in the river as Kerry’s boat slowly turned and bullets hissed into the water. Then Kerry’s hand appeared, reaching down to haul him aboard.
“I showed the story to my wife. I nearly started crying,” Rassmann recalled. “After 35 years, you’d think you’d get a grip on yourself.”
Rassmann’s subsequent decision to contact Kerry — and appear beside him as he campaigned in Iowa — would ultimately provoke an extraordinary backlash from other veterans who have since challenged Brinkley’s account of the Bay Hap ambush.
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The result has been a steady drip of allegations centred on the events of March 13, 1969 — and other aspects of Kerry’s Vietnam exploits — that may have made the senator rue the day he decided to draw on his role in the conflict to bolster his credentials to lead America in its war against terror.
It was a humid afternoon when Kerry’s craft, PCF-94, led a flotilla of five Swift boats up the Bay Hap river to deposit a group of Chinese-Vietnamese mercenaries.
The group was approaching fishing nets strung between posts when one of the boats, PCF-3, struck a mine. The explosion lifted the boat out of the water. Many of the American sailors assumed they were in an ambush and nobody disputes they opened fire on the riverbanks. Nor is there disagreement that Kerry’s boat initially gunned its motor and headed away.
After that, consensus shatters. The key issue is whether Kerry came under fire as he turned his boat to rescue Rassmann, who was then working with special forces upriver. Brinkley’s book quotes Kerry’s private journal in which he says he wanted to get out of range to put his men ashore so they could double back on the ambushers.
This version has been challenged, however, in a bestselling book, Unfit for Command, by John O’Neill, who took control of Kerry’s Swift boat after the lieutenant returned to Washington to become a critic of the war. “Kerry fled,” he wrote.
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O’Neill claims sailors on the other boats realised their fire was not being returned, and stopped shooting. “Kerry disappeared several hundred yards away, returning only when it was clear there was no return fire,” he says.
That version is disputed by Kerry and his crew, who have insisted their boat was rocked by a second explosion that injured his right arm. In the injury report that earned him his third Purple Heart — and an automatic ticket home — Kerry blamed a second mine; but Del Sandusky, his helmsman, believes it was an incoming rocket-propelled grenade.
It was the second explosion that knocked Rassmann into the water, but nobody noticed he was missing until Michael Medeiros, another Kerry crewman, spotted him in the water. When Medeiros shouted “man overboard”, Kerry turned his boat around.
Even O’Neill admits that Kerry “did the decent thing” by returning to pick up Rassmann; the crucial question was whether he did it under fire, as his medal citation declares — or whether, as three Swift boat captains claim, there was no enemy fire and the senator invented it when he wrote his report.
Some 35 years later this discrepancy has proved almost impossible to resolve. Rassmann has stuck to his version of events. Wayne Langhofer, a gunner on PCF-43, the boat nearest to Kerry, also backs Kerry. “There was a lot of firing going on,” he said.
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O’Neill and his comrades have refused to withdraw their claims and have been joined by veterans who have questioned some of Kerry’s other Vietnam exploits. The Bay Hap affair has shown how hard it could be for him to rebut them.