Prologue (excerpt)Page 2That Kerrey was even considering such a bold protest was in itself remarkable. He came of age after World War II, raised on the Great Plains in a Nebraska family that cherished traditional American values. "This boy grew up patriotic, raised in an America flush with victory and certain beliefs," Kerrey said. "He never doubted that his country and its leaders were right and good. For him, patriotism was never a choice. It was simply an instinct." By the time he departed for Vietnam as a 25-year-old Naval officer, he felt as if he could breathe fire. "I was ready to go at Hanoi with a knife in my teeth," he said. Kerrey chose perhaps the most arduous and dangerous of all military specialties,By the time [Kerrey] departed for Vietnam...he felt as if he could breathe fire. the Navy's SEALs—elite commandos trained to fight from the sea, air and on land. Over the years they became cultural icons, lionized in the press for their daring missions, and portrayed as fearless, calculating killers by Hollywood. Their heroic luster would stay with Kerrey, and contribute greatly to his star quality as a politician. In fact, his second combat mission of the war, which led to his Medal of Honor, would become, in retrospect, a well-polished memory. The March 1969 raid on a Vietcong-held island in the Bay of Nha Trang began flawlessly but ended in disaster when Kerrey's team lost the element of surprise-the most critical requisite for commando operations. An exploding grenade cost him the lower part of his right leg. And while Kerrey spent months in a Philadelphia Navy hospital learning to walk again, the president now standing just a few feet from him promised, but never delivered, an end to the war. The country seemed to be spiraling out of control. Two weeks before his trip to the White House, Nixon had ordered the invasion of Cambodia. Ten days before the ceremony, National Guard troops had opened fire on students at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four and injuring nine. The Cambodian adventurism and campus bloodshed both enraged him. Despite his misgivings about Nixon, Kerrey yielded to his father's wishes. He had decided to at least show up, even though he regarded the ceremony as part patriotic pageantry and part political theater to boost an unpopular war. "I felt like I was being used, you know, flagged," Kerrey said, "to take the edge off this horrible experience. The right thing in 1968 was to negotiate an end to the war. We'd have gotten a hell of a lot more in 1968 than we got in 1973. And [Nixon's secretary of state] Henry Kissinger gets a Nobel Peace Prize for the damn thing? What shame does he have? And likewise with Nixon and other political leaders."
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