Tour of Duty by Douglas Brinkley

Author:Douglas Brinkley [Brinkley, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The bus ride back to the Tan San Nhut airport was bittersweet for Kerry, who had no idea when he might see motorbikes, girls, and cafés again. The quick brush with civilization made him ponder just what civilization meant to him anymore. All the accustomed, genteel people, places, and things he cared about—Julia Thorne, Dick Pershing, his parents, Yale, sports, Cape Cod, Groton House, and the rest—seemed somehow lost to him forever. For the first time he wondered how, if he survived Vietnam, he would ever be able to fit back into society again.

Back in An Thoi, Swift officers had to learn not to grow too attached to particular boats or crews because they were often reassigned to other available PCFs as soon as those they were used to had gone in for repairs. That is precisely what happened to Tedd Peck, whose PCF-57 went in for an overhaul the same day as the Saigon summit, after which he was assigned to replace Lieutenant Tom Heritage on PCF-94. “I was ticked off, because the M-60s on the 57 boat had never fired tracers; they were in mint condition,” Peck remembered. “I was leery of the 94.” And he wouldn’t be on it for long. A week after he got the boat, on January 29, PCF-94 was tied up to U.S.S. Terrell County, an LST aboard which Peck and his crew were all sleeping soundly. At five o’clock, the morning still blanketed in predawn darkness, the 94’s new skipper received orders to go out on a river raid. “I screamed, ‘Goddamnit!’ ” Peck recalled, “and told my men we had to go.”

Paul Connolly, a desk commander at Cat Lo, had ordered six Swifts, one with him aboard, up the Cua Lon River. Wanting to see some action for himself, once in motion Commander Connolly ordered two of the PCFs to go up one of the first canals they encountered. Boom! Boom! Boom! came the echoes from up the canals, some from explosions that left one of the Swifts badly damaged. “I thought this was going to be a short day,” Peck reminisced in a 2003 interview from his home in Arizona. “It was obvious to me that Connolly, a desk officer, would want to get the hell out of the river system. And certainly there would be no more canals to explore.”

But Peck’s instincts proved wrong. As the six Swifts proceeded up the Cua Lon, Connolly again ordered a pair to head up yet another canal to look for signs of Viet Cong. Lieutenant Bob Hildreth’s PCF-72 and Lieutenant Tedd Peck’s PCF-94 got the call. Hildreth cleverly seized the back-seat, immediately radioing: “Ninety-four boat, you go first.” Peck had seniority over Hildreth, but pride kept him from dickering over the protocol. “Aye, aye” he replied, only a little snidely, and started up the dangerous canal. About two hundred yards into the waterway, Peck claimed he had an out-of-body experience, actually feeling his spirit leave his corporeal form. “I was resigned to the fact that I was going to die,” Peck explained.

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