October 2004, Week 1
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October 2004, Week 1
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Friday October 1 , 2004 I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received. Antonio Porchia, writer (1886-1968) Another episode in: The Trip From Hell: Christy got in the car today and the transmission was acting up again. She said; "How much money can we get from the credit union, I want to buy a new car... a mini van." I found out we have enough available but I asked her to go down to the local Transmission shop and see what they have to say. He said "Fix it, it'd be a shame not to." She took it into Redding (I don't like that city, got lost there last month) and took it into an ATRA sponsored Transmission Shop and he adjusted something and said "You won't have any more trouble" She took it back to Pat's... we'll see. Grandma is still incapacitated till at least Sunday. She will be going in tomorrow to have the packing removed from her nose. She is supposed to remain resting through Sunday and be reevaluated... Grandma will want to leave Sunday, Christy will be just as adamant that they stay... it will be interesting to see who wins... my money is on Christy. Shopping today... it took from about 0900 to 1300 to get through all the chores. Christian got here early I don't get much free time...
I read several articles today but this
one
Saturday October 2 , 2004 At bottom, every man knows perfectly well that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time. Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900) "B" has been invited to his sister's baby shower... most of his family will be there, she just had her first baby, she is 2 years older than "B"... I took him down but I couldn't get hold his sister... we waited 45 minutes in their driveway, there were about 15 people lolling about but no one would acknowledge us... exasperating. "B"'s sister Alecia brought him home... he had a good time. He told me that he had met two of his aunts and even visited their homes, he also mentioned that one of his brothers is dead and another is in jail... He has an enormous family, 10 kids, his mother is one of many and there were even more Aunts and Uncles on his father's side. Christy took Grandma back to the Dr. she appears to be OK... I watched Rudy Giuliani in "Spin Alley" Thursday Night raving about George's performance, calling it masterful and then he derided Kerry as being confused and contradictory. Huh? was he watching the same debate I was? What makes a man, who makes obviously delusional and partisan statements, presume he can still be considered to have credibility in anything else he does. If you can look at a train wreck and then go on TV and call it a parade you have a problem. When millions of other people saw the same thing and have their own opinion they have to wonder whether or not anything you have ever said or done has any credibility. I expect that sort of self-serving, fanatical, desperate rhetoric from Baker, Rove, Cheney and their ilk but not from people who have tried to position themselves as reasonable men. From my friend John in Nottingham; "Comment on the BBC recently is that the Shrub is simply totally Beyond the Pale (look up Irish history). (I have known the meaning of this phrase for a long time, it never occurred to me to look up the etymology of it though...The 'The Pale' is a reference to the general sense of safe boundary, such as the English Pale in Ireland, specifically that area around Dublin that the English controlled, which bore that name; Being beyond it means 'Out of his element'; ventured into an unsafe area... Pete) I think John is right, George was over his head, it's been so long since someone actually called him to task to his face that he was completely out of his comfort zone. He looked angry, bordering on apoplectic a few times, it seemed like he was saying to himself; How dare anyone hold me accountable for my decisions, impugn my righteousness! I think my cousin in Missouri said it best (I am paraphrasing) "My goodness, what can anyone see in that man, he looked like a cornered rat!" John said: Kerry has got to stop behaving like a Senator if he wants even a faint chance of winning. Who the hell wants an aristocrat in charge? Aristos just don't relate to the general population. I'm not sure what an Aristocrat is... I don't think of Kerry as one, he isn't an elitist, that label seems to suit Bush better. Bush puts on the "Common Man" mantle when it suits him. Very few snippets of the 'Real Bush' are allowed to escape the privacy/security/secrecy bubble surrounding Bush, he is arrogant (We saw that in the debate) he is rude, he is delusional... I thought Kerry did pretty good, he was concise because the format demanded it, He didn't have enough time to say all he wanted and poor bush seemed to be hard pressed to fill 90 seconds with his rhetoric... Bush answered every question with the pat phrases he memorized and was extremely flustered when he was thrown a curve-ball by Kerry. Bush looked bored and distracted when Kerry was speaking, he didn't appear to be listening to him at all, Kerry was absorbing every word and scribbling franticly... while Bush seemed to be killing time till he had to 'perform' again, like a 7 year old waiting for his cue in the school play. Sunday October 3 , 2004 The Trip From Hell: Christy took off from Warnersville, Pa. at 09:00 her time.. she made it to Nashville at 23:00... I took Calie and Monica to the movies, they met up with some pals and watched Shark Tales... they thought it was a good movie... The boys and I got some burgers and rushed home to get Christian's clothes and drop him off at McDonalds to be picked up by the car-pool. I can't seem to shake this damn cough... it's nasty... keeps me awake. "Unfriendly Fire " This is a powerful article, if you have the time please read it. Roy Hoffmann is the fella that started the SBSFT... I've known guys like him all my life. Honorable men who are thrown into jobs too big for them. They do their damnedest to get the job done by looking solely at the goal and not concerning themselves about the methods or the people in the trenches... He did his job... he was hated, despised and feared by his men. He will never be able to see himself as others see him and will fight to his death defending his actions... what a waste. What a shame... his inability to see that he might have made a mistake in his life may cost another honorable man the Presidency.
October 1, 2004America's Lost Respect
It's unclear whether Mr. Bush misspoke, or whether he really is that clueless. But his claim was in keeping with his re-election strategy, demonstrated once again in last night's debate: a president who has done immense damage to America's position in the world hopes to brazen it out by claiming that failure is success. Three years ago, the United States was both feared and respected: feared because of its military supremacy, respected because of its traditional commitment to democracy and the rule of law. Since then, Iraq has demonstrated the limits of American military power, and has tied up much of that power in a grinding guerrilla war. This has emboldened regimes that pose a real threat. Three years ago, would North Korea have felt so free to trumpet its conversion of fuel rods into bombs? But even more important is the loss of respect. After the official rationales for the Iraq war proved false, and after America failed to make good on its promise to foster democracy in either Afghanistan or Iraq - and, not least, after Abu Ghraib - the world no longer believes that we are the good guys. Let's talk for a minute about Afghanistan, which administration officials tout as a success story. They rely on the public's ignorance: voters, they believe, don't know that even though the United States promised to provide Afghanistan with both security and aid during its transition to democracy, it broke those promises. It has allowed the country to slide back into warlordism - and allowed the Taliban to make a comeback. These days, Mr. Bush and other administration officials often talk about the 10.5 million Afghans who have registered to vote in this month's election, citing the figure as proof that democracy is making strides after all. They count on the public not to know, and on reporters not to mention, that the number of people registered considerably exceeds all estimates of the eligible population. What they call evidence of democracy on the march is actually evidence of large-scale electoral fraud. It's the same story in Iraq: the January election has become the rationale for everything we're doing, yet it's hard to find anyone not beholden to the administration who believes that the election, if it happens at all, will be anything more than a sham. Yet Mr. Bush and his Congressional allies seem to have learned nothing from their failures. If Mr. Bush is returned to office, there's every reason to think that they will continue along the same disastrous path. We can already see one example of this when we look at the question of torture. Abu Ghraib has largely vanished from U.S. political discussion, largely because the administration and its Congressional allies have been so effective at covering up high-level involvement. But both the revelations and the cover-up did terrible damage to America's moral authority. To much of the world, America looks like a place where top officials condone and possibly order the torture of innocent people, and suffer no consequences. What we need is an effort to regain our good name. What we're getting instead is a provision, inserted by Congressional Republicans in the intelligence reform bill, to legalize "extraordinary rendition" - a euphemism for sending terrorism suspects to countries that use torture for interrogation. This would institutionalize a Kafkaesque system under which suspects can be sent, at the government's whim, to Egypt or Syria or Jordan - and to fight such a move, it's up to the suspect to prove that he'll be tortured on arrival. Just what we need to convince other countries of our commitment to the rule of law. Most Americans aren't aware of all this. The sheer scale of Mr. Bush's foreign policy failures insulates him from its political consequences: voters aren't ready to believe how badly the war in Iraq is going, let alone how badly America's moral position in the world has deteriorated. But the rest of the world has already lost faith in us. In fact, let me make a prediction: if Mr. Bush gets a second term, we will soon have no democracies left among our allies - no, not even Tony Blair's Britain. Mr. Bush will be left with the support of regimes that don't worry about the legalities - regimes like Vladimir Putin's Russia. By Jim Lobe WASHINGTON - Three years of the Bush administration's "war on terrorism" appears to have reduced the appetite of the US public and its leaders for unilateral military engagements, according to a major survey released on Tuesday by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (CCFR). Indeed, the survey, the latest in a quadrennial series going back to 1974, found that key national-security principles enunciated by President George W Bush since the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon are opposed by strong majorities of both the general public and the elite. While supporting the idea that Washington should take an active role in world affairs, more than three of every four members of the public reject the notion that the United States "has the responsibility to play the role of world policeman" and four of every five say Washington is currently playing that role "more than it should be". In addition, overwhelming majorities of both the public and the elite said that the most important lesson of September 11 is that the nation needs to "work more closely with other countries to fight terrorism" as opposed to "act more on its own". Similar majorities of both the public and leaders rejected Bush's notion of preemptive war. Only 17% of the public and 10% of leaders said that war was justifiable if the "other country is acquiring weapons of mass destruction [WMD] that could be used against them at some point in the future". Fifty-three percent of the public and 61% of leaders said that war would be justified only if there is "strong evidence" the country is in "imminent danger" of attack. For about 25% of both the public and the leaders, war would be justified only if the other country attacks first. The CCFR survey, which because of its rich detail and consistency over the past 30 years is generally taken more seriously than others that are conducted more sporadically, queried nearly 1,200 randomly selected members of the public during the second week of July. A second survey of 450 "leaders with foreign-policy power, specialization, and expertise" - including US lawmakers or their senior staff, university faculty, journalists, senior administration officials, religious leaders, business and labor executives, and heads of major foreign-policy organizations or interest groups - posed the same questions to determine where there may be gaps between the views of the elite and the public at large. The last CCFR survey was taken in 2002, and normally the next one would not be held until 2006. But the council decided to commission one for 2004, in part due to "the significant role foreign-policy issues are playing in American political life and the 2004 presidential election", according to Marshall Bouton, CCFR's president. The council also collaborated with similar efforts by partner organizations in Mexico and South Korea, the conclusions of which will be released in the coming days. While terrorism and other security threats still loom large in the public's mind, according to this year's survey, "there is a lowered sense of threat overall compared to 2002", when foreign-policy concerns, particularly terrorism, topped the list of foreign-policy issues that most concerned the public. "Protecting American jobs" was the most frequently cited goal of foreign policy in the 2004 poll (78% called it a "very important" goal), followed by preventing the spread of nuclear weapons (73%), and combating international terrorism (71%). For the elite respondents, on the other hand, nuclear non-proliferation and terrorism topped the list, while protecting US jobs ranked eighth out of 14 options. As for "critical threats", three out of four public respondents chose international terrorism, but that was down 10 points from two years ago. Two of three chose WMD, but that was also down by about 17 points from 2002, and virtually all other threats cited in the survey declined substantially. Thus "Islamic fundamentalism", which was considered a "critical threat" by 61% of the public in 2002, was cited by only 38% this year, while the "development of China as a world power", cited by 51% in 2002, claimed only 33% in 2004. While for the public foreign-policy issues virtually across the board were seen as less important than in 2002, that was not true for the foreign-policy elite, which rated "combating world hunger", securing energy supplies, improving the global environment and, most striking, improving the standard of living of less developed nations, significantly higher than two years ago. In addition, 40% of the elite now consider "strengthening the United Nations" as a "very important goal" of US foreign policy, up 12% from 2002. Conversely, the percentage of leaders who cited "maintaining superior power worldwide" as a very important goal, fell from 52% in 2002 to only 37% in 2004, the first time it has received less than majority support since the question was first asked in 1994. A more chastened approach to foreign policy also showed up in declining support on the part of both the public and the elite for maintaining military bases abroad, particularly in hot spots such as the Middle East and states linked to terrorist activities. More than two-thirds of both the public and the leaders agreed the United States should withdraw from Iraq if a clear majority of Iraqi people want it to do so. As to whether Washington should remove its military presence from the Middle East if a majority of people there desire it, 59% of the public said yes, but only 35% of the elite agreed. A majority of the public said Washington should not press Arab states to become more democratic; two-thirds said they opposed a Marshall-type plan of economic aid and development for the region. Large majorities of the public and the elite favor regaining traditional constraints on the use of force by individual states, including the United States, and oppose new ideas for making them looser, as is often proposed by the Bush administration. At the same time, they favor giving wide-ranging powers to states acting collectively through the United Nations. Thus majorities of both the public and leaders oppose states taking unilateral action to prevent other states from acquiring WMD, but support such action if the UN Security Council approves. In the specific case of North Korea, for example, two-thirds of respondents said it should be necessary for Washington to get the council's approval before taking military action. A majority of the public opposes the United States or any other nation having veto power on the Security Council. The survey also found strong support for US participation in a wide range of international treaties and agreements, some of which have been rejected or renounced by the Bush administration. Thus 87% of the public and 85% of the elite said they would favor the terms of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; 80% of both groups said they favored the land-mine ban; 76% of the public and 70% of the elite said they support US participation in the International Criminal Court; and 71% of both groups said they back US participation in the Kyoto Protocol to reduce global warming. Two-thirds of the public and three-quarters of the elite agreed that, in dealing with international problems, Washington should be more willing to make decisions within the UN, even if this means that its views will not prevail. Asked what specific steps should be taken for strengthening the world body, three-quarters of the public and two-thirds of the leaders said the UN should have a standing peacekeeping force. A majority of 57% of the public and a plurality of 48% of the elite said the United States should make a general commitment to abide by World Court decisions rather than decide on a case-by-case basis.
Unfriendly Fire
By Hanna Rosin "This is Latch." That's how Roy Hoffmann opened the calls, with a name he hadn't used in 35 years, a name the man at the other end of the line last heard crackling over a radio receiver in Vietnam. He called all the men who'd been under his command there, finding their names in old mimeographed records and photos once stored in his attic and now spread all over his second-floor office. "Latch, remember me?" he would say, transporting them back to those days on the Swift boats, the patrols in the Mekong Delta or even the middle of a firefight, when "Latch" had a habit of checking in from headquarters on the radio. They had become bus drivers and lawyers and cotton farmers, retired or heading in that direction. Some remembered him by other names, Red Rooster or Smiley or Mad Dog Hoffmann. All of them remembered him. "Before that call I hadn't thought for 30 minutes about Vietnam in 30 years," says George Elliott, a retired naval officer tending his garden in Delaware. Now here was Hoffmann, calling out of the blue, asking, "Have you read the book?" Just like that -- "the book." And Elliott knew he must be talking about historian Douglas Brinkley's book "Tour of Duty," describing John Kerry's time as a Navy officer in Vietnam. It was about them, too, after all. Did he think it was accurate, Hoffmann wanted to know. Did it do them justice? The results of Hoffmann's one-man crusade are now infamous, this year's version of the campaign mudfight -- was Bill Clinton a draft dodger? did Dan Quayle buy drugs? -- one of those nasty stories that pop up in the political season, with bit players dredging up thin allegations about a candidate's past. Nearly nine months later, the group Hoffmann founded -- Swift Boat Veterans for Truth -- has raised $7.5 million, hired a PR agent, and run those notorious television ads claiming Kerry lied about his heroism in Vietnam. The group has moved so far beyond Hoffmann's attic they're having trouble convincing people they are not shills for President Bush. Hoffmann is an unlikely player for this high-stakes political game. He'll vote for Bush but doesn't much respect him -- calling him "impulsive," an insult from an admiral who always insisted on discipline. The closest Hoffmann ever came to being a political operative was once collecting signatures on his block for John McCain. Nonetheless the story begins with "Latch," a persona laid to rest for 35 years who suddenly felt his honor challenged after finding himself as the bad guy in a presidential hopeful's biography. For his men, no matter what side they take now, Latch is the logical one to have opened this box. Even back then their commander was the focus of much of their gossip, the old salt from Korea whom they revered or feared, the one whose voice on the phone can still make them stand at attention. As they replay old questions in their minds -- how did they behave out there? Is there anything at this late stage in life they ought to repent for? -- they remember Latch as either a hero by example or the devil on their shoulder, pushing them to the edges of both their fear and the rules of war. For those who remember him less fondly, Latch, not Kerry, is the Swift boat veteran with the most explaining to do. Full-Time JobBy now, the Hoffmanns' home in Richmond has lost the rhythms of retirement. The downstairs floor is spit-shine tidy, there's a sunny kitchen with a watering can waiting to be filled, photos of Hoffmann in uniform surrounded by his five daughters, formal shots of the grandchildren neatly arranged on the side tables. These days, Hoffmann and his wife spend most of their time in their makeshift offices -- Mary Linn in the basement answering hundreds of e-mails, Roy upstairs, surrounded by so many open boxes that Mary Linn can't get in to vacuum. They see each other at dinner. The yard is not what it used to be. No one would call Hoffmann frail, but he's 78, small and stooped. He can't hear that well and often walks around whistling -- his "mood thermometer," daughter Hilarie Hanson calls it. "Things just slip my mind nowadays," he says, losing the name of someone's secretary. But he doesn't leave it at that. He runs upstairs, finds the guy's number, calls and asks for the secretary's name. His manner isn't fussy, but still direct and exacting. His woodworking is known for its details. Hoffmann retired from a 35-year career in the Navy in 1978, and from the "stevedoring business," as he calls it (he directed the Milwaukee port, then partnered in a shipping company) five years after that. If he hadn't formed the Swift boat group, Hoffmann would be attending reunions for various ships he commanded, or donating to some naval charity -- the standard retirees' "shop talk," Mary Linn calls it. Asked why he upended a peaceful retired life to launch this crusade, Hoffmann gives the on-duty answer of a commander protecting his troops: "I'm a Navy officer and I took the oath exactly the same as everyone else, from ensign to admiral," he says. "I couldn't bear that someone was betraying us and being a dastardly liar. If I can be any more plain than that, I don't know." Hoffmann first picked up the Brinkley book last winter, around the time Kerry won the Iowa caucuses, when an old Navy friend called and told him about it. Like most of the men in Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Hoffmann considers the book propaganda for the Kerry campaign, even though Brinkley, a professor at the University of New Orleans, sought out Kerry on his own and is not part of the presidential campaign. Hoffmann says he didn't look for his name in the index, that he read the bits about the "Chinese hoochie-coochie girls" first. He found the book confusing, and skipped around, but eventually made his way through the description of the military operations Kerry experienced during his four months of combat. There he discovered "Latch," the Vietnam villain: In mostly anonymous quotes, his men describe him as "hotheaded," "bloodthirsty," "egomaniacal," a "bantam rooster," on account of his height, a man with a "genuine taste for the more unsavory aspects of warfare." He is compared more than once to Kilgore, the unhinged cowboy lieutenant in "Apocalypse Now," who loves the smell of napalm in the morning. Hoffmann is not a ranter. He didn't yell or throw the book. Still, the descriptions stung. "Before the book, no one knew how he felt," says Mary Linn, meaning how Kerry felt about Hoffmann, although most of the quotes aren't attributed to Kerry. "He'd never been nasty to Roy." Until then, Hoffmann's feelings about Kerry had been ambivalent. Like some career military men, he'd been horrified by Kerry's 1971 congressional testimony about war crimes committed in Vietnam. But the Hoffmanns had attended a wedding party for Kerry and Teresa Heinz in 1995. (Mary Linn says she dragged her husband along and regrets having done it.) Overall, Hoffmann seems to have considered Kerry less a menace than an errant brother -- courageous but "impulsive," that same admiral's curse. Even so, Hoffmann was moved to wage a new kind of war. By March, Hoffmann had about 80 sailors signed up to his Swift boat group. In April, he organized a meeting in Dallas. John O'Neill, a Vietnam vet who had debated Kerry 30 years ago, got involved and wrote a book rebutting Brinkley's (the book, "Unfit for Command," has become a bestseller). They hired a PR agent, planned a news conference in May. O'Neill then connected the group with wealthy Texas Republicans. Rich McCann was one of the Swift boat captains Hoffmann invited to the Dallas meeting, but McCann turned him down. "Kerry was a brave individual," he told Hoffmann. "He gave everything he said he did." Like other vets who didn't join, McCann suspected Hoffmann's motivations weren't just political or patriotic but deeper -- an elaborate effort to deflect those late-in-life tugs at the conscience about what happened in Vietnam. "Roy Hoffmann is rewriting history, and he's going to believe what he's saying right now because he needs to believe it," McCann says. "How can you look at yourself if you can't rationalize what you did?" A 'Crusty Old Sailor'Hoffmann arrived in Vietnam in May 1968. Until then he'd commanded only big ships. Now he was in charge of Coastal Surveillance Vietnam, meaning all the Swift boats and Coast Guard vessels. As soon as he got there he made his expectations known: "You have the power," he told the men. "I expect you to use it judiciously and aggressively." To drive the point home, he got in an airplane his first week and flew over the coastline until he found a Vietnamese boat in a restricted area. He had the pilot land the plane and boarded the Swift boat responsible for patrolling that area. "You got my order?" he asked the boat captain. "Any questions? . . . Well, why in the hell aren't you carrying it out?" "Once they believed me, it was a piece of cake -- everyone's performance was up quite a bit," he recalls. In October 1968, Hoffmann and several other officers launched Operation Sealords, an effort to destroy the enemy in the Mekong Delta and better integrate the Vietnamese navy with U.S. forces. In his résumé, Hoffmann calls it highly successful. In Brinkley's book, Sealords is the source of much of Kerry's and his crewmates' agony. They found it reckless and pointless. Wade Sanders recalls getting a message once from Hoffmann calling him "pussycat" because Sanders had seen people running along the bank and hadn't fired on them. "That's when I realized things had suddenly changed," Sanders says. The men considered Hoffmann a "crusty old sailor," says Bill Zaladonis, an engineman at the time. "A man's man, a skinny little guy who didn't take guff from anyone. Everyone knew he was boss." "I was not a kindly commander, put it that way," Hoffmann says. "If someone was not carrying out the order, I would get out there and make sure they were doing their jobs." "One day Hoffmann ordered me and another boat to cruise the river so we could draw enemy fire," says McCann, who compares it to sending a soldier into the streets of Fallujah to get shot at. "I was scared to death most of the time, but I had to follow orders. But I also had to really scratch my head -- what exactly did we accomplish? Perhaps we had a bigger plan, but in my opinion we were being set up as sitting ducks." Hoffmann doesn't have much sympathy for that attitude. "When you're in a war you don't sit back and wait for attack," he says. "You're directed to take the fight to the enemy and that's what you do." "There wasn't automatic permission to kill or anything like that," he says. But "you don't have to be shot at to shoot." If you gave a warning shot, and the person tried to escape, or didn't respond, he says, "they are definitely a target." Bill Means is a private investigator in Bakersfield, Calif., and was at the helm of a Swift boat the same time Kerry was in Vietnam. Recently, he saw the groups' ads on TV, and they "made me want to reflect on my war experiences." He took down a shoe box filled with 39 letters he'd written from Vietnam, and read them aloud to his wife in the kitchen. He read complaints about his commanders, wonder about the Vietnamese girls, dispatches from a kid trying to act "stupidly brave." "It was this war crimes stuff that got me going," Means says. "I needed to resolve, did I do anything I wasn't too proud of? I wasn't worried, but you have to live with your conscience your whole life and I wanted to know." To refresh his memory, he called up Thomas "Tad" McCall, the commanding officer on his boat, PCF 88. Eventually he got around to asking about the one incident that stuck in his mind. "Remember that day, with that commander, who was he, and what was he wanting to do?" Means asked. "Don't you remember, Bill? That was Latch, that was Roy Hoffmann," replied McCall. "You mean the guy who's criticizing Kerry for war crimes is the only one who ordered me to commit one?" Means said. It was March 14, 1969. McCall, a newly minted ensign and the son of the Oregon governor, got a call about a special assignment to take a commander upriver to visit a wounded SEAL, now New School University President Bob Kerrey. He remembers the date because he was supposed to be off -- it was his 25th birthday. "I was quite nervous," McCall recalls. "Captain Hoffmann was kind of revered, kind of feared." The crew spit-shined the boat and put on combat gear instead of their usual cutoffs. From the start, Hoffmann insisted they search nearly every boat they passed. McCall balked a little: He knew all these boats, they'd patrolled these waters almost every day for two months. But he did it. At one point Hoffmann fixed his attention on a small cluster of fishing boats much closer to shore than McCall had any intention of going. McCall recognized the boats, too. "That junk is in the security zone," McCall recalls Hoffmann saying. "I want you to board that junk." McCall replied that the fishermen weren't doing anything wrong, just fishing. "I was pretty peeved," he recalls. Hoffmann ordered them to hail the boat on the bullhorn. The fishermen were too far away and paid no attention. He ordered the gunner to fire his M-16 in the water and make splashes. They still didn't respond. "Shoot closer," Hoffmann said. "I can't shoot any closer or we'll shoot the people," the gunner replied. "Well, do it," Hoffmann said. At that point, McCall recalls, he and Hoffmann got into a fight, with McCall insisting they couldn't shoot unless there was hostile intent. "He didn't live in the water like we did," McCall explains. "He was basically asking us to kill innocent civilians. In his mind they were people who deserved it." Then McCall remembered that, as the captain, he had authority over Hoffmann while they were sailing. Nervously, he ordered him out of the pilot house. Hoffmann went down "madder than a hornet," recalls Means. "Cussing up a storm." As soon as they docked, Hoffmann gave McCall an administrative sanction, meaning he couldn't sail for 30 days. Means remembers the crew high-fiving because Hoffmann was off their boat. McCall remembers crying. Hoffmann does not remember the story exactly that way. He recalls sanctioning the son of an important Oregon politician. But he says the incident involved a fishing vessel that was passing dangerously close to a cache of weapons, and he doesn't recall being on board the boat but rather witnessing it from his headquarters. "It doesn't sound like me, telling them to shoot innocent people, and I will deny it emphatically," he says. When he hears that their version involves fishermen ignoring warning shots, though, he changes his view a bit. "Well, now we're beginning to see something different," he says. "The junks were in an area they weren't supposed to be in and they ignored warning shots? And [his men] weren't going to do anything about it. You know what we call that? Disobedience of orders." McCall says he's not surprised Hoffmann doesn't remember. "He did a lot of things," he says. "To me it was a searing moment in a young career. To him it was just one more moment of chewing someone's ass." Recently Hoffmann tracked down McCall. They talked for about 20 minutes about the event and couldn't reconcile their differing recollections. McCall says Hoffmann seemed intent on explaining himself, why he was so adamant about the restricted zones, about being strict with the junks. McCall was left with the impression of "a man conscientiously trying to do a good job." Clean ConscienceDouglas Brinkley says he soft-pedaled Hoffmann's role in the book, but that he is "the most egregious example of blatant disregard for civilian casualties and for the lives of his men in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam." "He infected the lives of a lot of Navy guys down there, and he has a lot of answering to do," Brinkley says about Hoffmann. "He can either recognize he has blood on his hands and deal with his own ghosts or go where it's safe and reach for the flag. He can see a therapist or wage a new war, and he did the latter." If such a thought ever crossed Hoffmann's mind, it is deeply buried. "Me, with a guilty conscience, you got to be kidding," he says. "I've said a hundred times, I have no apologies for being aggressive. We were directed to carry the fight to our enemy by orders and we did it, for real." Hoffmann won five medals in Vietnam. At first, he would not discuss any of them. "Medals are overrated," he says. Then he reads the citations in a mock pompous voice: "Hoffmann was courageous in the face of point-blank fire, blah blah blah." "Medals help you get promotions, and as far as I'm concerned that's the end of it. You don't go around parading it. Kerry makes a point of making his whole damned career over being a hero. I am not a hero. I was doing my duty." Hoffmann doesn't see shades of gray when discussing what it takes to win a war, what loyalty means and what you don't air in public. He still pines for his small-town childhood near the Mississippi River, his dad a butcher, his mom playing a Rosie the Riveter role, "no resentment, no protest, just plain old patriotism, is the best way I can describe it." He loves to tell the story about how one day in Vietnam, actor Jimmy Stewart showed up in his office, asking about troop morale. "Morale isn't pretty good, it's damned good," he recalls telling Stewart. "It's not about the troops, it's about the American people. They just ought to take a damned 2-by-4 to the back and stiffen up. "We have the same problem today, in the [Iraq] war," he continues. "The American people don't have the damned guts to stand up for it, the damned backbone." A Voice on the LineAfter Brinkley's book came out, Kerry called Hoffmann. It was a cordial conversation, there were no raised voices, Hoffmann recalls. "I thought 'Tour of Duty' unfairly maligned you," Hoffmann remembers Kerry saying, adding that he'd always admired him for his leadership. "Did you actually read the book?" Hoffmann asked. "Yes." "It sure as hell doesn't look like it," Hoffmann said, and recalls Kerry laughed. Hoffmann talked about the "outrageous mistakes" in it. Kerry invited him to submit corrections, but Hoffmann declined. "He was just doing it to get me off his back," he says. Hoffmann says the conversation ended when he told Kerry he'd never forgive him for his 1971 testimony, and asked again why he did it. "His answer was very simple. It surprised me," says Hoffmann. "I didn't think he would be that forthright." "That was my conviction," Kerry answered. They haven't spoken since.
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a result of the American military,"