THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, August 17, 1996 TAG: 9608160053
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JEFF STEIN, Correspondent
LENGTH: 202 lines
IT WAS September 1965. The Navy destroyer John R. Craig had just wrapped up six months off the coast of Vietnam, and held a ceremony to hand out medals.
Officers and men stood stiffly on deck, their white uniforms flapping in a gentle breeze. Wives fanned themselves with programs and children fidgeted as dignitaries were welcomed aboard the 385-foot warship, moored at the 32nd Street Naval Station in San Diego.
``We were all `bare-breasted lieutenants,' '' joked John Brueggeman, one of the young officers decorated that day. ``The war was still too young then. None of us had any medals.''
Brueggeman and two other lieutenants received the Navy Commendation for Achievement that day, for ``meritorious service'' during their Vietnam cruise. The other officers were Lt. Robert C. Kahler, the operations officer, and Lt. Jeremy ``Mike'' Boorda, the Craig's weapons officer, an enthusiastic, 5-foot, 4-inch former enlisted man.
The commendation entitled the three men to wear a small, rectangular ribbon of green and orange stripes, pinned over their hearts. Years later, one of the men, Mike Boorda, would add a small bronze ``V'' - known in the Navy as a ``V device'' - onto it, signifying that he had won the medal in combat.
Boorda would eventually rise through the ranks to become chief of naval operations, the service's top post. That tiny ``V'' would prove to be the focus of great public scrutiny.
Through the explosion of anguish that followed Boorda's May 16 suicide, two questions persisted: Was he entitled to wear the V?
And: Did the man see combat?
Retired Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., trying to make sense of Boorda's suicide, spent days researching that 1965 cruise.
He discovered that of the 367 men who served on the Craig that spring and summer, all laboring under the same wartime conditions, one officer was awarded the combat ``V'' - and it wasn't Mike Boorda.
When the Craig sailed from San Diego on March 6, 1965, Vietnam was hardly closer to most Americans' thoughts than Bosnia is today. There were fewer than 20,000 U.S. ``advisers'' on the ground. The first American combat units had just been dispatched. Air strikes on North Vietnam had been under way for less than a year.
The Craig sliced across the Pacific, stopping first at Pearl Harbor, then at Subic Bay in the Philippines. On April 8, the 20-year-old warship turned for the Asian mainland. Its mission: to protect a Navy task force in the South China Sea, standing by to rescue downed pilots.
The ship's captain, Cmdr. James Kenneth ``Ken'' Jobe, had been a Navy frogman who fought with Marine units across the Pacific in World War II. Brueggeman had been commissioned through his college ROTC, Kahler through Officer Candidate School.
Boorda had reached officer country via a rougher road. He had run away from an alcoholic, abusive family in 1956 to join the Navy, lying about his age to gain admission at 16. After six years as a personnel clerk, he'd been recruited for Officer Candidate School.
He was a hands-on leader, close to his men, remembered Konrad Langlie, the Craig's torpedo man. ``All the men liked him,'' he said. ``He was very personable, very dedicated, very interested in you.''
Boorda literally welcomed Langlie to the Craig with open arms, grabbing the sailor as he spooled down to the Craig's deck via a helicopter winch. ``He caught me,'' Langlie marveled over the telephone last week.
For the first three months of its mission, the ship plied the warm, blue-green waters without incident, according to the ship's log.
``Steaming as before,'' Boorda wrote in a firm, direct hand on April 14, 1965, giving the ship's position adjacent to the carrier Midway as fighter jets took off for air strikes on North Vietnam. The Craig's readiness was maintained at ``stage four,'' only a step higher than being tied up at a pier.
``Boring,'' chuckled Mike Broderick, asked for one word to describe those days on the Craig, where he served as an engineering officer. ``It was real boring.'' Another word? ``Hot.''
``The refrigeration systems were down a lot,'' said Langlie. ``There were also water shortages from time to time. We basically were drinking warm Kool Aid with our meals.''
When the ship ran into a typhoon on return from a short leave in Hong Kong, all hell broke loose in the galley, Langlie remembered, with cracked eggs and water sloshing around on the deck.
Most of the time, however, the seas were placid. Tropical sunshine blistered the ship. Below decks, the air grew stale. Occasionally Jobe would allow the men overboard for an hour's swim, surrounded by boats on shark watch.
The pace picked up in July. The Craig was ordered in close to the South Vietnam shore for Operation Market Time, part of a ``Vietnamese coastal patrol and surveillance force,'' whose duties included taking South Vietnamese sailors on board for training, according to the ship's official history. No combat action was recorded.
Then, on July 20, the Craig was assigned to shell enemy forces threatening Marines at the Da Nang air base.
``For the next 20 days the Craig ranged up and down the Vietnamese coast carrying out this mission,'' the ship's history narrates. ``During this period the Craig fired over 3,300 rounds of 5-inch illumination high explosive projectiles at many targets with devastating results. Records were made and broken on almost a daily basis, not only in rounds expended but in rearming at sea as well.''
Like most official histories, however, the report says both more and less than what really happened during this crucial 20-day period.
Much of the time, life on the Craig remained serene. The red tile roofs of Da Nang's French Quarter could be seen from the deep-water harbor. Across the water, the heavily jungled ``Monkey Mountain'' rose into the mist, obscuring local Viet Cong guerrilla units operating there.
The most immediate threat to the ship were sampans and junks that sailed close to the destroyer. Some of them were believed to carry sappers, communist guerrillas who could swim up and attach a mine to a ship's hull.
``The biggest thing to worry about were these swimmers,'' Jobe said last week from his home in Kent, Wash. ``They had these fishing boats and we had to scare them back.
``If they got too close I'd stick a ball of old rags down the gun barrel and put dry power behind it and fire it right at them. They didn't come any closer after that.''
But the calm was often broken by the roar of the ship's 5-inch guns. On July 21 the Craig steamed 20 miles south of Da Nang, according to the logs, where it ``struck general quarters and commenced firing shore bombardment.'' The next night the Craig again ``brought batteries to bear on target, commenced firing intermittently illumination and destructive rounds from both mounts.''
On July 23 it ``provided naval gunfire support'' for Marines on shore. In the following days the Craig steamed farther south, paying visits to Nha Trang and the mushrooming U.S. logistical base at Cam Ranh Bay, returning to Da Nang on July 28.
``We shore-bombed up and down that coast almost solid,'' Mike Broderick said. ``I was a kid. . . so when they shot off the guns it was a lot of fun. In fact, it was one of the few times it wasn't boring.''
The busiest man on board may have been Boorda, who oversaw the ship's guns. The Craig had left the States without an up-to-date weapons manual, Jobe said.
Boorda ``wrote a whole new manual on gunfire support. Did it overnight,'' the captain recalled. ``It was still in use when I left.''
The Craig had a spotter, somewhere on Monkey Mountain above Da Nang, calling in reports about enemy positions. ``We'd go up to the (ship's Combat Information Center) in the middle of the night,'' said Brueggeman, now retired in La Jolla, Calif., ``and Boorda would be jumping around on the deck, you know, `We got 'em running now! We got 'em running!'
``I think that was Boorda's most joyous time, when he was firing those 5-inches in Da Nang.''
Once incident added to Boorda's growing reputation as a swashbuckler: He took the Craig off on a firing mission, leaving its skipper, Jobe, ashore.
As Jobe tells it himself, he had gone into Da Nang to see some old cronies from the Marines. ``The old sarge came in and said, `We need your guns.' I said, `Hell, I don't pull the trigger. Call the ship, tell them what you need, and they'll take care of it.' ''
Jobe chuckled with the memory. ``When the ship came back, the guns had been fired so much they had bubbles on 'em.''
That Aug. 10, the Craig departed Da Nang and resumed escort duty in the South China Sea. It headed home for San Diego the following month.
At the medal ceremony soon after, three lieutenants - the department heads Kahler, Brueggeman and Boorda - were awarded the Navy Commendation for Achievement. None received special ``V devices'' for their ribbons, apparently because they hadn't been in combat, at least not in the common sense of the word.
That's what Kahler and Brueggeman said the ``V'' meant to them - being shot at. In the wake of Boorda's suicide, that's what the issue seemed to come down to: Did the Craig take fire?
``As far as I know,'' Jobe said, ``we didn't get any fire.''
Roy Lewis, a former Navy yeoman on the Craig, wrote an article for the Sacramento Bee claiming that ``one Sunday morning. . . during our bombardment of shore targets, which lasted three hours, the enemy returned machine gun fire and strafed the hull of the ship. Thus, to claim that Boorda didn't see combat is an unexcusable distortion of the facts.''
Lewis, however, later retracted this claim, saying the account of enemy fire was ``hearsay'' passed on by two other sailors. Lewis, a typist, said he was below decks during the time of the alleged incident. ``I didn't personally witness this,'' he admitted.
``Most of the time I thought it was quite pleasant,'' he said of his time on the cruise. ``I liked being at sea . . . It was quite tranquil, actually.''
But one officer aboard the Craig did receive the ``V'' - the ship's captain, Jobe.
Zumwalt, a former chief of naval operations, was seeking some explanation for Boorda's death in late May. He knew the Navy boss died on an afternoon he was scheduled to meet with reporters from Newsweek, who were nosing around about Boorda's wearing two ``V devices'' on his uniform.
Boorda had stopped the practice a year before, but the reporters had questions, nonetheless.
``I sent for all kinds of documents, and one of them was the document that awarded Boorda his medal,'' Zumwalt said. ``It did not authorize him to wear the `V device,' but it listed a reference number.
``When I looked up the reference, I found that the C.O. of the very same ship, for the very same period of service, was authorized to wear the `V.' ''
Indeed, Jobe was awarded the ``V'' in a Pacific Fleet citation issued Oct. 2, 1965, ``for meritorious achievement'' between April 8 and Aug. 10 of that year.
In other words, Mike Boorda's commanding officer had received a Combat ``V,'' while Boorda himself, the ambitious young man who directed the gunfire, had not.
Asked what he had been awarded the V device for, Jobe, now 74, at first said he did not recall receiving it. Later, he acknowledged that the Craig's ``combat'' was ``a pretty one-sided thing. . . . We were helping the Marines on shore.''
Zumwalt saw the disparity as all too common. ``There's just absolutely no reason why Mike Boorda should not have the same authority,'' he concluded. ``It just shows the rather willy-nilly nature of the process.
``Sometimes it gets done. Sometimes it doesn't.''
MEMO: Staff writer Earl Swift contributed to this report. Jeff Stein is
author of ``A Murder in Wartime: The Untold Spy Story That Changed the
Course of the Vietnam War'' (St. Martin's Press). ILLUSTRATION: AP Color photo
Right: Boorda, here in an undated photo as chief of naval
operations, was weapons officer on the Craig in 1965.
KEYWORDS: JEREMY "MIKE" BOORDA SUICIDE PROFILE by CNB