Douglas Brinkley publishes excerpts from his book on John F. Kerry's experience in Vietnam.#

This is a quote from a letter he sent home that seems to give a great deal of meaning to why he followed a career in politics:

Right now everything that is superficial and emotional wants to give up and just feel sorry but I can't. I am involved in something that keeps pushing on regardless of the individual and which even with what has happened must, I know deep, deep down inside me, be coped with rationally and with strength. I do feel strong and despite emptiness and waste, I still have hope and confidence. There is a beast in me that keeps pushing me on saying Johnny you can't let go because of this—Johnny you find some sense from this—Johnny you are too strong to stop now—something keeps me going harder than before. Judy, if I do nothing else in my life I will never stop trying to bring to people the conviction of how wasteful and asinine is a human expenditure of this kind. I don't mean this in an all-consuming world saving fashion. I just mean that my own effort must be entire and thorough and that it must do what it can to help make this a better world to live in. I have not lost faith—on the contrary—I have gained a conviction and desire greater than ever before—and now, a sense of inevitability—a weighty fatalism that takes worry out of the small actions of late and makes the personal much more important.

In another letter, Kerry describes seeing a group of mercenaries talking about a mission that he had just delivered them to in his Swiftboat.

One of them mimicked the expression and the position that one of the dead had assumed at the instant he had become one of the dead. It had been easy. No shot had been fired at them. Besides, the dead didn't matter at all. They were now just four more casualties of war. The United States would now pay each of the PRU's X number of dollars for the people they had killed. And the total body count was now four higher than before.

Kerry talks about a war briefing he was at the ridiculous attitude of the commanders:

Once the general had left we were shown over to the main part of the Naval Forces Vietnam Headquarters and there we were given an intelligence briefing. Again, we met with nothing that we didn't know and I suspect that any member of the officer corps in the division could have stood up and given a better presentation with no preparation at all. At the end of it, the admiral came back in and made a few more remarks—to the effect that the general had been very impressed with the cut ... of the men he had spoken to. The admiral [said he had] replied that he felt that in that room was a future Chief of Naval Operations which seemed strange to me because almost everyone that I knew was planning to get out. Perhaps the admiral was referring to himself?

On his amazement about the nature of war:

"But the ease with which a man could be brought to kill another man, this always amazed me," he went on. Even more troubling to him was the imprimatur the U.S. military accorded this coldheartedness. To illustrate his point, he referred to the messages that would come in from the brass at Cam Ranh, praising the Swifts' gunners whenever they had killed a few Vietcong, and ending "Good Hunting": "Good Hunting? Good Christ—you'd think we were going out after deer or something—but here we were being patted on the back and receiving hopes that the next time we went out on a patrol we would find some more people to kill. How cheap life became."

And on why they were doing it:

I was amazed at how detached I was from the whole scene. I just lay in the ditch, not firing because I wanted to save ammo and because I couldn't see what I was firing at and I thought about what was happening in New York at that very moment and if people really felt that I was doing something worthwhile while they went down to Schrafft's and had another ice cream sundae or while some fat little old man who made another million in the past months off defense contracts was charging another $100 call girl to his expense account. And then, when the shooting stopped, I came back to where I was.