Soldier Gore : The story of the veep and Vietnam

Early during the research for my biography of Al Gore Jr., I came across an article on the 1970 campaign in which his father, Albert Gore Sr., lost the U.S. Senate seat he had held for 18 years. The piece, "The End of a Populist" by David Halberstam, appeared in the January 1971 issue of Harper's. Halberstam, a former reporter for the Nashville Tennessean who knew the Gore family well, offers a good contemporary account of why the younger Gore decided to join the Army despite deep personal misgivings:

Young Albert graduated from Harvard this year: he is militantly anti-war and did not want to go into the Army. But he was faced with a terrible choice: to stay out and avoid the draft in a state like Tennessee would cost the Senate one of its leading doves. His family told him to make his own choice, that they could not care less whether Albert ran and won. In fact Pauline [Gore's mother], who is bitterly and militantly anti-war, told young Al that she would be glad to go to Canada with him.

Canada was, of course, far-fetched; there were plenty of other ways to avoid military service. But in the end, Gore decided to join the Army in an unsuccessful effort to save his father's seat. Neither in the Halberstam piece, nor in my own conversations with people who were close to Al Jr. at the time, did a second rationale enter the picture-the altruistic notion that if he avoided or evaded the draft some other young Tennessean from his home county would be forced to go in his place. As John Tyson, a Harvard roommate, later said: "He felt by helping his dad and campaigning with his dad that that was the greatest thing that he as an individual could do to stop the war." Tyson was in a position to know. He lived near Newark, New Jersey-the site of the recruitment center where Gore enlisted-and was perhaps the last friend to see him before he raised his hand and joined the military.

Even so, I decided to give Gore the benefit of the doubt when, years later, he told interviewers that the desire to spare another Tennessee family the anguish of having a son serve in his place had also played a role in his decision. After all, I reasoned, the fundamental fact was that Gore did volunteer. He did go to Vietnam, and traveled around that country as a uniformed military journalist covering the activities of his 20th Engineering brigade. He was no grunt, to be sure; but few volunteers were. The "teeth to tail" ratio in Vietnam at the time was roughly 1 to 4, and during most of the war the Army simply assigned its draftees to combat while "taking care of its own" with behind-the-lines jobs.

Still, Vietnam was no picnic, even for journalists. Gore traveled around the country in military planes and choppers that flew low to avoid enemy missiles, in the process making the occupants more vulnerable to small- arms fire. (On one of my early trips as a freelance reporter, I traveled aboard an old Huey from coastal Nha Trang to Ban Me Thout in the central highlands. I was surprised to see several of my journalist colleagues lug hardback three-ring binders aboard the chopper and proceed to sit on them. When I asked what was going on, a trim redheaded Reuters correspondent repli-ed matter-of-factly, "The bullet doesn't go as far up your ass if it has to pass through a thick notebook.")

Why did Gore go? Over time, he has sought to emphasize the civic motive rather than the antiwar motive. In a recent conversation with compliant historian Douglas Brinkley, who was permitted to spend several days traveling with Gore aboard Air Force Two in preparation of a Talk magazine piece, the vice president suggested, "I wouldn't have been able to walk down Main Street with my head high, without feeling small and guilty," since "it is perfectly obvious that if you found some fancy way to get out of it somebody would go in your place." Like this reporter, historian Brinkley appears to have found no contemporaneous Gore statement or letter corroborating this later-recalled sentiment. It may be true, even if unprovable.

More difficult to understand is how Brinkley left unchallenged a small but revealing bit of revisionism by Gore regarding his combat record. In March 1988, during his first run for the presidency, Gore described for a Vanity Fair article his travel to various firebases where members of his engineering company were at work: "I took my turn regularly on the perimeter in these little firebases out in the boonies. Something would move, we'd fire first and ask questions later."

In a similar vein, Gore told Michael Kelly (then with the Baltimore Sun): "I pulled my turn on the perimeter at night and walked through the elephant grass and I was fired upon."

Something in these accounts struck me as fishy. Military units usually have their own duty rosters, including guard duty, and rarely assign those tasks to visitors. Sure enough, my instincts were vindicated when I found Michael O'Hara, a sportswriter for the Detroit News who had worked and traveled with Gore in Vietnam and was his closest Army buddy. "We never pulled guard duty in the field because we weren't part of those units," O'Hara told me. "The only place we stood guard was back at Bien Hoa," the secure base where Gore lived. "It was the equivalent of being a school crossing guard," O'Hara recalled. "I know guys that didn't even take their rifles with them."