“I'll show you where they shot from. See? That's the hole covered up with reeds,” says Kerry, showing the films on a recent evening, his hand tightening on the remote control as he clicks the images down to slow motion.

“This is just something that I improvised… . The point was not to just take an ambush, but to go directly at them,” adds Kerry, pointing to where he brought the boat ashore, and explaining how he returned later with a Super 8 millimeter hand-held movie camera to record highlights of the mission. “That's me right there. One of my crew was filming all this.”

The films have the grainy quality of home movies. In their blend of the posed and the unexpected, they reveal something indelible about the man who shot them - the tall, thin, handsome Naval officer seen striding through the reeds in flak jacket and helmet, holding aloft the captured B-40 rocket. The young man so unconscious of risk in the heat of battle, yet so focused on his future ambitions that he would reenact the moment for film. It is as if he had cast himself in the sequel to the experience of his hero, John F. Kennedy, on the PT-109.

“John was thinking Camelot when he shot that film, absolutely,” says Thomas Vallely, a fellow veteran and one of Kerry's closest political advisers and friends.

“He was thinking, 'These are my moments fighting for a good cause,' ” adds Vallely, now director of Harvard's Indochina-Burma Program. “But then he had to throw that away, Camelot and the whole thing, when he came out against the war. That is what makes John an interesting guy; it's what makes him real.”

Kerry dismisses the film record of his war as “just something I did, no great meaning to it.” But through hours of watching the films in the den of his newly renovated Beacon Hill mansion, it becomes apparent that these are memories and footage he returns to often. Kerry jumps repeatedly from the couch to adjust the Sony large screen TV in his home entertainment center, making sure the picture is clear, the color correct. He fast forwards, rewinds and freeze frames the footage. His running commentary - vivid, sometimes touching, sometimes self-serving - never misses a beat. At one point, his eyes well with tears when he talks about a close friend killed by a Viet Cong rocket in the spring of 1969 on the same rivers he had left only two weeks before.

The evening captures the Kerry conundrum: a man often tagged as a political opportunist - aloof, insincere - was also a young man of courage and high ambition, his inner life intense, emotional and filled with the raw experience that still shows in the severe lines of his face, the often-haunted look in his eyes.

[…]

Kerry began his tour of duty in a safe haven, aboard a frigate stationed in California, and then the Gulf of Tonkin. But he wanted action, and he got it.

He volunteered for service in Operation Sea Lords, skippering one of the so-called “swift boats,” charged with navigating the Mekong Delta in search of the small craft that supplied the Viet Cong with weapons. Kerry's time “in country” with Sea Lords was less than four months.

[…]

That Kerry took the trouble to film his war experience strikes many veterans, including some of his closest friends, as extraordinary - even strange.

Kerry says he shot his war footage on a Super 8 camera he bought at the PX in Cam Ranh Bay. Asked how he filmed in the heat of battle, he demonstrated, gripping an imaginary ship's helm and thrusting his camera hand out to the side. “I'd steer, or direct, or fire my gun, and hold onto it when I could,” Kerry says. “Sometimes the other guys would pick it up.”

Watching the film and listening to Kerry's narration is to take a strange journey inside the war. There is Kerry in cutoff shorts, working on his suntan next to a Viet Cong prisoner bound and blindfolded. There are the splashes of incoming rocket fire. There is a mortar blowing a thatch hut into oblivion. Through the silent footage, there is a sense of a young man turning against the war as he filmed it.

Even without all the added melodrama—intense inner life, haunted eyes, and all that—it is clear that this is a puff piece. What is not so certain is whether Sennott realized just how much his subject's revelations make him seem both inordinately self-absorbed and transparently weird.

Nor was Sennott's interview a fluke. BostonIrish recently pointed up this notes-from-the-campaign piece in the March 7 Boston Herald (direct link unavailable; search for “Rambling Kerry”).

OAKLAND, Calif. - Emerging from his seven-motorcycle, nine-car motorcade onto the sunny tarmac, Sen. John F. Kerry tossed a football with his presidential campaign aides as television cameras rolled, every catch a throwback to another JFK.

What the cameras didn't capture was Kerry's body man Marvin Nicholson hauling the candidate's guitar, humidifier, suits and other luggage on board the waiting chartered jet.

Life on the campaign trail is a mixture of made-for-TV moments and behind-the-scenes reality of sleeping in a different city every night and eating off plastic trays.

The grueling pace of life on the road has taken a toll on Kerry. He even has compared the strains of the trail to fighting in the jungles of Vietnam.

“Physically there are a lot of similarities actually - just in terms of staying up late, going all day and getting up early and being under the gun, so to speak,” he told a television crew recently. “In other ways, obviously it's just not.”

[…]

When he walks back on his plane to talk to the traveling press corps, Kerry tries to keep the banter light, talking about sports, movies or his ties, which he buys from the upscale Vineyard Vines.

Sometimes he joins in the game of bowling an orange down the aisle that breaks out every time the plane lifts off.

When he does turn reflective, it's usually reminiscing about Vietnam and some of his personal experiences there.

For the record, once again: Kerry was in Vietnam four months. His reminiscing is strangely like that of a former high school quarterback who, decades after his moment, is still fixated on his glory days.

Except that the braggart at the corner pub isn't a candidate for leader of the Free World.

What should we make of a man who not only reenacts an example of his own heroism, but also seems obsessed by it? And who, more recently, cannot let a day pass without either directly praising his own courage, or implicitly using the veterans in his entourage to the same end? And who responds to a question about favorite pets with a wildly implausible yarn about his swift boat mascot?

One more.

As Sen. John Kerry carved his Burton snowboard down a green rated Upper College run, another skier interrupted his stride, colliding with the presumptive Democratic nominee at 9,010 feet.

The slope-cade of two Ski Patrollers, several Secret Service agents, two journalists, one camera and one Kerry aide suddenly came to a halt. The Massachusetts Senator lay on the ground, removed his Smith sunglasses, and surveyed the damage.

Assured that the ABC News camera accompanying the entourage had not captured Kerry's fall, the Senator glared at your sloping Noter and assured, “I don't fall down. That son of a bitch ran into me.”

Don't fall down, Senator? We shall see on November 2.

By the way, the “son of a bitch” in question was one of Kerry's Secret Service agents.

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