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.
