Editor’s note: This is the second of two stories detailing the history of Ames resident and Fort Dodge native Gene Thorson with Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry during the Vietnam War.

The day for Gene Thorson and his shipmates to follow John Kerry’s lead and attack the Viet Cong in their swiftboat had finally come.

Thorson would see whether or not his skipper was the Real Deal.

Kerry believed if they turned the three swift boats he commanded toward the shore, he would transform a long, horizontal target of three boats traveling side-by-side into a narrower, vertical one.

“It would concentrate our machine guns directly on the point of fire and surprise the hell out of them,” Kerry said in an interview with the Guardian.

Thorson said the idea was strange at first, but in retrospect, he firmly believes he wouldn’t be alive if the soldiers hadn’t gone on the offensive.

“The Viet Cong was waiting to ambush us,” Thorson said. “We would have been blown out of the water by a guy with a rocket launcher if we hadn’t done it that way.”

As Kerry’s boat crashed ashore, a lone Viet Cong soldier stood up, holding a B-40 rocket-propelled grenade launcher, ready to fire.

But before he did, the man was wounded by one of Kerry’s crewmates. The soldier began to run, and Kerry leaped off the boat to chase him.

“I didn’t want to let him get away,” Kerry said in the Guardian interview. “I didn’t want him to run away and turn around with an active B-40 and take us out. There but for the grace of God … The guy could have pulled the trigger, and I wouldn’t be here today.”

The Viet Cong soldier didn’t fire. Kerry’s crew managed to rout the Viet Cong and complete the rest of its trip through the Mekong delta without taking a wound. His plan was risky, but it worked.

The move was regarded as heroic, but created a strong stir among the top Vietnam commanders.

Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, who was in charge of naval personnel, couldn’t decide if he should give Kerry the Silver Star or court-martial him for his actions, since Kerry ignored standard operating procedures.

In the end, they awarded him the Silver Star — the third-highest combat honor.

“They thought to themselves, ‘This guy definitely has balls to do what he did,'” Thorson said.

In March 1969, Kerry completed his tour of duty, and Thorson completed his shortly thereafter. The two men went their separate ways.

Thorson returned to Iowa, got married and became a cement mason — a job he still holds today.

Kerry traveled to Washington, D.C., divorced his support of Americans in Vietnam and became a war protester — trading in his Army fatigues for a picket sign. He joined other veterans in tossing their medals and combat ribbons onto the Capitol steps.

His actions polarized Vietnam veterans. Some agreed the actions taken by the United States in Vietnam were lawless and said the United States had no business meddling in other country’s affairs. Other veterans thought Kerry was betraying his fellow soldiers by protesting.

Thorson didn’t take sides, and he still doesn’t. He remains quiet and politely refuses to answer if he agreed or disagreed with Kerry’s antiwar actions after Vietnam.

He said people didn’t draw distinctions between supporting the troops and supporting the war 30 years ago. They were either one or the other, and Thorson doesn’t renounce his involvement in Vietnam.

“I was a hawk back then, and I still am,” Thorson said. “People will disagree with Vietnam, and I’ll listen to what they say. However, I’ll defend what we did there.”

While Thorson remained neutral about Kerry’s postwar activities, he would join him in similar antiwar activities three decades later.

But during those three decades, the two maintained nearly no contact. Thorson continued as a cement mason while Kerry built a political career, beginning as a lawyer, a lieutenant governor, then a U.S. senator for Massachusetts.

Their dissimilar lives were brought back together in 1996 by the same thing that brought them together in 1968: political turmoil.

At the time, Kerry was running his re-election campaign in the Senate against favored Massachusetts Gov. William Weld. Weld challenged Kerry’s service record in Vietnam.

As a political trump card, Kerry called in Thorson and his other Vietnam comrades to campaign for him. The plan worked; Kerry was re-elected to a third term.

Having his former crew members proved so successful, Kerry decided to call them again when he explored a presidential run in 2002.

As Kerry stumped in Iowa last fall, he was joined by Thorson — who defended Kerry with political rhetoric instead of a 50-caliber machine gun. Part of Thorson’s job was talking to veterans about Iraq, telling them President Bush was leading America down a dead-end road with a war that started the same way as Vietnam.

“Back then, we were fighting against the communists, against ‘the Big Red Machine,’ and we wanted to pave the way for democracy in Vietnam,” Thorson said. “The reasons given for [the Iraq] conflict aren’t very different.”

Although he’s traveled across the country with the Kerry campaign, Thorson doesn’t let it go to his head. When he returns to Ames from the campaign trail, he quickly reverts from ‘Gene Thorson: right-hand man’ to ‘Gene Thorson: cement mason.’

“I never broadcast that that I served in Vietnam with John Kerry,” he said. “When the topic of war service comes up, sometimes I’ll mention that I served under Kerry. Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t.”

If Kerry is elected president in November, Thorson doesn’t expect his life will change very much. He has no plans of sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom or taking trips to Camp David. Despite his ties with a potential world leader, his life will be as it has always been: low key.

However, he joked that he wouldn’t mind installing a phone in his garage with a direct link to the Oval Office.

“If Kerry wins, I might get an extra phone so If I ever need anything, I can call upon a favor from the president.”