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[Kerry] really cares about the individuals that he befriends. He has a bond with this band of brothers from Vietnam. These guys are like true family to him. For example, in Vietnam, Kerry never liked to go to the Officers' Club. He would just go eat with the enlisted men. That's unusual. Most of the young officers liked getting away from the enlisted men and hanging out in the Officers' Club. Kerry enjoyed being with the enlisted men more. He just functions better with everyday working people—he doesn't condescend to them. He's not trying to wear blue-collar outfits; he'll wear his Hermès tie to go talk to steel workers. At first, it seemed to me like, God, he's dressed in this perfect suit, and he's going to a factory? But ultimately, the factory workers prefer that to his pretending that he's one of them. We can make fun of him for looking stiff, or for wearing a fancy suit, but it's much worse to seem like you're changing your clothes and your attitude just to be something you're not.

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If you were Kerry, how could you not serve? Was he going to live his life as a fraud—as somebody like Dick Cheney who finagled five deferments? Or was he going to try to use his father's influence like Bush to jump over a hundred thousand other people on a waiting list to get a National Guard billet? He couldn't live with himself if he did that. That's how one defines character.

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There's a very poignant moment in the book where Kerry finds forty-two starving Vietnamese in a pit and radios back to tell headquarters about them. Headquarters told him, "Go on with your mission, leave them there." And Kerry felt that that was morally wrong, so he broke orders and got all forty-two Vietnamese to board the convoy of Swift boats and brought them in for immediate medical attention. He could have been not only reprimanded but court-martialed for that. But the men who were part of that episode said, "This is why we like John Kerry: we felt good about ourselves for that day. Sometimes we felt we were monsters in Vietnam. We would just see villages burned or Vietnamese people's lives being disrupted by us, but on this day we saved forty-two people's lives." That's the kind of thing that Kerry did to really gain their loyalty.

These men, most of them Republicans, are now following Kerry on the campaign trail and vouching for him. They're proud of their tour of duty serving under Lieutenant Kerry, even though they may not agree with some of his Senate votes. They're raging Republicans, but they remember that this guy not only brought them home alive, but made them proud of their service.