Bob Kerrey's war

Making sense of what happened -- or didn't -- in a small Vietnamese village 32 years ago

by Dan Kennedy

WHAT WE NOW know for certain about Bob Kerrey is disturbing enough. Last week the former Nebraska senator revealed that in February 1969, as a young Navy lieutenant, he led six other men toward a Vietnamese village called Thanh Phong. It was nighttime, and he and his men were terrified. A shot rang out -- or seemed to ring out -- and Kerrey's Raiders, as they were called, opened fire, blasting the village's thatched huts with some 1200 rounds in just a few minutes. Afterward they crept into the village to see what they had wrought -- and discovered, to their horror, that they had killed about 14 unarmed women and children.

But there was more, much more. Kerrey chose to speak out not because he wanted to clear his conscience after all these years, but because the New York Times Magazine and 60 Minutes II were about to report something unimaginably more awful. One of the men whom Kerrey led into Thanh Phong that night had claimed the deaths were not the result of a tragic mistake at all. Rather, he said, the women and children were deliberately executed, on Kerrey's orders, so that his men could escape safely.

Most likely we'll never know the full truth of what happened on that night. There are, though, some important points to be made in the aftermath of last week's media-driven round of speculation, rationalization, and
obfuscation.

First, the most serious charges against Kerrey are extraordinarily thin, based on little more than the uncorroborated testimony of Kerrey's former comrade, which in turn has been vigorously contradicted by the rest of his comrades.

Second, rather than take a hard look atthe facts, much of the punditocracy has been content to engage in guilt-ridden liberal hand-wringing, giving Kerrey a pass on even the worst-case scenario because, well, you know, war is hell -- thus doing a disservice both to Kerrey and to the quest for truth.

Third, Kerrey proved himself to be a master media manipulator, getting his side into play before his accusers could say a word. By the time the 60 Minutes II segment finally aired this past Tuesday, it seemed anticlimactic.

The past week has, of course, permanently altered our perception of Kerrey, one of our most decorated living war heroes. Even if you take him at his word, his Bronze Star was awarded based on the grotesquely false notion that he and his men killed 21 enemy Viet Cong troops that night. Kerrey says he never cared about the award, but he also never set the record straight until his hand was forced. Several years ago Kerrey memorably called Bill Clinton "an unusually good liar." If Clinton ever perpetuated an untruth as profound as Kerrey's, I'm not aware of it.

Kerrey seems genuinely anguished by what happened in Thanh Phong, and to have been living with that anguish for the past 32 years. And certainly no one has questioned the heroism he showed several weeks after the raid, when, in a harrowing firefight, he continued trying to protect his men even after his right leg had been blown off. For that, he received the Medal of Honor.

But this is far larger than Kerrey's personal story. The revelations touched off an outpouring of media analysis and commentary, focusing as much on our still-unresolved national psychosis regarding the Vietnam War as on what Kerrey and his men did or didn't do. GHOSTS OF VIETNAM, read the cover line on this week's Time magazine, superimposed on a pensive color photo of Kerrey, with a young, uniformed, black-and-white Kerrey looking over his left shoulder. Not to push a cliché one step beyond, but obviously those ghosts still haunt us.

* Truth and consequences. Ira Stoll, whose SmarterTimes.com Web site critiques the Times from a conservative point of view, was way too harsh when he wrote, "The New York Times has now been reduced to printing the articles that don't meet Newsweek's standards." But Stoll had a point. Gregory Vistica's Times Magazine story is thoroughly reported, dauntingly researched, and, at least so far as I am able to determine, fairly presented. (Vistica also co-produced the 60 Minutes II report.) But the evidence that Kerrey deliberately executed civilians is thin.

Vistica presents two witnesses who claim they saw Kerrey commit a war crime. The first is Gerhard Klann, a member of Kerrey's Raiders, who told Vistica that Kerrey personally helped him kill an elderly man (by Klann's account, the man's wife and three grandchildren were also killed) on the outskirts of the village, and then, later that night, ordered the execution of the villagers, who were machine-gunned to death from a distance of six to 10 feet. "The baby was the last one alive," Klann told Vistica in what must have been a wrenching interview. "There were blood and guts splattering everywhere." The second witness, a Vietnamese woman named Pham Tri Lanh, said that she personally witnessed each of the killings -- not just the execution, but the dispatching of the elderly couple and their grandchildren earlier that night as well. (Kerrey insists that the victims of the earlier killings were five men, and that he did not personally participate in those killings.)

There are some problems with these accounts. By Vistica's own telling, Klann comes off as unstable (granted, that would hardly be surprising if he took part in the terrible acts he describes), at one point threatening to disavow his whole account if Vistica reported a minor drunk-driving incident. Then, too, Kerrey and the other five members of his unit issued a strong statement last weekend backing up Kerrey's version, saying, "At the village we received fire and we returned fire. One of the men in our squad [Klann] remembers that we rounded up women and children and shot them at point-blank range in order to cover our extraction. That is simply not true."

Now, truth cannot be determined by vote, so a six-to-one margin in favor of Kerrey's version and against Klann's is hardly dispositive. And the men have every incentive to back their former SEAL commander -- after all, if he took part in a deliberate atrocity, then so did they. But it's hardly fair to level such a serious charge based on nothing more than one man's say-so and some ambiguous military records. Yet that's what it comes down to.

Over the weekend, Pham Tri Lanh's testimony came apart when she was interviewed by Time. At first, according to the magazine, she repeated her story that she had personally witnessed the horror of that night -- but "then she changed it, saying she hadn't actually seen the killings, but had only heard the screams and later seen the bodies." And after having told Vistica and 60 Minutes II producer Tom Anderson that her husband had been a member of the Viet Cong, she denied it to Time. As Time put it, it's now unclear whether she is "an honest witness, a propagandist or just an old woman with a hazy memory."

In an interview with National Public Radio, Vistica said, "No matter whose version is right, whether Senator Kerrey's version is right, whether Gerhard Klann's version is right, either way you look at it, they ended up killing a lot of people, and that has caused all the team a great amount of anguish."

Either way you look at it? Vistica suggests that it doesn't matter all that much whether Kerrey's Raiders accidentally killed women and children in a panic or deliberately executed them at point-blank range. In fact, it makes all the difference in the world. We'll never know whether Kerrey's or Klann's account is closer to the truth. But despite some inconsistencies in Kerrey's story, Vistica didn't dig up nearly enough evidence to cast Kerrey's version into serious doubt. As the Boston Globe's Tom Oliphant wrote on Tuesday, "I could get out my violin and play schmaltz about war and Vietnam. But this is a murder story that lacks the basic underpinnings high standards should require."

* The fog of punditry. In an op-ed piece for the Washington Post on Sunday, Senators John Kerry, Max Cleland, and Chuck Hagel -- Vietnam veterans all -- offered a startling statistic: "only six percent of Americans younger than 65 have ever served in uniform." And you can bet that, among the elite media, the percentage is far lower than that. After all, one of the defining characteristics of the Vietnam War was that it was fought mainly by blue-collar kids, whose privileged, college-attending peers were pretty much exempt.

At one time, many baby boomers pointed to their lack of military service with pride. The war was, after all, an immoral, tragic mistake, and any participation in the antiwar movement, no matter how peripheral, was seen as vastly superior to going to Vietnam and killing babies (as the smugly self-satisfied liked to put it). But in recent years antiwar sentiments have been overcome by a wave of World War II nostalgia, fed by Tom Brokaw's best-selling book The Greatest Generation and Steven Spielberg's film Saving Private Ryan. Even if liberal forty- and fiftysomething journalists haven't changed their minds about Vietnam, they have learned to feel awkward and guilty around those who served in their stead.

This guilt has been on full display in the aftermath of the Kerrey story. The most ludicrously over-the-top example was Alex Beam's column in Tuesday's Globe. Abandoning his characteristic skepticism, Beam wrote of Kerrey's media inquisitors: "Where do these Peacetime Charlies get off? Who among these journalists has ever come under fire, in war? I certainly haven't. How dare they attempt to pass judgment on a man who lost his leg just a few weeks later, serving in a conflict he was rapidly losing faith in?"

Well, I've never served either, and I fully understand that that puts me at a huge disadvantage -- intellectually, emotionally, morally -- in attempting to judge the actions of those who did serve. But the military answers to civilian authority for a reason, and the reason is that it acts in our name. Judging isn't a luxury; it's a necessity. My own judgment is probably pretty much the same as that of most people: if Kerrey's version is correct (as seems likely), then what took place in Thanh Phong was a terrible accident, but nothing more; but if Gerhard Klann's version is correct (as seems less likely), then Kerrey and his men were lucky they weren't prosecuted for war crimes, as about 100 of their peers were.

Kerrey's fellow veterans have rushed to his defense, too, including Senator John McCain, writing in the Wall Street Journal, and Senator John Kerry, writing in the Globe. In such an atmosphere, it's hard even to ask a question, no matter how legitimate -- although some, such as Mickey Kaus, of KausFiles.com, and John Leo, of U.S. News & World Report, have tried.

Columnist Richard Cohen, in Tuesday's Washington Post, wrote that "in choosing to accept his [Kerrey's] version of events, to forgo an investigation, we are in a sense rendering a verdict: We fear what we will find. Like Lot's wife, we are being told not to look back." Cohen got it exactly right, and it's a mindset that's dangerous in a democratic society.

* The media war. In a matter that involves nothing less than the meaning of life and death, it seems almost trivial to note that the Kerrey story was also the object of some slick media maneuvering, with Kerrey proving as slick as anyone. (And how would you like to be Mark Feeney of the Boston Globe, whose piece on Kerrey's new life as president of New York's New School University appeared on April 24, the day before Kerrey's admission that he had killed civilians was first reported? Unfortunately for Feeney, he says he interviewed Kerrey three weeks before the piece finally appeared.)

The two strands of the media story are Newsweek's seemingly inexplicable failure to follow up on the tip it had received in 1998, and Kerrey's largely successful effort to spin the story his way before the Times Magazine and 60 Minutes II could have their say.

Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker made a good case for himself over the weekend when he appeared on CNN's Reliable Sources, hosted by Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz (incidentally, Newsweek is owned by the Washington Post Company). According to Whitaker, Gregory Vistica heard about Gerhard Klann's story in 1998, while Vistica was employed by Newsweek, but he was unable to get Kerrey to go on the record in any detailed way. Whitaker said that after Kerrey decided not to run for president in 2000, the magazine's editors didn't want to be seen as having hounded him out of the race. But Whitaker added that he urged Vistica to stay in touch with Kerrey and try to get him to give his side of the story. Unfortunately for Newsweek, Vistica left the magazine before Kerrey was ready to talk.

"The reason it took two years for this to come out was it was only after two years that he was prepared to come forward and to talk openly about this," Whitaker said. "He went back to Vistica. But by that time, Vistica had left the magazine." Fair enough. But Newsweek's editors knew about Klann's account too. Thin though parts of Vistica's story may be, it was within Newsweek's grasp, and some version of it should have appeared within its pages first.

Kerrey's spin game was smartly analyzed by Kurtz in the Post and by Seth Mnookin and Stephen Battaglio in Inside.com. Kerrey had first alluded to the killings in a little-noticed speech the previous week. Then, last week, he handed his story to the Wall Street Journal and the Omaha World-Herald, getting his own confession out before anyone even realized there was worse to come. The Times was able to recover quickly by posting Vistica's story on its Web site five days before publication. But Kerrey, by placing it in the Journal and the World-Herald on a Wednesday, ensured that 60 Minutes II couldn't come back for a week. And, of course, by the time it finally aired, the dramatic interview with Pham Tri Lanh had already been called into doubt.

Kerrey also won a tactical advantage, pitting the Journal and the Post against their archenemy, the Times. The Journal has weighed in with an unremitting wave of pro-Kerrey, anti-Vistica material, even recycling on its OpinionJournal.com Web site a negative review of a Vistica book that the Journal first ran in 1996. And after Kerrey and his fellow Raiders drafted their statement condemning Klann's version of events, they gave it exclusively to the Post, which promptly put it on page one of its Sunday edition.

The events of the past week may have ruined Kerrey's presidential aspirations, assuming he still had any. But he showed that he's still got the moves.

PERHAPS FITTINGLY, the revelations about Bob Kerrey do not seem to have changed many people's perceptions of him as a serious, thoughtful, truthful, even moral man. There is, after all, an understanding that something uniquely awful happened in Vietnam, and that the things men did over there do not define them as human beings.

Kerrey should be held accountable somehow if more definitive evidence emerges that he committed war crimes. There's no statute of limitations on the kinds of acts described by Gerhard Klann. But even if it's true that Kerrey, for a moment, became a monster in Thanh Phong, that doesn't mean he was a monster before that moment, or after it. Kerrey says he's been haunted by the events of that night ever since. He should be.

"When a veteran is in distress about things like this, as far as I'm concerned it's a sign of his humanity. I'm a great admirer of Bob Kerrey," says Jonathan Shay, a Boston psychiatrist who's treated veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder and who is the author of Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (Atheneum, 1994).

A final observation. Earlier this year Harper's magazine published a long, passionate, exhaustively detailed piece by journalist Christopher Hitchens arguing that Henry Kissinger should be prosecuted for the war crimes he committed in pursuing the Vietnam War, as well as other misdeeds (see "Don't Quote Me," News, March 9). Hitchens's essay -- since turned into a book -- quickly disappeared, almost without a trace, as Slate's Timothy Noah observed last week. It's a cruel irony that Kissinger got away scot-free while Kerrey, who carried out Kissinger's obscene policies on the ground, is now being called to account.

"You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever," wrote Tim O'Brien in "How To Tell a True War Story," part of his fictional memoir The Things They Carried.

The Kerrey story may be winding down, but the Vietnam War goes on and on and on. Every time we think it's behind us, there it is again. In his interview with Vistica, Kerrey spoke eloquently of his lost innocence, of never again "feeling in church like God was smiling warmly down upon me as if I was the most special thing on earth."

It was a loss of innocence for the nation as well. And it is something we are still coming to grips with.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.