The Fog Of War

He was in the land of nightmares, where nothing counted but killing or being killed. Twenty-five and eager to do his duty, whatever that might be. He was supposed to kill, and he was also responsible for the lives of six men in a war with almost no rules. The enemy was all around, but he didn't know who or where they were. The dark, the confusion, the strain of listening for sounds that signaled death, the tension, the terror. Suddenly he had to make a choice, and he pulled the trigger. Oh, God, what have I done?

For former Senator Bob Kerrey, that nightmare never goes away. He knows that one night 32 years ago in Vietnam, he and his squad of Navy SEALs killed nearly a score of unarmed civilians, mainly women and children. The shame and guilt and remorse have haunted him since. He did not want to make his personal anguish public any more than other Americans want to dredge up the nation's agony again. But because a fellow SEAL who lived through the same nightmare that night has come forward with an even more damning chain of events than Kerrey admits to, his private pain is reopening hard questions about war, memory and guilt. The tangled tale of ambiguous acts, conflicting recollections and tragic carnage embodies the madness that was the Vietnam War. So here we are, faced with another judgment to make in the endless reckoning of damages inflicted by that disastrous conflict.

Why? Because history never stops being written. Because Kerrey is a politician, a public figure respected for his candor, a certified war hero who survived grievous wounds, a man who once sought and may again seek the presidency. And because the ambiguity of his experience reminds us that good men did terrible things in Vietnam, making us examine what it means when honor is peeled away from war.

Several years ago, a reporter named Gregory Vistica, who worked for Newsweek at the time, got wind of a big story. A former commander had heard from a troubled SEAL that his unit, led by the young Kerrey, had been involved in a Vietnam raid that went horribly wrong. Vistica pursued the tale until he turned up the Navy's dusty "after action" reports on the events of Feb. 25, 1969, in the isolated peasant village of Thanh Phong. Late in 1998, when Kerrey was contemplating a second run for the presidency, the reporter put those 30-year-old documents in then Senator Kerrey's hands. The Senator knew his actions on that terrible night were no longer a private affair. "There's a part of me that wants to say to you all the memories that I've got are my memories," Vistica quotes Kerrey as saying, "and I'm not going to talk about them."

But he did. And so last week Kerrey found himself talking again, this time in a calculated effort to tell his version of the story before Vistica's investigation appeared this week in a bylined article in the New York Times Magazine and on a segment of 60 Minutes II, for which Vistica received a producer's credit. These reports take a condemning view of the raid, strongly suggesting that Kerrey is wrong when he says the civilian deaths were the tragic consequence of the fog of war, and that the former squad mate, Gerhard Klann, is right when he says the killings were a deliberate execution. Now Kerrey faces a whole army of reporters seeking to cut through the shifting memories to get to the truth of what he did that night.