The Fog Of War

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Some minutes later, Kerrey recalls, the squad spotted four or five huts by the faint flicker of candles inside. Then out of the night came the whine of gunfire. "We returned it," says Kerrey, giving the order for his men to unleash a ferocious barrage of automatic rifle rounds, grenades and armor-piercing rockets. In the flashing tracer light, no one could see who was being hit. The assault lasted only a few minutes.

When the gunfire subsided, Kerrey's men discovered that all the dead were women and children. "The thing I will remember till the day I die is walking in and finding, I don't know, 14 or so, women and children who were dead," he says in the Times Magazine article. He remembers finding the dead bodies clustered together, though he insists his men began firing from 100 yds. away, shooting as they advanced on the hooches. When the unit spotted several people running away, they shot them too. "It's come back to haunt me about every other day," Kerrey told TIME. "If you feel that shame, it's very hard to talk about it."

If the inadvertent killing of civilians was a grim commonplace in Vietnam, deliberate execution was a step over the line, a criminal violation of the laws of war. Yet one member of Kerrey's squad says that is what the SEALs did that night. Gerhard Klann, the veteran among Kerrey's green tyros, told the Times Magazine and 60 Minutes II that the five villagers knifed in the first hooch were, in fact, an old man, his wife, two young girls and a boy. He said Kerrey ordered the killing and personally helped him cut the old man's throat.

Klann said he heard no incoming fire as the squad entered Thanh Phong. He said that when they failed to find the Viet Cong official, Kerrey ordered the SEALs to round up the unarmed women and children in the hooches. Then, Klann said, "an order was given" to shoot them. "We lined up, and we opened fire." A baby was the last one alive, Klann told the Times Magazine. "There were blood and guts splattering everywhere." 60 Minutes II backs up Klann's version with the words of Pham Thi Lanh, identified as the wife of a Viet Cong fighter, who claimed to have witnessed the scene. "They ordered everybody out from the bunker, and they lined them up, and they shot all of them from behind," she said. When a TIME reporter visited Thanh Phong last week, Lanh told a different story, saying she had not actually seen any execution.

It is still impossible to settle whose version is right and whose is wrong. Before Saturday night, the only other SEAL to speak up, Michael Ambrose, an executive at a Houston deep-sea-diving firm, called Klann's account "the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life," and in most ways, his recall conformed with Kerrey's. In the course of the Friday-night dinner, the rest of the squad agreed on two points: they had been fired upon first, and no one had given or received an order to deliberately shoot civilians. Kerrey himself has insisted over and over that while the massacre was an "atrocity," it had been accidental. "As guilty and awful as I felt," he told TIME, "I have every reason to believe that there were Viet Cong in that village that night. We did not go there with the intention of killing anybody that was innocent. I was at risk of having dead men in my squad if we didn't become quite violent."