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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 theSEALsdid 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 theSEALsto 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 otherSEAL 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."
Whatever
the truth of that terrible night, the long-hidden memory of
it explains a great deal about Kerrey, about the way a soldier
maimed in body and mind came to cope with the horrors of war.
During Kerrey's
brief, lamentable run for the presidency in 1992, he confounded
his handlers with his ambivalence about exploiting what should
have been his strongest political asset: his war heroism.
Everywhere he went, people thanked him for it. But always,
there was an awkwardness in the way he addressed it. In the
end, under pressure from his consultants, he mentioned it
plenty, but he always seemed to talk around it. Kerrey never
mentioned his Bronze Star for Thanh Phong, but he could not
escape the glory of his other decoration. He was awarded the
Congressional Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military
prize, for his actions in another raid less than a month after
Thanh Phong.
That one
too went very wrong - information from defectors led Kerrey's
squad into a trap. Chastened by the killings in Thanh Phong,
Kerrey had decided to take these targets as prisoners. As
a result, he told TIME last week, "I think I almost got some
of my men killed that night." Instead, in a 90-sec. fire fight,
seven V.C. were gunned down - but not before a grenade landed
on Kerrey's foot, shattering his leg and wounding his groin,
chest and face. Declining morphine for the pain, Kerrey refused
to relinquish his command until he had got his men to safety.
The disastrous
mission that oneSEAL called a "bumbling overf___" was deemed
a success by the brass. Ambrose put Kerrey in for a Silver
Star, but as the request moved up, senior officers embellished
the description and elevated the recommendation. The next
year, Kerrey was awarded the Medal of Honor for conspicuous
gallantry.
They all
knew it was ridiculous, Ambrose told Karen Tumulty, then with
the Los Angeles Times, in 1992. "Bob wanted to turn the medal
down ... It was just another night out," he said. "We just
got hit." Kerrey and the others believed the "honor" was politically
motivated: Nixon's unpopular war needed a few more heroes.
Kerrey's buddies told him to accept the medal for the sake
of all those who had fought and lost more than he had. Kerrey's
sister Jessie Rasmussen says he was still struggling with
a decision as the family gathered in Washington for the ceremony.
But on May 14, 1970, just 10 days after National Guardsmen
shot and killed antiwar protesters at Kent State University,
Kerrey allowed Nixon to pin the country's highest military
honor on his chest.
More than
20 years later and running for President, Kerrey talked about
that decision. "I accepted on behalf of other people that
didn't get it," he said. "I'm very uncomfortable with the
introduction, 'Here's Bob Kerrey, an American hero.'"
Now we know
one reason why. Thanh Phong puts so much in context, especially
the competing pulls of public life and Vietnam: why Kerrey
never seemed entirely comfortable with one, why he kept being
drawn back to the other.
Kerrey grew
up the third of seven children in a quiet working-class community
on the edge of Lincoln, Neb. At the University of Nebraska,
he partied hard and nearly flunked ROTC. But he was good at
his other studies and finished the five-year pharmacy program
in four. Still, life behind the drug counter had started to
look like drudgery. He once recalled how a farmer came in
looking for a treatment for the "sniffles." Annoyed at the
triviality of the man's complaint, Kerrey said, "Try this"
and wiped his sleeve across his nose.
When his
draft notice arrived in the fall of 1965, Kerrey jumped at
the chance to enlist in Navy officer-training school, then
signed up for something more exciting: underwater demolition.
Kerrey relished the rigorous training and jumped again when
he was selected for the secret counterinsurgent team called
seals. He was eager to serve, he said, "with a knife in my
teeth."
But his
war ended after just three months, when that grenade hit his
foot. He woke up in the Philadelphia Naval Hospital, where
doctors sawed off half his right leg. He still calls the hospital,
not Vietnam, "the most important and defining period of my
life." In that old-fashioned 12-story building, he shared
a room and nine months of recuperation with Jim Crotty, a
Marine pilot badly burned in an accident. "What he saw when
he arrived at the hospital was room after room of people maimed
like you wouldn't believe," Crotty said. "He looked at the
whole thing and said, 'Jesus Christ, what did we do, why did
we do it, who's responsible?'"
When Kerrey
took his first wobbly steps outside the hospital, he learned
how the country was coming to view the war. The G.I. generation
came home from World War II to a grateful, admiring nation.
The boys of Vietnam were called baby killers. Kerrey heard
it in Philadelphia, at a movie theater. "Somebody said something
very ugly," he once said. "I don't remember the exact words,
but very ugly and very hurtful."
Unsure what
to do next, Kerrey headed to Stanford University, intending
to get an M.B.A. He withdrew before class started and moved
across the bay to Berkeley. Somewhere in his mind was the
idea he might teach, but "the larger purpose was recovery,"
he said. There Kerrey learned to read, really read, not the
science texts of his college years but the great literature
of life. The love of literature has sustained him ever since.
Before the Democratic debates in 1992, when the other candidates
were deep in their briefing books, Kerrey spent time with
moody poetry, especially the lines of Robert Frost:
Word I was
in the house alone
Somehow
must have gotten abroad
Word
I was in my life alone,
Word
I had no one left but God.
Restless
by the spring of 1971, Kerrey went home to seek a new life
in Nebraska. He tried out the antiwar movement but quit when
rallies seemed antiveteran. Then he married and turned his
attention to business. With his brother-in-law, he started
a restaurant chain that made a pile of money. His dedication
to the job took a toll on his marriage; he divorced after
four years. Yet in those years came the first release from
the psychic pain he said often made "it difficult to see."
The moment he felt healed was when his son was born and again
when his daughter arrived two years later. Yet he did not
tell his grown-up children about Thanh Phong until two weeks
ago. Now he talks of how healing it is to hear that they still
love him.
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May 7, 2001 | No. 18
COVER
STORIES
Haunted
by Vietnam
Former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey confesses under pressure to killing more
than a dozen innocents in 1969. In his sadness, shame and decades-long
silence, fellow vets see themselves-and the rest of America confronts
war's wrenching ambiguity
TRAVELER'S
ADVISORY
SOUTH
PACIFIC
PAPUA NEW GUINEA: Murder in the Dark...
The still potent fear of sorcery is leading to vigilante killings
THE
ARTS
ART: Andrew Sayers reframes Australia's
view of itself...
THEATRE:
The RSC takes on Shakespeare's histories..
BOOKS: Inside the domestic interior of
Vermeer
MUSIC: Irish boy band Westlife goes transatlantic
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