Word: kerrey
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Lanh is one of the few witnesses to that night 32 years ago. Most of the others who were in the village at the time have either died or moved away. Kerrey admits an atrocity took place but swears it was accidental. He and his supporters argue that Lanh's account shouldn't be believed, because she was a communist revolutionary married to a Viet Cong soldier, and because her stories have been offered to journalists while Vietnamese government officials sat nearby. Lanh evidently told CBS her husband was Viet Cong, but, again, changed her story and denied to TIME...
Against that dreary background of official hubris, myopia and duplicity, it seems odd that former Senator Bob Kerrey is hitting newspaper headlines and television screens because of the revelation that his team of Navy SEALs killed innocent women and children while on a mission in the Mekong Delta. I reckon that thousands of grunts went through the same experience. But if what they did was appalling, it was comprehensible. In a way, they were victims of the machine that vaulted them into a hot, humid, shadowy, alien environment in which friend and foe were a blur, and all a potential...
...faced an enemy that, like bamboo, could be bent but not broken. As a result, the war was essentially unwinnable. For Kerrey and his buddies, who grievously suffered, and are still haunted by the ordeal, the epitaph for Vietnam and similar ventures is succinct: "Never Again...
Vietnam was some omelet. But it was a war, after all--a tragic, confusing, mishandled business in which the enemy merged with the civilian population, and the girl who did the laundry might blow you up with a grenade hidden beneath the folded underwear. Brave, decent men like Bob Kerrey got hurt or killed and sometimes made mistakes that killed the innocent...
...term collateral damage implies something secondary and unimportant. But it's the collateral damage that most haunts us later on. It's because of My Lai, or incidents like Bob Kerrey's night in the Mekong Delta, that that war keeps coming back and back and back to the surface of the American conscience, all these years later--unquiet ghosts that you may still see flickering, from time to time, in Kerrey's troubled...