Word: kerrey
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...message here, Kerrey told TIME, is as simple as it is sobering: "I have not been able to justify what we did militarily or morally. But it's one of the things that went on in the war." His shame is the shame of the entire war: what he did was part and parcel of how America fought Vietnam. "In a free-fire zone we had permission to do it," Kerrey says. "And we had very aggressive instructions from our commanding officer in 1969 for how to deal with people there. And anybody that wasn't aware that this...
Vietnam has come to define the way we ought not to fight our wars. The main lesson is to take no American casualties, to fight only if victory is assured. But Kerrey's story reminds us that there is another lesson, one far harder to follow. Nations have no business sending their young into battle without lasting moral justification, not only because it is hard to die for your country but because it is equally hard to kill for your country...
...know and understand what Kerrey's Raiders did that night in Thanh Phong can be cathartic. To condemn it is something else, requiring a clarity that was almost never available to young men shooting in the dark. It is a clarity our nation likewise never had at the time. When we judge Bob Kerrey, we judge our nation as well...
When the Navy SEAL squad known as Kerrey's Raiders went into Thanh Phong in 1969, the men were dropped off by speedboat and crept in by cover of night. Today visitors to the remote coastal village come by daylight, by road and ferry, past lush coconut groves and over the countless fingers of the Mekong River as it branches across the delta. Of late, those traveling the one-lane clay road to Thanh Phong--now home to about 380 families who fish and grow rice--include foreign journalists trying to corroborate an atrocity and Vietnamese government officials accompanying them...
What isn't yet clear is whether villager Pham Thi Lanh is an honest witness, a propagandist or just an old woman with hazy memories. In interviews with 60 Minutes II, she emerged as the key eyewitness corroborating the worst charges against Kerrey and his squad--she claimed to have seen them use knives and guns to murder women, children and an old man. But when interviewed last week by TIME, she first repeated her story, then changed it, saying she hadn't actually seen the killings, but had only heard the screams and later seen the bodies. "I heard...