Word: kerrey
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...Kerrey's Raiders, as the squad called itself, had little experience but lots of enthusiasm. Despite warnings of "considerable danger," toward 12 midnight on a moonless night, the men piled into a swift boat and headed for Thanh Phong. Darkness gave cover but heightened the confusion. As the men crept toward the village, they bumped into an outlying hooch they thought was a warning outpost. Kerrey says his men, wielding knives, told him they would "take care" of the people inside to prevent them from alerting the village. But Kerrey says he did not join in the killings or examine...
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...
...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...