Word: kerrey
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...