Word: kerrey
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...experience of Vietnam is shaped by what we let ourselves say. Memory plays tricks?and to ward off horror, we make our memories play tricks. Except for long ago, when he told his mother, his first wife and a minister, Kerrey never brought up the botched mission at Thanh Phong. And then, on April 18 of this year, at a small speech to officer-training candidates at Virginia Military Institute, toward the end of his discourse about moral justifications of war, Kerrey spoke about the night in 1969 when he led six Navy SEALs on an operation to take...
...Kerrey recalls it, the nighttime assault unfolded amid the confusion endemic to Vietnam. In-country for just a month, the 25-year-old lieutenant had charge of a squad of Elite Navy SEALs (short for Sea, Air and Land unit) trained to emerge from the dark, kidnap or kill local Viet Cong leaders, then melt back into the jungle. This night their target was a village secretary reportedly holding a party meeting in Thanh Phong. The straggle of hooches lay deep in the Mekong Delta "free-fire zone," where innocent civilians had?officially, at least?been cleared out, and everyone...
...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 90 m 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...