Word: kerrey
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...former Senator Bob Kerrey, that nightmare never goes away. He knows that one night 32 years ago in Vietnam, he and his squad of Navy SEALs killed nearly a score of unarmed civilians, mainly women and children. The shame and guilt and remorse have haunted him since. He did not want to make his personal anguish public any more than other Americans want to dredge up the nation's agony again. But because a fellow SEAL who lived through the same nightmare that night has come forward with an even more damning chain of events than Kerrey admits...
...Because history never stops being written. Because Kerrey is a politician, a public figure respected for his candor, a certified war hero who survived grievous wounds, a man who once sought and may again seek the presidency. And because the ambiguity of his experience reminds us that good men did terrible things in Vietnam, making us examine what it means when honor is peeled away from...
...Kerrey opines, in the Times story, that the civilians of the village his men attacked were, in all probability, Vietcong supporters. And a local woman interviewed for the story makes no bones about the fact that her husband was a guerrilla. Because the Vietcong were not an invading force from the north; they were an indigenous guerrilla army that survived, prospered and the ultimately prevailed because of the support they received not only from their compatriots and commanders in the North or from Moscow and Beijing, but, more important, from within the civilian population of the south...
...Thanh Phong, Kerrey and his men were on a "behind-the-lines" mission, but they were also not very far from Saigon. In the Vietnam war there was no frontline; the enemy was everywhere. Not in uniform, not always armed, not always a male of fighting age. And if a whole South Vietnamese village supported the Vietcong, providing a base, logistics and intelligence to soldiers who were often their husbands and sons, then where exactly was the line drawn between civilians and enemy personnel? It was that reality that gave rise to oft-quoted statement by an American officer...
...Actions like those described by Kerrey were not, for the most part, the product of poor judgment or malice on the part of field commanders. The principle of individual accountability notwithstanding, the ultimate moral responsibility for what happened that night in Thanh Phong - and in countless other Thanh Phong's, both documented and undocumented - lies less with those who did the actual killing, but with those who sent a half million young Americans on a moral, political and military mission impossible...