Word: kerrey
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...joke, "You were lucky this time." He remained the ideological conscience of Senate Democrats, goading them not to compromise the party's populist tradition by promoting such seemingly lost causes as universal health care and insurance coverage for mental illness. During a recent conversation with former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, Wellstone joked about his legacy. According to Kerrey, Wellstone said, "I think my epitaph is going i*Ato read, 'We don't know what he did, but he sure looked tired.'" Says Kerrey: "Now I think his epitaph will be, 'We didn't realize what a good...
...version of the first mission has already been told. In 2001 the New York Times Magazine published an article by Gregory Vistica, alleging that a platoon led by Kerrey slaughtered unarmed women and children during a night raid in the Mekong Delta. Kerrey had not spoken publicly about the assault before the Times story and challenged some of the interpretations that were put upon his conduct. Those seeking the definitive account of the attack will not find it here. Kerrey says, quite plainly, "I remember very little of what happened in a clear and reliable way." What he does remember...
...Kerrey had a lot to lose. "Lincoln in the 1950s," he writes, "was about as safe and quiet a place as you could find on earth." Kerrey tells the usual tales of going to church, of trying out for the high school football team, of teenage fights and crushes. All of this, to an extent, is predictable. Yet these reminiscences of the Golden Years after World War II are given an unexpected poignancy, not because of how they end?we know they will end in Vietnam, America's ultimate repository of innocence lost?but because of how they began...
...That made its end hard to bear. For Kerrey, like many others, night fell in Southeast Asia. After voting for Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election and qualifying as a pharmacist, he signed up as a Navy officer. Two years' training as a frogman and SEAL followed, until he was sent to Vietnam at the beginning of 1969. His war lasted a little over 50 days, just time enough for two terrifying missions. In the second, he lost his leg; in the first, something even more intimate?his sense...
...Kerrey lived, of course, and those in the village did not. But it is impossible to read his book without a sense that war can be almost as terrible to those who survive it as to those who do not. Throughout When I Was a Young Man, Kerrey quotes from Wilfred Owen, the greatest poet of World War I. Owen's subject, he once wrote, was "war, and the pity of war." That is Kerrey's subject too, and he has added magnificently to the long canon of literature...