Word: phong
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...SEAL that his unit, led by the young Kerrey, had been involved in a Vietnam raid that went horribly wrong. Vistica pursued the tale until he turned up the Navy's dusty "after action" reports on the events of Feb. 25, 1969, in the isolated peasant village of Thanh Phong. Late in 1998, when Kerrey was contemplating a second run for the presidency, the reporter put those 30-year-old documents in then Senator Kerrey's hands. The Senator knew his actions on that terrible night were no longer a private affair. "There's a part of me that wants...
...Star for leading an operation in February 1969 that has all the appearances of an atrocity against Vietnamese civilians. And the revelations, both through Kerrey's own shifting recollections and the even more damning account offered up by one of the men he commanded that fateful night at Thanh Phong in the Mekong Delta, look set to stoke the fires of anguish over a war that continues to haunt America to this...
...Here is an American hero, twice decorated for his heroics in the heat of battle, and later one of the most respected legislators on both sides of the aisle in the Senate telling the nation that despite the medal, he believes he did nothing heroic that night in Thanh Phong. Although the military honored him for killing 21 Vietcong in the operation, he now maintains that the only people who died were unarmed Vietnamese men, women and children...
...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...