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Ghosts of Vietnam continue to haunt U.S.
By Carl Heintze
The tragic story of former Sen. Robert Kerrey is the all too familiar tale of a god with feet of clay.
But it also raises some troubling questions for us all.
If you'll remember, Kerrey, who holds the Congressional Medal of Honor for valor in Vietnam, has been confronted with an earlier combat action in which his chief foes seem to have been old people and children.
Fighting in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam as a Navy SEAL leader he and his squad were responsible for the deaths of at least 32 innocent men, women and children. That the three score and two died is certain. Less certain and now probably impossible to determine is how they died.
Kerrey's contention is they were accidentally killed during the fog of war. A member of the team has a different story, however. He says the squad herded the villagers into a group and then mowed them down.
The few surviving Vietnamese have still another version. Their story, however, tends to support the version not Kerrey's.
It's important to remember that Kerrey's Medal of Honor is not for this engagement, but for one which happened later and in which he lost a leg.
There are, however, some questions about the loss of life in the village, the first battle--if one can call it that--that haven't been explained:
1. Why didn't the various versions of the story come to light until now?
Kerrey has been a governor, a senator and a candidate for president and is now retired from politics, but he's still considered a potential candidate for the presidency. Yet neither he nor anyone else ever brought up this incident until this year when it appeared in a New York newspaper. Even when he was running for president the story lay hidden. How come now?
2. Why are there different versions of the same events?
Kerrey's remembrance is not the same as either that of the few remaining Vietnamese who were in the village or of the former member of his SEAL team. Kerrey says this is because everyone remembers battle differently. Maybe, but there seem to be sharp differences in recollection in this particular case. Why is that? Is Kerrey trying to make what happened into something that didn't?
3. Does it really make any difference what happened?
Here, alas, we face a moral dilemma. It is not morally correct to kill civilians, particularly old men and women and young children, even in wartime. Yet it happens all the time. Kerrey makes a point of this, of the fact that the villagers probably were Viet Cong sympathizers. They were, he indicates, the enemy. They should have been treated as such. The survivors claim this is not so. At this distance from the event we'll probably never know for sure.
But the question remains, does it make any difference now what happened?
War is not fair. It also is not excusable. Terrible things happen in warfare. That's because the normal restraints on human behavior disappear. Individual responsibility gets handed over to the group, whether it be the nation or in this case the SEAL squad. Kerrey can claim he was doing his duty and he'll be right--so far as that definition goes.
In the end we are forced back to the question about Vietnam which we as Americans have yet to answer: Was the war itself right? Were we right in attempting to rid the country of what we perceived to be --and which was--a deadly foe?
Or were we where we should not have been in the first place doing what we should not have done at all?
I don't think the answer to this is any easier to reach now than it was 30 years ago when former Sen. Kerrey and other Americans were in Vietnam. The question is not how the war was being fought, but rather whether it should have been ours to fight in the first place?
If you assume the former--that it should have been fought--then any means to end it was possible, even killing old people and children. (And most any means from Agent Orange to shooting up villages at random was undertaken).
If, on the other hand, if the war was wrong in the first place--as many Americans believed then and more believe now--then Kerrey and his squad were part of an even larger, an even more irresponsible, wrong.
I do not know that we can answer these questions now. I do not know that we will ever answer them. But history will somehow some day.
Until then and so long as those on either side are alive the question will beg for an answer and the ghosts not only of the village which Kerrey and the SEALS invaded but hundreds of other hamlets and towns in Vietnam will not rest.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contribtor to The Sun.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
