I’ve found this discussion to be a very clear airing of the facts known to date about that night at Thanh Phong. I would like therefore to address some other parts of the controversy.
One underappreciated but very relevant fact bearing on the controversy comes after the event itself: Kerrey’s citation for the Bronze Star. It says that on the night in question Kerrey’s team killed 21 Viet Cong, a claim everybody now admits is false. Now, if we already knew for sure that Kerrey was a war criminal, bothering about whether or not he lied to get a medal would, I agree, be tantamount to making sure that Timothy McVeigh also got a citation for leaving his truck in a No Parking zone. But the analogy doesn’t hold since at present, we are very much left to struggle with Kerrey’s credibility, about which his medal is instructive. John McCain, in his Wall Street Journal piece last week, wrote that Kerrey “would be the first to agree that his conduct, no matter how unintentional, did not merit commendation.” But actually, McCain got it exactly backward. Before one of the top combat decorations can be awarded (like the Medal of Honor that Kerrey won later), some sort of independent follow-up investigation on the alleged gallantry is usually undertaken. But for a Bronze Star in Vietnam—which was essentially awarded to anybody who saw combat there—the information was basically self-reported—that is, gathered from the participants themselves (one of whom was Kerrey), and then signed on by the commanding officer (who was Kerrey), and then forwarded up the chain of command. In other words, the important false detail about the dead being Viet Cong rather than noncombatants either came from Kerrey’s mouth or his pen or both. In other words, his very first contribution to the history of that night in Thanh Phong was a lie. And he knows this, which makes his comments that somebody else wrote up the citation Clintonesque at best. And notice that his lie not only commits the medium sin of self-inflation but also the grave sin of attempting to deflect subsequent questions about civilian deaths. In my mind, this weighs heavily against Kerrey.
Once Kerrey was contacted years later by Gregory Vistica, and in his comments afterward, his main reaction has been more nuanced: not a flat-out lie, but a retreat into the language of self-help and recovery. Kerrey doesn’t tell us much now beyond how much he’s suffered; the rest is his “private memory.” I tend to think this tack, effective though it may be, suggests he’s guilty of a war crime. If he’s not, why wouldn’t he get his team together not to put out a vague self-serving statement, but to be questioned by Vistica? Why wouldn’t he direct Vistica to other good sources? Why wouldn’t he show Vistica his personal service papers, which almost surely contain contemporaneous information about the incident, ranging from official documents to letters home? Why wouldn’t he, as Joe Klein mentions other traumatized vets have done, undergo hypnosis? And I am really upset that so many other prominent Vietnam vets are, to use a word they would apparently be comfortable with, co-enabling Kerrey here. Both that Journal piece by John McCain and the one in the Washington Post by Max Cleland, Chuck Hagel, and John Kerry were appallingly incurious about what might have happened at Thanh Phong. Basically, all these guys are using the “been there” defense—if you haven’t been in a war yourself, you’re in no position to evaluate Kerrey. That’s ridiculous. I don’t care how much combat John McCain et al. have seen, at this point, noncombatant Gregory Vistica knows more about what happened that night than any of them. And the “been there” defense is insulting to any vet who at additional personal risk to himself managed somehow to not only be brave but also just. We who have not been under fire should be able to say they did the right thing.
And where’s the Pentagon in all this? There’s plenty of information in that building that’s dispositive here. Was there a tasking order for the Thanh Phong mission? There must have been standing operation orders covering assassination missions carried out by SEAL Team 1 in 1969. What do they instruct SEALs to do when they come in contact with noncombatants during a mission? Every military mission that isn’t illegal from the get-go creates paperwork. Why doesn’t the Pentagon produce it all now? I don’t think we have to worry anymore about our Vietnam war sources and methods being compromised.
Since there is no statute of limitations on war crimes, even after all this time, it’s proper to pull the foregoing threads. And proper to pull them hard. If we are to have the legal and moral authority to police other countries, we have to demonstrate that we can police ourselves.
