Dialogues

Bob Kerrey and Vietnam

Dear Tim, Scott, and Jacob,

I’d like to jump into this “Dialogue” to wrest it from factual minutiae and focus instead on exactly what Tim does not want to talk about—assessing Kerrey’s goodness and the larger meaning of the war.

Reading these dispatches, I was reminded of an exchange between Michael Walzer and Paul Fussell written in reaction to Fussell’s essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb.”  (The essay and the resulting exchange appeared in the New Republic 20 years ago; both are reprinted in Fussell’s book of the same name.) Fussell’s essay is partly a reasoned justification of Truman’s decision to drop the bomb (well over a million American and Japanese troops would have died in an invasion of Japan, many civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have eventually become combatants, the nuclear arms race was not foreseeable, etc.). But it is largely an argument that non-combatants, by dint of their (lack of) experience, have a hard time conceiving of the moral chaos visited upon combatants. From the perspective of the ground soldier, Fussell argues, war is amoral: He didn’t start it, he can’t end it, and all he can do is save his ass. In this context, the atomic bombings may have been vicious and tragic, but they were merely final acts of amoral violence without which an amoral and violent era could not have ended.

Walzer will have none of this. He reaffirms the moral distinction between combatant and noncombatant deaths and compares the military to a police force: Both could increase their efficiency and expose themselves to less risk if they ceased to distinguish between the guilty and innocent, but distinguishing guilt from innocence is one of humanity’s ethical obligations. Fussell’s reply is an extraordinary one:

I’m grateful to Michael Walzer for his courteous demurrer, but I think we’re never going to agree, for our disagreement is one between sensibilities. I’d designate them as, on the one hand, the ironic and ambiguous (or even the tragic, if you like), and, on the other, the certain. The one complicates problems, leaving them messier than before and making you feel terrible. The other solves problems and cleans up the place, making you feel tidy and satisfied. I’d call the one sensibility the literary-artistic-historical; I’d call the other the social-scientific-political. To expect them to agree, or even to perceive the same date, would be expecting too much.

I’d like to talk about this “disagreement between sensibilities”—in particular, to defend Fussell’s sensibility. More specifically, I want to plead for humility, both in our assumptions about what Kerrey and his Raiders did in Thanh Phong and in our judgments about the morality of their actions.

On the factual issue, all we know for sure is this: that a squad of Navy SEALs killed about one to two dozen civilians during a wartime raid at night. Absent any forensic evidence from the incident (such as an audio or video record, freshly killed bodies, spent rounds, etc.), all we have to go on are the competing 30-year-old memories of some battle-scarred witnesses/perpetrators. I think the opportunity to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt expired long ago. To “put the odds at 53 percent that Kerrey is telling the truth to 47 percent that he isn’t” is, I think, hubristic.

On the moral issue, we know that during that war civilians, including women and children, frequently worked with the Viet Cong and killed unsuspecting American soldiers. We also know that American soldiers killed civilians just to express their anger and fear. This type of brutality is disturbing but certainly not new to warfare. It may not be moral, but it is certainly understandable (to me), that the madness of daily, random death finds release in acts of sadism. As Fussell notes in his essay, during World War II Japanese soldiers routinely severed the penises of American corpses and stuffed them in the corpses’ mouths, while American soldiers routinely removed gold teeth from still-living Japanese soldiers and kept their skulls as souvenirs. Many of these soldiers are now kindly grandfathers sitting in nursing homes. For them, the war was the war, the peace is the peace, and never the twain shall meet. It’s not surprising that they refuse to talk about the past—even with fellow soldiers. To paraphrase Kerrey, I don’t begrudge them their memories.

Tim is right that all of us have the capacity to be fudge the truth when the heat is on. We’ve all experienced this. But we haven’t all watched seemingly innocent women and children kill our buddies with grenades, and we haven’t all encountered terrifying, life-threatening encounters in the dark. (Certainly that is true of most politicians other than Kerrey—including George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Ronald Reagan, each of whom avoided combat, with varying degrees of honor.) For any of us to call Kerrey a “war criminal” is, I think, hubristic. 

Given what is know about Thanh Phong, all I can conclude is this: It was neither an “atrocity” nor “legitimate self-defense” (whatever those terms mean in the context of war) but rather—as Jacob noted in his first dispatch—a tragedy. A tragedy has two sides, and no absolute right or wrong. As Fussell writes: “To observe that from the viewpoint of the war’s [combatants] the bomb seemed precisely the right thing to drop is to purchase no immunity from [Hiroshima’s] horror.” In fact, Fussell dwells at length on the death and mutilation experienced by Hiroshima’s victims. As we should dwell at length on the death and mutilation experienced by both Vietnamese and Americans in the Vietnam war, without pointing fingers.

Yours,
Michael