Timothy Noah writes Slate’s “Chatterbox” column. Jacob Weisberg writes “Ballot Box.” Scott Shuger writes “Today’s Papers.” Michael Brus writes “The Week/The Spin.” This week they discuss the factual and ethical disputes surrounding former Sen. Bob Kerrey’s raid on a civilian town during the Vietnam War. To read Noah’s columns on this topic, click {{here#2606:Show=4/29/2001&idMessage=7595}}, {{here#2606:Show=4/28/2001&idMessage=7591}}, and {{here#2606:Show=4/26/2001&idMessage=7584}}.
I’d like to answer Tim, then Michael, then Scott. Then I’ll be finished, but anyone is welcome to jump back in if there’s still more to say.
Tim, one thing you missed by only reading a transcript of the 60 Minutes II broadcast was a very persuasive image. It’s Pham Tri Lanh, the 62-year-old woman who claims to have witnessed the attack, showing the CBS camera crew a small burial plot in the village of Thanh Phong. We see the headstones of Bui Van Vat, his wife Luu Thi Canh, and their three grandchildren, who lie beneath unmarked cement humps. The date on the headstones is Feb. 24, 1969.
This corresponds to the recollections not just of the Vietnamese woman, but also to those of Gerhard Klann about what happened at the first hooch. Their stories align, down to the approximate ages of the three children whose throats were slit. And here are their graves. Now, it is possible that Bob Kerrey remembers correctly that the five people killed by fellow SEALs inside the first hooch were five men and not the family whose tomb this is. But if so, what are these graves, and where are those graves? Unless there is some elaborate conspiracy at work, the existence of this gravesite takes the question of what happened at the first hooch from possible atrocity to probable atrocity.
Now, to say that an atrocity was committed still leaves open questions of moral and legal responsibility. Kerrey says he didn’t actually see who was inside the first hooch and that Klann and Mike Ambrose told him only men were inside. It’s possible that his crew members lied to him. But what’s more likely, it seems to me, is that Kerrey has repressed and revised an unbearable reality. In the Times Magazine story, Vistica quotes him acknowledging that “[s]tandard operating procedure was to dispose of the people we made contact with. Kill the people we made contact with, or we have to abort the mission.”
This is like one of the comments Kerrey made to Dan Rather that you point out sounds like a combination of a confession and a denial. And that gets us back to my original point about Kerrey’s sincerity. Kerrey thinks he didn’t commit a war crime, but he feels as remorseful and guilty as if he did. After a week of examination, I’m even more convinced that this is tragic irony. An outside observer recognizes that Kerrey’s memory is almost certainly deceiving him. What he thinks happened is very probably wrong. Yet what he feels is entirely appropriate.
Michael, I think you frame the broader issue well. To Paul Fussell, as you point out, war is hell. The individual grunt, used as cannon fodder, has no moral obligation whatsoever. He merely tries to keep his head attached to his body. Michael Walzer, on the other hand, conceives of war as a hell that can get a lot worse if soldiers do not abide by the time-honored, if often violated, rules that govern it. Everyone in the chain of military command, down to the individual infantryman, has moral responsibilities, even if he did not ask to take them on in the first place (and it’s worth noting that Kerrey and the other SEALs volunteered for their dangerous duty).
You take Fussell’s position, as have several prominent Vietnam vets in the Senate. One of them, oddly enough, is John Kerry, who as David Greenberg points out in {{this#105552}} “History Lesson,” was a force for exposing American war crimes in Vietnam in the 1970s. The essence of this view is: Those who weren’t there can’t possibly judge those who were. And those who were there turn out to have no desire to judge either.
I accept the caution but not the conclusion. Most of us will never have to face a horror like that Bob Kerrey went through, so we should be sensitive in our judgments. I hope I have been—as I’ve indicated, I have the greatest sympathy for the man. But if we can’t ever judge the actions of others in wartime without being in their boots, we’ll have to drop all those rules that have developed over centuries—no killing prisoners and civilians, no raping, enslaving, pillaging, and so on. Forget about the Serbian war crimes now being prosecuted in The Hague—we have no basis to judge. I think you can be sympathetic to Bob Kerrey personally without going near such a morally relativistic position. We can try to understand why someone in his position might have done as he did. But we can’t ever excuse it. What Michael Walzer says in Just and Unjust Wars is absolutely right. Without rules and moral judgments, the horror of war would be a lot more horrific.
Scott, thank you for weighing in as well. I wish there had been more voices like yours in the larger debate over the past week—military men defending the honor of their profession not by saying, in effect, everybody did it in Vietnam, but by reminding us that not everybody did it. To say, as Michael Brus does, that civilians can’t judge the actions of soldiers is ultimately a slander against all veterans, because it means the just conduct of war can’t be distinguished from indiscriminate slaughter.
I also share your hope that the Pentagon will forthrightly investigate this incident, which may be the tip of a much larger iceberg, though I doubt that it will. Where we may disagree, however, is in terms of what sounded like your view that the Pentagon should investigate the Thanh Phong atrocities with an eye to prosecuting a possible war crime on Kerrey’s part. Even though I think what happened probably was a war crime, I don’t think a criminal prosecution at this point would be either fair or socially useful.
First, as many commentators have noted, the Thanh Phong massacres were the direct product of our military rules of engagement. The district was designated as a “free-fire zone,” in which soldiers were instructed to regard everyone as the enemy. Instead of distinguishing combatants and noncombatants, Americans were trained to view the Vietnamese as either friend or foe—even children.
To fight in this context at all meant fighting against civilians. That doesn’t morally absolve soldiers and low-ranking officers who intentionally killed women and children. But it certainly diffuses the legal culpability. Who shall we prosecute? The soldiers who pulled the trigger, the officers up and down the chain of command, or the commander in chief who had ultimate authority for the policy? He has gone where the law cannot reach him. Add to that diffusion of responsibility the passage of decades and the low probability of establishing a legal standard of proof, and I think you have little hope of convicting anyone. Moreover, prosecuting Bob Kerrey would seem to visit responsibility for what were widespread misdeeds exclusively on one person because he happens to be famous and, perversely enough, because his own sense of deep remorse helped his story to the fore. A man who says he wishes he had returned home limbless and blind instead of doing what he did is someone who I’d say has been punished enough by his own conscience.
There is usually another purpose to war crimes trials, which has less to do with punishing the guilty (since the vast majority of war criminals are never prosecuted at all) than it does with bringing a nation face to face with its own misdeeds. But America has not spared itself a moral reckoning over Vietnam, the way that Japan has over its conduct in World War II, for example. Our country’s moral self-examination began several years before shots were fired in the village of Thanh Phong. It continues, as it should, to this day.
