Tim,
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StumbleUponPart of my argument was that Bob Kerrey participated in an "atrocity," as he himself has termed it, whether or not he and his men lined up women and children and shot them in back. At the first "hooch," they murdered five unarmed people, apparently two grandparents and their three grandchildren. One version, initially supported by another member of the squad, has Kerrey helping to kill the old man. Kerrey only remembers witnessing this killing. In any case, as leader of the seven-man Fire Team Bravo, Kerrey was responsible for the decision to kill these people, in order to continue with a mission.
Leave aside for a moment the dispute about what happened to the larger number of civilians killed 15 minutes later in another hooch. What happened at the first hooch was a war crime. The rules of war do not allow soldiers to intentionally kill noncombatants for either self-protection or mission-protection. The area's status as a "free-fire zone" and Kerrey's understanding that it was OK to kill civilians under these circumstances might affect his culpability under U.S. military law. But I don't think it can affect the status of his actions under international law, which is binding on both governments and individuals. Serbian war criminals can't escape judgment in the Hague by saying that everyone in Bosnia or Kosovo was defined as the enemy.
That said, Kerrey obviously did something much worse if, as Gerhard Klann asserts, his team subsequently rounded up women and children and murdered them. Here, I don't think our views are terribly far apart. Last week, you thought it was more likely than not that this is what happened. Now you think it is more not than likely, based on the statements of Kerrey's fellow SEALs and the revelation that a Vietnamese eyewitness was only an ear-witness. I'm still closer to your earlier opinion, but I agree that it's not a slam-dunk. So let me take up your useful suggestion that we weigh the existing evidence as clinically as possible. I'll give the arguments on both sides, ranked according to how persuasive I find them. Feel free to modify my lists as you see fit.
First, the support for Klann's charge of an intentional massacre:
1. Circumstantial evidence: According to the Times Magazine story, Kerrey remembered finding the bodies of dead women and children clustered together in a group inside the second hooch. This is a powerful piece of support for Klann's version, because there's no other good explanation for it. Let me quote an e-mail message from a military man we both know who served in Vietnam. "At the first indication of anything unusual, the people roll into their bunkers, and each hooch has one, probably dating from the French era. Even if the attacking force fires all of their weapons, no one will be hit. No one. Ever. The only way to assemble the civilians in one place is to pull them out of their bunkers and round them up. What happens afterward is a matter of discretion."
2. Further circumstantial evidence: As Kerrey tells it, the firing began from a distance of 100 yards in total darkness. Gregory Vistica, the author of the Times Magazine article, points out that it would be hard to kill so effectively at that range with the kind of firepower that Fire Team Bravo had at its disposal, even if the victims weren't protected in bunkers.
3. Account of the first Vietnamese witness: Pham Tri Lanh originally told 60 Minutes II that she witnessed these killings. She subsequently told Time that she only heard them. As a former Viet Cong sympathizer and citizen of the unfree nation of Vietnam, she may have various motives for lying. However, that doesn't mean she is lying. Her reportedly unprompted account does square with Gerhard Klann's story of slitting an old man's throat outside the first hooch and with stories of the other commandos doing the same to a woman and three children inside.
4. Account of the second Vietnamese witness: According to the Los Angeles Times story you cited, Bui Thi Luom says she is the only survivor of the attack, in which her family members died. Her account also squares with Klann's version of what happened at the second hooch.
5. Gerhard Klann's apparent motivation in talking: This story came out because Klann, a former SEAL, felt the need to confess what he had done to a former officer. He didn't want to speak to a reporter, who heard a second-hand rumor. Only after Vistica coaxed Klann and showed up at his house did he relent and speak for the record.
6. Plausibility of Klann's account: Klann's version is consistent with external evidence about the dead at both hooches. It explains why the bodies in the second hooch were found as they were, which Kerrey's version does not.
7. Weakness of Kerrey's original denial: We have different views about how memory works, but let's assume for the moment that you're right and that Kerrey now remembers what really happened. He has been accused of being a mass murderer and a war criminal. His initial response to these charges, which he knows to be false: "I don't begrudge Gerhard his memory. Mine's bad enough." Where's the outrage?
8. Weakness of the group denial: Having said I think Kerrey is a forthright fellow, the wording of the joint statement he and five others issued is downright evasive, even Clintonian. It repeatedly notes, "We took fire and we returned fire." This in no way answers the charge that the killing of women and children was intentional. "No order was given or received to execute innocent women, old men and children as has been described by some," the statement says. "… Our actions were in response to a dangerous situation that we know for certain could have resulted in our deaths. … We were young men then and did what we thought was right and necessary." All these statements could be true without ruling out the possibility that a massacre of civilians took place.
9. Military context: American soldiers at that time and in the area of the war were being encouraged to regard civilians as Viet Cong sympathizers and to kill them indiscriminately in order to substantiate inflated body counts.
Now here's the evidence refuting the charge of an intentional massacre:
1. Weakness in Klann's version: Vistica points out one important inconsistency. Klann told him that the Americans were worried that if they let the women and children go, they might alert enemy soldiers. But so presumably would a massive artillery barrage. This is Gregg Easterbrook's point in the e-mail you quoted. What, then, was their motivation for the killing?
2. Denials of Klann's account: Kerrey and the five others say it wasn't a massacre, it was an accident.
3. Doubts about Klann's reliability and motivation: The guy has had a drinking problem. He threatened to contradict his own story if a reporter mentioned his drunken-driving arrest record in print. Kerrey says Klann was angry at him for not supporting Klann's effort to get a Congressional Medal of Honor for his part in an attempted rescue of American hostages in Iran.
4. Mike Ambrose's account: One of the SEALs told Vistica a third version. After searching one of the hooches, finding only women, and leaving, the Americans heard a shot, then opened fire from a range of 20 to 50 feet. From a moral perspective, this version is worse than Kerrey's—the SEALs knew they were shooting women, if not also children. But it's not as bad as Klann's version.
5. An independent account: A separate military report, based on the complaint of a Thanh Phong villager who appeared at a South Vietnamese military base, described the dead as including 11 unidentified people who were "assumed to be Viet Cong." James Webb argues that this substantiates the notion that there were Viet Cong fighters in the village, perhaps hiding behind the civilians, and that they fired at the Americans. However, it doesn't make much sense that a group of at least 11 Viet Cong guerrillas would have gotten off only a single shot at the Americans, which is what Mike Ambrose remembers.
Tim, I'd love for you to persuade me that I'm wrong about this. And maybe I'll feel differently after watching 60 Minutes II tonight, or after more evidence arrives. But right now, it seems to me that the weight of evidence points to something more like a massacre than an accident.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:
The "you can't judge if you weren't there" is a copout, or an invitation to one. Nobody says that about battlefield heroism, though it may be just as true. And it's suspicious when that line comes in reference to someone the press loves. Weisberg has it exactly right on this: you shouldn't be overquick to judge someone's actions in very difficult situations. But you shouldn't use the difficulty to argue that nothing matters. Or--if you're really willing to argue that--you should apply it even to people you hate, like Serb death squads, sleazy Argentine "dirty war" types, and French secret police in Algeria forty years ago. But nobody seems to want to do that.
They're right not to do that, but if you're going to judge some, you have to judge everybody according to the same standard. At least, you have to if you claim to care about justice.
--A.G.Android
(To reply, click here.)
I have spent years reading police reports, listening to and watching tapes of police interrogations. Kerrey's statements and conduct bear an uncanny resemblance to a confused, frightened criminal suspect who has the feeling something terrible happened but isn't quite clear what it was. This doesn't prove his guilt, of course, but it also doesn't prove the tenderness of his conscience. In my experience, guilty suspects exhibit this confusion at least as frequently as innocent ones, perhaps more often.
--Yukon
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If a majority or large plurality believe that a full scale investigation of those events 30+ years ago are warranted, I don't supppose that their desire is in any way illegitimate, but we shouldn't fool ourselves as to the possibility of ever determining, to any large degree of certainty, what actually occurred, unless a tremendous amount of yet-undiscovered circumstantial evidence becomes available. The nature of conflicting, or even unconflicting, eyewitness accounts in circumstances such as these are no basis for forming judgments.
--Will Allen
(To reply, click here.)
In an otherwise remarkably thoughtful and incisive essay on Bob Kerrey and his conduct in Vietnam, Jacob Weisberg makes one crucial misstep. He writes that
"Bob Kerrey is a good person who evidently did something awful, and possibly something profoundly evil, on a single day of his life. Such a contradiction doesn't just challenge our view of an individual. It shakes our view of morality itself. If Bob Kerrey could do that, good and evil aren't fixed within a person for a lifetime. Decency is less of a choice than the lack of sufficient reason to do evil."
The error here is perhaps best illustrated by considering a kind of diametric opposite of the Kerrey case: the story of Oskar Schindler. Schindler's numerous "character flaws" have long been documented, and while he was known to be very charming, few would have described him as possessing a saintly personality; yet he saved a thousand lives at great personal risk. Would we therefore say that Schindler was not a good man, just because Jacob Weisberg, if given the chance to interview him, might well have failed to feel the enormous warmth and sympathy he feels towards Bob Kerrey? Does the heroism of such an imperfect person shake our view of morality itself, or tell us that selfishness is less of a choice than the lack of sufficient reason to act altruistically?
On the contrary, it teaches us an ageless lesson: that we are all ultimately judged by what we do, not by what others perceive us to be. We don't yet know, and may never know, what Bob Kerrey did or did not do in Vietnam, but we surely know one thing: that Kerrey's choice was, like Schindler's, his to make, and that the moral state of his soul will finally be determined by his choices--not vice versa.
--Dan Simon
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(5/2)
Reader Comment From The Fray:
I did not read the Hagel-Kerry Op-Ed to reserve exclusively the role of judge for Vietnam War combat veterans. Rather, I thought the article suggested whom we should call as witnesses in the "trial." No procedure for judging actions can rationally require that the judge have been identically situated with the judged. Accepted procedures do, however, recognize the value of witnesses to inform our judgments. In evaluating, post hoc, the actions of combatants, the testimony of other combat veterans, then similarly situated, is certainly some of the most relevant evidence available. Most combatants in Vietnam did not commit war crimes. Far from stacking the deck with biased sympathizers, considering the perspectives of combat veterans may permit a more complete and informed evaluation of his actions.
--Sean Watts
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(5/9)