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.
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StumbleUponOne 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.
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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
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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
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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)