Dear Tim, Scott, and Jacob,
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StumbleUponI'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
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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
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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)