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Bob Kerrey and Vietnam

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from: Michael Brus
to: Jacob Weisberg, Timothy Noah, and Scott Shuger

Posted Wednesday, May 9, 2001, at 9:00 PM ET

Timothy Noah writes Slate's "Chatterbox" column. Jacob Weisberg writes Slate's "Ballot Box" column. Scott Shuger writes "Today's Papers" and served five peacetime years as an officer in the U.S. Navy. Michael Brus writes "The Week/The Spin." This week they continue to 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}}.

Dear Jacob, Tim, and Scott,

I reject the Manichean choice that Scott presents—namely, that you either prosecute Bob Kerrey for war crimes or you confess to being a moral relativist and forfeit any right to judge acts committed in the name of warfare. Respect for the political context and factual ambiguities of Thanh Phong need not lead to the conclusion that anything goes.

Let's stipulate some differences between Thanh Phong, on the one hand, and Nazi Germany, My Lai, and the former Yugoslavia on the other. First, most war crimes trials—such as those at Nuremberg and the ones planned for The Hague—are prosecutions of politicians and generals, not combat soldiers. Second, in all three examples the trials took place/will take place within several years of the crime. (My Lai investigators began interviewing witnesses about 14 months after the massacre.) Finally, all three prosecutions used/will use evidence such as shell casings, photographs, and human remains. What evidence do we have from Thanh Phong? Other than the falsified Bronze Star citation (probably one of hundreds, if not thousands, of falsified Vietnam medal citations), we have conflicting 33-year-old memories.

Obviously you three have more confidence in these memories than I do. Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who treats Vietnam vets, has written that

traumatic memory is not narrative. Rather, it is experience that reoccurs, either as full sensory replay of traumatic events in dreams or flashbacks, with all things seen, heard, smelled, and felt intact, or as disconnected fragments. These fragments may be inexplicable rage, terror, uncontrollable crying, or disconnected body states and sensations, such as the sensation of suffocating in a Viet Cong tunnel or being tumbled over and over by a rushing river—but with no memory of either tunnel or river.

Yet Tim seems convinced that Kerrey knows exactly what happened that night 33 years ago. Moreover, if the emotions Kerrey displays aren't the "appropriate" ones, Tim concludes, then he must be manipulating the public. ("If all Kerrey really did was accidentally to kill some unarmed people, then the self-dramatizing language he's been employing seems wildly inappropriate.")

Scott thinks that Kerrey's expressions of shame are "self-indulgent" and "narcissistic" excuse-making—as if we or he know what he needs to make excuses for. Because we don't require music critics to be composers, Scott reasons, we shouldn't require journalists, historians, and prosecutors to take into account the trauma experienced by combat soldiers. I'd be more inclined to agree with this genteel analogy if I saw streets and hospitals littered with ex-composers drinking themselves to death or dropping to the ground when a car backfires. In other words, I think there is a qualitative difference between traumatic experience and non-traumatic experience. There is also a political context to Thanh Phong killings: They were committed not just in a war, but one in which enemy soldiers masqueraded as civilians, and in a war zone in which the United States had warned civilians that they were targets. (Calling Kerrey's Raiders a "SEAL assassination team," as Scott does, simply wishes this political background away.) As a moral matter, it is important to take personal experiences and political context into account. As a legal matter, of course, they usually are. Hence the distinctions that prosecutors and juries routinely make between first-degree murder, manslaughter, negligent homicide, and not guilty by reason of insanity or self-defense.

But there's a larger worldview lurking behind the zeal to "resolve" Thanh Phong, whatever the evidence. Let's call it the "positivist" fallacy, a belief that earnest investigators can always unearth the truth. With all due respect, Scott, I think you demonstrate this fallacy when you argue that "noncombatant reporter Gregory Vistica now knows more about what happened that night in Thanh Phong than any of [the participants]."

Now, I admire Vistica's reporting. His is a gripping, balanced, and illuminating story, one that deserved to be told. And if Vistica or another journalist had found a smoking gun—forensic, documentary, or photographic evidence that Kerrey and his men had systematically executed civilians without any provocation—then I would support legal proceedings. (To be fair, however, the prosecutors would have to solicit from the public possible war-crimes evidence implicating other Vietnam, Korean, and World War II vets; Kerrey shouldn't be singled out just because he's famous.) But to say that Vistica "knows more" about Thanh Phong than the participants do just because he has "talked to more witnesses" and "read more relevant documents" is a curious view of epistemology. It is like saying that a biochemist knows more about drug addiction than a junkie because the biochemist understands the addiction mechanism of the brain. In an extremely literal way he does. But in a very real way he knows bullshit. Analytical detachment is only a part of true understanding.

Certainly analytical detachment is insufficient to understand human character. It is interesting, Scott, that you mention Hitler's World War I medal. This, I think, is exactly what John McCain was getting at when he wrote in the Wall Street Journal that "unless you too have been to war, please be careful not to form your judgment of [Kerrey] on your understanding of what constitutes a war hero." McCain doesn't just mean that war "criminals" are not all bad, but that war "heroes" are not all good. Even civilian "heroes" are not all good: In the early 1970s Ted Bundy showed deep empathy and saved many lives while interning as a social worker in Seattle hospitals.

I think analytical detachment is also insufficient to understand political character. Scott, you write that our leaders during the '60s and '70s "were far more concerned with how their political fortunes might suffer than with what their decisions meant to the people of Vietnam." I don't deny that political calculus (i.e., pandering to the majority of Americans who supported the war until the early to mid-'70s) played a large role in their decisions. But were their motives entirely cynical? They may have underestimated the human costs of winning the war, and they may have erred in assuming that Ho Chi Min was a Soviet-style totalitarian (as opposed to a nationalist authoritarian who spouted Communist rhetoric), but I think they sincerely believed that Western-style economic and political freedom was worth fighting for.

The fact remains that at age 25 Kerry had to make life-or-death choices in a fraction of a second that nearly all our current political leaders deliberately avoided having to make. That doesn't necessarily make Kerrey morally superior to Bush fils, Gore, Clinton, et al., but in my mind it makes Gerhard Klann's haunting memory much less damning.

Yours,
Michael

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from: Michael Brus
to: Jacob Weisberg, Timothy Noah, and Scott Shuger

Posted Wednesday, May 9, 2001, at 9:00 PM ET
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Scott Shuger was a Slate senior writer and the original author of "Today's Papers." He died June 15, 2002. Michael Brus, a former Slate assistant editor, is a writer and social worker in Seattle. Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate. Jacob Weisberg is editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and author of The Bush Tragedy.
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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

(To reply, click here.)


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

(To reply, click here.)

(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

(To reply, click here.)

 (5/9)

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