[I was in high school and college during the sixties, and that's the main reason I never for one second considered supporting NATO's intervention in Kosovo. The Vietnam War did more to shape my view of the world than any event I have lived through. It utterly convinced me that violence corrupts, that absolute violence, war, corrupts absolutely, and that the way you help limit war is by not joining in. In reflecting on the sins of the Weathermen 30 odd years ago, it is well to ponder the far greater transgressions of the U.S. government then. A timely reminder is provided by the story now breaking about the participation of Bob Kerrey – former Senator and Presidential contender, now president of the New School – in the slaughter of Vietnamese women and children during his time as a Navy Seal. The following is an excerpt from the NY Times current web posting on this atrocity.]
As an inexperienced, 25-year-old lieutenant, Kerrey led a commando team on a raid of an isolated peasant hamlet called Thanh Phong in Vietnam's eastern Mekong Delta. While witnesses and official records give varying accounts of exactly what happened, one thing is certain: around midnight on Feb. 25, 1969, Kerrey and his men killed at least 13 unarmed women and children. The operation was brutal; for months afterward, Kerrey says, he feared going to sleep because of the terrible nightmares that haunted him....
Gary Solis, a war-crimes expert at the United States Military Academy at West Point ... says that atrocities were more common in Vietnam than we knew. While there were 122 convictions for war crimes in Vietnam, he says, "In my opinion, war crimes occurred that were never reported."
Did Kerrey and his men commit crimes of war, or were they just applying the basic rules of a dirty war as best they understood them? "Let the other people judge whether or not what I did was militarily allowable or morally ethical or inside the rules of war," Kerrey says. "Let them figure that out. I mean, I can make a case that it was." ...
Kerrey insists ... his squad's actions would have been permitted under the rules then in effect. "Under the unwritten rules of Vietnam, we would have been justified had we not been fired upon," he said in 1998. "You were authorized to kill if you thought that it would be better. If you thought it would be better to bring them out, you were authorized to bring them out." This month Kerrey said flatly, "We were instructed not to take prisoners."
"Standard operating procedure" was widely understood to mean that, in a free-fire zone, any man was considered a "target of opportunity" and could be killed. Yet, there were other considerations. "It was quite clear what he wanted," Kerrey says of his commanding officer, Hoffmann. "He wanted hooches destroyed and people killed." Hoffmann agrees but says he never intended for his men to kill innocent women or children. But in Vietnam, he adds, it was hard to distinguish between guerrillas and noncombatants. Kerrey underscores that point. "There are people on the wall," he says, referring to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, which lists the names of all the Americans who died in Vietnam, "because they didn't realize a woman or a child could be carrying a gun."
Kerrey has spoken generally about the practical problems officers face in these situations. The commander's first consideration, he said, is the safety of his men. "With seven men operating, one goes down and you've got two carrying him," he says. "It doesn't take much in the way of casualties to put you in considerable risk of losing everybody."
Several officers, even some under Hoffmann's command, said the rules then in effect allowed for too much violence. William Garlow says he and his fellow swift-boat commanders were ordered to shoot up villages almost at random. "We burned their hooches and killed their livestock," he says. Even one of Hoffmann's senior commanders in Cat Lo says the killing became indiscriminate. "I hated it," says the former officer, who requested anonymity.
[Full text: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/25/magazine/25KERREY.html?pagewanted=print]
Carl
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