But the subsequent NYT story makes this passage from the Globe's puff piece more interesting:
"It was much noted among reporters during the '92 cmpaign that Kerrey seemed more comfortable discussing his favorite book, Walker Percy's novel 'The Moviegoer,' than tax reform or trade relations...
... 'That's the story of my life,' Kerrey says of the novel. 'A guy comes home from a war, has memories of a war: He's on a search. I don't use the same method that Binx Bolling used in his search, but I am aware that human beings have a tendency to sleepwalk, that every now and then something awakens us. It can be something you least expect. To be conscious of time, conscious o the relationship between things that happen today and things that happened 20, 30, 40 years ago can make it easier to understand, can bring clarity to the question of how did we get to where we are today.'"
Aside: That's quite the evolution for the New School: From hiring the "university in exile" to hiring a war criminal as president. Not that the term "war crime" ever appears in this weirdly-structured story, which has to be read backwards to know what happened.
Aside 2: << He [Klann] served with distinction in a 20-year Seals career ...>>
So... did the dead baby help or hurt his service review?
----Original Message Follows---- From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Baby Killers & Collateral Damage: Part 2 Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 01:55:38 -0400
***** New York Times 25 April 2001
One Awful Night in Thanh Phong
By GREGORY L. VISTICA
Senator Bob Kerrey's hands trembled slightly as he began to read six pages of documents that had just been handed to him. It was late 1998; the papers were nearly 30 years old. On the face of it, they were routine "after action" combat reports of the sort filed by the thousands during the Vietnam War. But Kerrey knew the pages held a personal secret -- of an event so traumatic that he says it once prompted fleeting thoughts of suicide.
Pulling the documents within inches of his eyes, he read intently about his time as a member of the Navy Seals and about a mission in 1969 that somehow went horribly wrong. 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... _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com