Kerrey Tells of ’69 Vietnam Raid That Killed Civilians

Former Nebraska senator and governor Bob Kerrey, a potential Democratic presidential contender, has revealed that he commanded a raid on a village during the Vietnam War that killed only women, children and older men.

Kerrey stressed that members of his seven-man Navy SEAL team began shooting after they were shot at and assumed they were facing fire from Viet Cong soldiers.

He said the secret incident has “haunted” him for 32 years.

“Now I can talk about it. It feels better already,” Kerrey said in an interview Wednesday.

Kerrey made his comments after news reports about his involvement in the Feb. 25, 1969, raid in the Mekong Delta.

Then a 25-year-old Navy lieutenant, Kerrey got a Bronze Star for the raid and later received the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest valor award, for another SEAL action that cost him part of his right leg. His war hero background has been an important part of his political profile.

Kerrey’s account, however, has been dramatically contradicted by a member of the SEAL squad he headed and by a Vietnamese woman who claimed to be a survivor of the raid and who alleged the villagers were brought together and massacred.

“It was very crowded, so it wasn’t possible for them to cut everybody’s throats one by one,” Pham Tri Lanh, who said she was an eyewitness, told CBS News’ “60 Minutes II.” The network released excerpts from the interview Wednesday.

“Two women came out and kneeled down,” Lanh is quoted as saying. “They shot these two old women and they fell forward and they rolled over and then they ordered everybody out from the bunker and they lined them up and they shot all of them from behind.”

‘We Lined Them Up and We Opened Fire’

Gerhard Klann, a member of the SEAL commando team headed by Kerrey, described similar events in another interview with the program.

“We herded them together in a group. . . . We lined them up and we opened fire,” Klann is quoted as saying.

Klann also told the New York Times that Kerrey at one point helped push an older villager to the ground and put his knee on the man’s chest while Klann drew a knife across the man’s neck.

Kerrey disputed those accounts Wednesday night.

“This was a free-fire zone and there was significant Viet Cong activity in the area, and our mission was to interrupt a high-level [Viet Cong] district meeting that was going on,” Kerrey told the Los Angeles Times. “I believe it went on in that village that night.

“Not only had I flown the area to be sure there were no civilians, but we were told anyone in that area could be considered the enemy.”

Kerrey said it is “not true that I put my knee on a man’s chest and held him down. That is simply not true.

“The woman who was interviewed who said she crept up and saw all of this is undeniably Viet Cong,” Kerrey said.

” . . . My highest responsibility was to deliver the men back to their mothers, fathers and loved ones,” the former senator added.

A woman who answered the phone at Klann’s Pennsylvania home Wednesday night said: “He doesn’t want to talk about this any more. He has nothing more to say.”

The accounts contradicting Kerrey were part of a joint investigative effort by CBS and the New York Times. The Times posted a story by Gregory L. Vistica on its Web site Wednesday in advance of publication in the newspaper’s Sunday magazine and indicated that the Kerrey story had been in the works for 2 1/2 years. The Times story quotes Kerrey at length, along with accounts from Klann and another team member who alternately supports Klann and Kerrey in the story, but on Wednesday called Klann’s version “ridiculous.”

A companion report by CBS’ “60 Minutes II” is set to air Tuesday. Vistica is a former national security correspondent for Newsweek and is co-producing the “60 Minutes II” segment.

Kerrey, president of the New School University in Manhattan, publicly revealed the incident at the George C. Marshall ROTC award seminar last week at the campus of the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Va.

“It was not a military victory. It was a tragedy and I had ordered it,” he said.

“How I have anguished ever since, could I have made such a mistake,” he told cadets. “Though it could be justified militarily, I could never make my own peace with what happened that night. I have been haunted by it for 32 years.

“Knowing that the people we killed were probably enemy sympathizers and their missing men had fired upon us drawing our fire has not helped. Knowing that I followed what I considered to be the standard operating procedure has not helped.

“I tell you this story now because I believe a part of your military training must include how to cope with the horrors of war if you are lucky enough to survive them,” Kerrey added.

The citation for Kerrey’s Bronze Star for the raid on the village of Thanh Phong refers to 21 Viet Cong who were killed, huts destroyed and weapons captured.

“The citation is different than what we reported to military superiors,” he told the Omaha World Herald.

He only disclosed the village incident to his wife and children two weeks ago. He said the idea that men in combat with horrible memories “are not willing to tell everybody should not be surprising.”

Referring to Klann’s charge that an old villager was killed, he said, “I didn’t see the man.

“When Gerhard said the old man, he was old relative to him. My guess is he was probably younger than Gerhard Klann was now.”

Klann’s Remarks Are Assailed

Another member of the SEAL team told the Washington Post that Klann’s comments are “the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

“It is untrue in every sense of the word,” Michael Ambrose, a Houston executive, told the Post Wednesday.

Kerrey, who is considering running a second time for the White House, served eight years as Nebraska’s governor and two terms in the Senate. In 1992 he sought the Democratic presidential nomination.

Kerrey said a large part of him would have liked the village incident to remain his own private memory forever. He said the New York Times first approached him in 1998 about it.

“But I am not a private citizen,” he said.

Discussing the impact of his disclosure on his family, he added: “My kids tell me they love me. My wife tells me she loves me. After that my concerns decrease.”

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Times staff writers Josh Getlin, Elizabeth Jensen and Edward Boyer also contributed to this story.