More Echoes of Vietnam Horror
Former U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey’s acknowledgment that he led a Vietnam mission that resulted in the deaths of unarmed civilians dredges up the horrors and ambiguities of war, any war. It more specifically adds another chapter to the prolonged reckoning that a conflicted nation has had with an unpopular conflict.
The interest now in Kerrey’s experience as a Navy SEAL, of course, arises from his status as a former senator and a potential Democratic presidential candidate. There are questions about what he did, and about the timing of his explanation. But this tale also reminds us of broader things, the pressures of battle conditions and how war’s ugliness reveals itself in the revisionism of history.
The atrocities that exist alongside individual acts of heroism always have been known to participants of war. But today, with the passage of time and in a world brought together by modern communications, we know much more from the unfolding testimony of witnesses in cities and villages from Europe to Southeast Asia over the last half of the 20th century. Vietnam was a defining time in this regard. Beyond the fissures it caused in the social fabric, it stripped away some cherished conventions of honor and glory in war.
The growing chasm between official pronouncements and battlefield realities spawned an era of mistrust of government. For those on the ground, like Kerrey’s small SEAL team, it might come down to a matter of not being able to tell who was who. Youngsters fresh from towns in California, the Midwest or New Jersey could be thrust into villages where the population and the enemy could not be distinguished by the textbook or their training. They and the nation since have found that the justification for decisions made under fire might well have crumbled upon inspection of bodies in a hut, or over time in the longer view of historians.
While some brutal acts may be discerned clearly as war crimes, we cannot in every case know or judge with certainty the actions of those who, fighting in the nation’s name, claim they were shot at in the dark.
The idea of Kerrey as a war hero of course does not emerge untarnished from this story. It also seems unlikely he would have provided such a detailed version of horrifying past events were it not for an investigation of his role carried out jointly by two news organizations.
As a leading public figure under scrutiny for long-past battlefield actions, Kerry embodies in a highly visible way the contradictions of war. He came to public service on a trail cleared by a Medal of Honor for another action, and today we find that, as can happen in combat, an entire war record is less clear-cut.