There to Kill the ‘Cong, Men Were Told to Hate

As millions of Americans turned on their TV sets and stared into the eyes of Bob Kerrey and Gerhard Klann the other night, they saw, perhaps for the first time, the confusion, pain, guilt and moral ambiguity caused by a shameful war that wasted lives and distorted our values. Kerrey and Klann are good men--patriots, sailors--which means they were volunteers, not draftees. They went to Vietnam having been raised like most of us to believe one of the Ten Commandments:--Thou shall not kill.

But their war was our war, authorized, encouraged and tolerated for too long by not just presidents and Cabinet members, but also the hundreds in Congress who, out of laziness, opportunism or ignorance, endorsed or tolerated the conflict. It was, after all, a chapter of the Cold War being waged against godless communism.

So Kerrey, Klann and fellow members of their Navy SEAL unit participated in an episode that, in the confusion of darkness and panic, turned into an orgy in which old men, women and children were killed either by having their throats slashed or bodies torn apart by automatic weapons.

Kerrey told Dan Rather that, had the United States won the war, no one would have heard of what happened that February night in 1969 in the hamlet of Thanh Phong. In losing, Americans have had to endure endless years of self-recrimination and doubt.

What we have yet to be told is whether Kerrey’s squad was accompanied by a Vietnamese interpreter to help it unscramble a complex language. Yes, the squad claims to have knowledge of a Viet Cong leader in the hamlet. But to what extent was that reconnaissance carried out by the Navy? Or was it South Vietnamese government troops out to settle scores with the local peasantry? Precisely who were members of the Viet Cong or how many were merely family members or sympathizers in that hardscrabble spot on the map? Where were they to go, if not remain in their own homes?

The ARVN, the South Vietnamese Army, was well known for raping, pillaging and rendering life unbearable for the unarmed peasants in the countryside. The depth of hatred cultivated over many years by one set of Vietnamese against another helps to explain why so many people in the countryside joined the Viet Cong. But how could Kerrey, Klann and the others know that? They went to Vietnam supposedly to defend our values and fight the Communists.

The talk this past week has been to suggest that what happened in Thanh Phong was an aberration compared to the conduct of most GIs in Vietnam. Perhaps, but that also may be a comforting myth. Our government dispatched hundreds of thousands of young men to a distant country without any knowledge of its language, culture or history. “That wasn’t our job,” an officer told me once. “We were there to kill the ‘Cong, the enemy, and to do that you had to teach our men to hate the people.”

As I watched Kerrey and Klann, tears came to my eyes. I remembered another incident just after the 1968 Tet offensive when I interviewed a young Marine who was about to be court-martialed. One night, he had been so courageous, calling friendly artillery on his own position to beat off a North Vietnamese attack, that his commanding officer was going to nominate him for a Silver Star, the nation’s second-highest medal for heroism. But during the next two days, the corporal led his squad of Marines on a security patrol into a hamlet on the outskirts of Hue, where they encountered a group of farmers in black pajamas, carrying rice. Without an interpreter or any evidence, the Marines mistakenly concluded the peasants were Viet Cong. In two different locations, they tortured, dismembered and summarily executed the unarmed Vietnamese in broad daylight. One farmer had been hanged and, before dying, his throat was slashed and his heart was cut open. Five women were widowed and 26 children were left without fathers.

I revisited the hamlet 26 years later to find that, while the bitterness had diminished, the memories had not. One widow showed me her husband’s grave in a nearby rice paddy. When I asked about another grave nearby, she explained it was that of her teenage daughter who had been killed by a Marine artillery shell. She turned to me and we held hands. “War is terrible,” she said. “It causes so much heartache.”

Writing in the young man’s defense, a Marine captain explained that days before the battle in which he acquitted himself so courageously, the accused corporal and his men had discovered the body of their former platoon leader, a lieutenant who had been executed with his hands bound by barbed wire, his penis cut off and stuffed in his mouth. The young soldiers were mortified.

The Marine corporal was convicted and sentenced to a long term in prison. His fellow Marines also were convicted, but given lesser sentences.

Americans did not hear much about these young men. They did not share Kerrey’s fame. The squad leader, a good-looking, shy kid of 20, was the son of a Pentecostal minister whose former neighbors wrote letters describing the young Marine’s humane qualities, growing up in a Midwestern town. He has since resettled in another part of the country, but no doubt, like Kerrey and Klann, in his mid-50s, he too is burdened with the ghosts of Vietnam.