Killing Civilians Goes With the Duty of War

There is something amiss in the coverage of Bob Kerrey’s mission in Vietnam. A number of journalists have suggested an investigation into Kerrey’s conduct would help to clear up contradictions.

The plain fact, sorry to say, is that much of the hand-wringing about the Kerrey mission comes from observers who have never faced that terrifying moment in war when the dagger is at their belly and death stares at them.

It is easy to judge others when you have no comprehension about how men in battle feel, how they react and how they do what they have been charged to do.

When I was so very young, I was a pilot of a B-25 low-flying attack bomber. I flew 51 combat missions over Italy. One of our prime objectives was to interdict Nazi troop movements and supplies flowing into Italy through the Brenner Pass and into the Po Valley.

Each of us, from 19 to 24 years old, was frightened out of our wits on every mission as we took heavy fire from the Nazis who manned the antiaircraft guns determined to blow us out of the sky. But scared as we were, we flew the missions. We took out our targets. We never turned back even as we rode through a curtain of fire. Getting killed was a daily possibility. God only knows how many civilians, including women and children, we killed on those missions.

War is a dirty, brutal, inhumane, very dangerous enterprise, which is why, I dare say, a good many otherwise well-educated men counted Vietnam to be a war they would sit out and let others cohabit with death. I can understand that. What is required of those who never served though is to try, somehow, to understand what Bob Kerrey and the six Navy SEALs under his command confronted on a dark night, behind enemy lines, in the thick brush and among Viet Cong unknown to them. They were commanded to carry out a perilous task, and they did what they were instructed to do. This is called “duty,” and if you don’t understand what that word means, then you cannot comprehend the Kerrey mission and what happened that night to these brave men.

Never forget that in a war all the normalities of a social compact are abandoned, as they must be. As the World War I supreme commander on the Western Front, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, put it: “In war, the one word you must eliminate from your vocabulary is the word ‘benevolence.”’

If the Pentagon wants to stir old memories of the killing fields and chooses to investigate Kerrey’s mission, then it has to investigate the past combat performance of millions of young men, including me, who served and defended their country and who, unhappily, killed civilians in dirty wars.

So to the journalists who want an investigation, I say let the inquiries begin, but don’t single out Bob Kerrey. Include us all.