Bob Kerrey, An American Shame.

An article published the April 29 New York Times Magazine disclosed atrocities perpetrated during the Vietnam War by Bob Kerrey, former Democratic Senator from Nebraska, one-time and perhaps future candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination, and the current president of the New School, where I teach.

Beneath details that may be cloudy lie some incontrovertible facts. Principal among them is that in February 1969, Kerrey and Navy SEALs under his command killed between a dozen and nearly two dozen unarmed, noncombatant Vietnamese people--elderly men, women, and children--in Thanh Phong, a hamlet in what was then South Vietnam. The incident occurred when Kerrey and his troops were on a mission to assassinate, or win over, a village official in the area.

Kerrey's story is that the killings, or some of them, were accidental. He claims that his team opened fire wildly at night in the village when they thought they'd heard a gunshot or some other noise and only afterward learned that they'd killed more than a dozen people huddled together outside a hut. This story is frankly improbable. It strains credulity to believe that wild shooting in the black of night would leave no survivors, not even wounded ones. And Kerrey's interpretation is disputed by one of the men on his team.

Gerhard Klann, the most experienced of his squad, asserts that their team rounded up the victims and shot them down in cold blood. Klann says that after they fired continuously for a time, the SEALs stopped, heard a baby crying in the mass of bodies, and unleashed another lengthy fusillade. Klann's account is corroborated independently by two Vietnamese women who report that they were hiding in the bushes at the time. Klann, now a Pennsylvania steelworker, appears to have no ax to grind with Kerrey and, more to the point, has had no contact with the Vietnamese who give an account almost identical to his. Two other members of Kerrey's team refused at first to give any details of the incident, and two others gave accounts that reportedly lay between Kerrey's and Klann's. All four have subsequently offered versions that converge on Kerrey's.

In any event, there is no dispute that, when the team first approached the village, they came across another hut occupied by five people--an elderly man and woman and three children--and murdered them all by stabbing them repeatedly and cutting their throats. The descriptions of these horrible killings in the New York Times Magazine article and later on CBS's 60 Minutes II are chilling.

I also tend to believe the more horrifying version of the massacre because it falls within the standard operating procedure of Navy SEALs, Rangers, and Special Forces units in Vietnam. They were specialists in "counterinsurgency" warfare, including torture, assassination, terror, and murder of civilians. This is the more important point that easily is overlooked in the mass-mediated investigation of Bob Kerrey's character or honesty.

His defenders remind us that he was young and inexperienced and possibly confused or in over his head. (Presumably he brought from Nebraska no taboo against mass murder of elderly men, women, and children.) They say this was the way that ugly, ambiguous war was fought. Note the postmodern-tinged variant of the "just-following-orders" defense that failed so spectacularly at Nuremberg.

Kerrey claims to have been tormented and wracked by guilt because of this incident, which he insists on characterizing as a tragic accident. But he was awarded the Bronze Star for his role in that war, and the citation justifying his medal credits him with having killed twenty-one Viet Cong. He neither rejected nor returned the medal; nor did he correct the lie about whom he had killed.

He has represented himself as having become an opponent of the war, but, on closer inspection, his opposition is nearer to that of Chuck Norris than Benjamin Spock. He purports to have been incensed at Richard Nixon's extension of the war to Cambodia but freely, and without open hesitation, he accepted from Nixon the Congressional Medal of Honor for a subsequent action in which he lost part of his leg--even though, he recently claimed, he felt that Nixon was using him as a pawn to support the Cambodian escalation. The portrait painted by the combination of Bob Kerrey's practice and preachment looks suspiciously like someone who has tried to have it every way at once. I found myself musing that he is what Bill Clinton would have been like if Clinton hadn't been able to avoid going to the Army.

Naturally enough, particularly here at the New School, the disclosures about Thanh Phong have generated much discussion about Kerrey's credibility, and questions abound as to whether he should be considered a war criminal. These questions are especially troubling at a university that began as a haven for faculty persecuted for their opposition to World War I and that remains institutionally proud of having been a refuge a generation later for scholars fleeing Nazism.

I should make clear that I'm not prepared to denounce Kerrey as a war criminal, among other reasons because doing so seems to me to be a waste of time. My father, who is a veteran of the D-Day invasion and the Battle of the Bulge (he was sent, as he caustically puts it, to fight the racist Germans in a racially segregated army), has always looked cynically at the Nuremberg and subsequent war crimes trials. He maintains that all they mean is that you shouldn't lose a wag,. War crimes charges are imposed only on the vanquished.

No one is going to bring Kerrey up on charges, and, if Kerrey were charged, it would be the equivalent--reprehensible though his actions were--of targeting street-level drug dealers while permitting those controlling and directing them to go unscathed. William Calley, architect of the infamous My Lai massacre in which U.S. soldiers slaughtered as many as 350 unarmed Vietnamese civilians, was a scapegoat who--though certainly guilty of perpetrating a heinous atrocity--also took the rap for Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, and a military command that waged total war on the population of Vietnam. (Kerrey, incidentally, to diminish the heinousness of his own actions, insists that Thanh Phong "was no My Lai," though the only significant difference appears to be the number murdered.)

Kerrey himself acknowledges the framework within which his "Kerrey's Raiders" operated when he notes that the area around Thanh Phong was designated a "free-fire zone." U.S. soldiers considered any living thing in that zone a legitimate military target. He adduces this as a mitigating circumstance for the massacre but does not draw out how that designation fit into the larger, genocidal strategy of the American war effort.

In fact, despite his celebrated claim to anti-war sentiment, in a Washington Post op-ed piece last year Kerrey said, "The shame is that we, in the end, turned our back on Vietnam and on the sacrifice of more than 58,000 Americans. We succumbed to fatigue and self-doubt, we went back on the promise we had made to support the South Vietnamese, and the Communists were able to defeat our allies."

This is not a view that can reasonably be understood as anti-war; rather, it expresses the mindset, popularized in the 1980s by Rainbo films and the Reaganite right, that the war effort was undone by corrupt and inept politicians and bureaucrats, the American version of the stab-in-the-back myth about German defeat in World War I that the Nazis used to fuel their ride to power. It has also become a conventional rhetorical move in calls for national "healing" of our collective pain and division over Vietnam.

This is also a view that denies the genocidal reality of the war. Think about it: How can declaring large sections of the country "free-fire" zones, thereby making much of its population into targets for slaughter, possibly square with a notion of supporting our allies? Who could those allies have been? The free-fire-zone designation was linked to Operation Phoenix, the CIA's systematic torture and assassination program aimed at extirpating the National Liberation Front's political and military infrastructure and base of support, and the "strategic hamlet" program, which forcibly rounded up peasant villagers and transported them from their indigenous areas to hybrid villages--concentration camps under U.S. and South Vietnamese military control. Many peasants, of course, resisted this forced relocation; those who refused to move were simply declared to be Viet Cong supporters and became candidates for liquidation.

By the Orwellian premises of the strategic hamlet program, any Vietnamese killed could be assumed to be a Viet Cong sympathizer by definition. The American domestic political imperative of showing that the U.S. was winning the war fed the sickness of the body count: the daily tallies of the killed and wounded.

This macabre practice not only approximated charting box scores in a demonic sports reportage; it also passed down to line officers the pressure to maximize the count. Stir in a little zeal, a little ambition, and a lot of racist dehumanization, and it's not hard to see how massacres could become commonplace.

Then there was the savage bombing campaign that destroyed the country's agricultural base and indiscriminately killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of these "allies" whom Bob Kerrey imagines felt deserted by American military withdrawal. Raining napalm from B-52 bombers flying too high to be heard turned unsuspecting villages into rolling fireballs. Under the campaign of "defoliation," ostensibly intended to eliminate vegetation that could conceal guerrilla troop movements, the U.S. sprayed the contaminant Agent Orange over large expanses of the country, with the effect of rendering agricultural cultivation impossible and visiting disease of untold magnitude on the population.

How could such brutality be visited on one "ally" by another? The answer is simple. It can't be. The Vietnamese people were never our government's allies; they were never more than utterly dispensable objects of its imperialist geopolitical aspirations defined by its Cold War with the Soviet Union.

The war's roots lie in the United States government's refusal to accept Vietnamese self-determination after the defeat of French colonial domination in 1954. The Geneva Accord signed in that year by France and the Viet Minh--the coalition movement that had fought successfully against Japanese imperial occupation during World War II and then for seven years against France's attempt to return as colonial power--called for the country to be divided temporarily into two zones, north and south of the seventeenth parallel. The northern zone was to be under administrative control of the Viet Minh, led by the popular Ho Chi Minh. The southern zone was to be administered by the French. Under the terms of the accord, this arrangement was to last two years, until July 1956, at which time an election would be held, supervised by an International Control Commission made up of representatives from India, Canada, and Poland, to reunify the country under a single government. The United States brazenly blocked the election because it knew that Ho Chi Minh would have won. Washington then installed its own puppet government in the south headed by Ngo Dinh Diem, who was assassinated in 1965 with the endorsement of President John F. Kennedy.

South Vietnam was the pure creation of American imperialism. Throughout its brief, ugly history, South Vietnam was governed by military dictators and brutal, avaricious thugs backed by the U.S. military. These are the allies Bob Kerrey refers to.

This is how it was, and apparently remains, possible to claim commitment to a country while degrading and butchering its population.

Kerrey's expressions of remorse at the Thanh Phong massacre would be much easier to accept if they were accompanied by an honest acknowledgment of what that war really was--from its beginnings before 1956 to its end--and a full repudiation of the role that he and so many others were led to play in it.

There is more at stake here than Bob Kerrey and the atrocity of which he was a part. The astounding savagery of imperialist war against a total population persists as a blithely arrogant prerogative in American foreign policy, as the Gulf War and inhumane sanctions against Iraq demonstrate all too clearly. This is an expansion on a horrific scale of the sentiment expressed by the American officer in Ben Tre during the 1968 Tet Offensive who famously said, "It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."

On reading the details of the Thanh Phong massacre and the feeble attempts by liberal "healers" to sanitize its heinousness with ambiguity and psychobabble, I found myself charged with the same outrage that I felt during the Vietnam War.

The calls to write off the atrocity--and, by implication, the many other ones like it--to the nature of a confusing, unconventional war and to commiserate with Bob Kerrey's suffering are offensive to any decent human sensibility. They resurface, albeit in candy-coating, the jingoistic arrogance that only American lives and suffering count.

Imagine a circumstance in which foreign combatants on American soil would skulk around suburbs slitting the throats of civilians who might give away their movements. Could bygones ever be bygones? How many generations would be required for measured conversation of "healing" to take place?

Finally, I should say that I did not go into the military during the Vietnam years. For much of it, I had the class privilege of a student deferment from the draft. However, the experience of those who did serve is not entirely foreign to me. I spent several years working with troops at Fort Bragg, organizing for their rights inside the military and against the war. And like most of my age cohort, I had many friends who served, and too many who died, in Vietnam. I know all too well how the G.I.'s have been cast aside and ill served since they returned, but we can't let the right conflate redress of those grievances--which are against the government that sent them to fight, not those of us who opposed their being sent--with a demand to rehabilitate the war.

I also know that it does no dishonor to the Americans who were forced to serve in that horrible, repugnant war to admit what it was. If there is any "healing" to occur, that honesty must be its foundation.

Adolph L. Reed Jr. is a professor of political science on the graduate faculty at the New School University in New York City and is a member of the Interim National Council of the Labor Party. His most recent book is "Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene" (New Press, 2000).