Fog of war

Kerrey’s Raiders, a seven-man unit of elite Navy SEALs, attempted to infiltrate the remote Vietnamese village of Thanh Phong on the night of Feb. 25, 1969, their mission to kill the Viet Cong leaders they believed were meeting there. Their approach was detected and they came under fire about 100 yards from the village. They returned fire to cover their retreat and in so doing, killed a dozen or so women and children.

That’s the version told by the leader of that unit, Medal of Honor winner and former Sen. Bob Kerrey, and by five of his fellow SEALs. The version told by the sixth, Gerhard Klann, and by some of the Vietnamese villagers is horribly at odds: Kerrey’s Raiders swept into Thanh Phong, didn’t find the Viet Cong and, in some combination of frustration and inhumanity, rounded up the women and children and massacred them. Further, Mr. Klann says he saw Lt. Kerrey single-handedly cut the throat of a defenseless old man found alone in his hut.

These conflicting versions – recounted in a Sunday New York Times Magazine story and now everywhere else – do more, of course, than merely illustrate how memories cloud after 32 years or even that a fine line exists in all wars between valor and madness. It is certainly more than a decades-old grudge between a former SEAL and six former comrades, one of whom happened to attain fame and power.

There have been after-the-fact atrocity stories from all wars, but Vietnam is especially fertile ground for the genre. The nature of that war itself contributes: a dense jungle setting, the lack of anything resembling marked battles or frontlines; an enemy without uniforms, undetectable within the civilian population; an enemy that often included women and children.

But Vietnam still fosters this kind of anguish for reasons deeper and far more sinister than geography or demographics. It was a war the United States entered into through a series of lies from the highest levels of its government and because Congress betrayed its constitutional duty. The war was ended with more lies and betrayal – young men and women who served valiantly came home to scorn, the Vietnamese people were left to suffer for another quarter-century under a brutal regime bent on ”re-educating” its people though imprisonment and torture. The phrase “fog of war” usually refers specifically to the confusion of combat. In that vein, Vietnam was the war of fog.

None of this explains away an atrocity. No war is so difficult or unpopular that the senseless slaughter of unarmed civilians can ever be condoned – to do so demeans those individuals who fight with honor and makes the concept of international rules of war meaningless. And no amount of elapsed time, certainly not a mere 32 years, should prevent the investigation and, if necessary, prosecution, of a war crime.

Now that former Sen. Kerrey has been publicly convicted by hearsay without trial, this accusation needs an official investigation. Although three current senators who served in Vietnam – Max Cleland of Georgia, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and John Kerry of Massachusetts – say an investigation of their former colleague will only reopen wounds and, as they said in a joint statement, “blame the warrior instead of the war” – only a discrete, thorough and official inquiry by the Pentagon can put this single event in the context it requires and can give Kerrey’s Raiders the presumption of innocence they deserve.