The Wall Street Journal Editorials
The Consequence of War
May 1, 2001
The Vietnamese government is happy to trot out witnesses
from the supposed atrocity conducted by Bob Kerrey's Navy SEAL's at
Thanh Phong. It is doubtful that they would be so cooperative if
questions were asked about Communist killings in places such as My
Loc.
In
April 1969, the Marine rifle company to which I was assigned was
operating in the An Hoa Basin of Vietnam, west and south of DaNang.
In addition to our routine of long-range combat patrols and
defensive positions along a vital and heavily contested road, it was
decided that we would provide security for a "town meeting" hosted
by the South Vietnamese government's district chief, who had been
criticized for living in the distant and more secure confines of
DaNang. Over the space of a few days, visits were made to nearby
hamlets, where 30 delegates were chosen to attend the meeting. After
that, the district chief and his senior aide were brought in on the
morning convoy.
A thatch-covered "hooch" at the bottom of our perimeter,
about the size of a typical American living room, was chosen as the
meeting place. Shortly after the meeting began, a Viet Cong
assassination team raced through the thick foliage, hit the hooch,
and fled. My rifle platoon was returning from a combat patrol as
explosions rang out to our front. In seconds a Viet Cong soldier
sprinting down the trail collided with my point man. I can still see
his young face, adrenalized and madly grinning, as he was captured.
And I remember the sight of the others as we reached the hooch.
The floor inside was covered with an ankle-deep mix of
blood, innards, limbs and bodies. I and several others waded into
the human mire, emptying bodies from the hooch and finding medical
care for those who had survived. Nineteen people were dead,
including the district chief and his aide. The aide's right arm was
blown off near the elbow, its tendons like slim white feathers, as
if he had been reaching to catch a grenade.
Nearby an older woman sat motionless against a wall, her
face stunned and her dark eyes piercing, untouched except for a
small, square hole in her forehead. I thought she was alive until I
grabbed her arm. The wounded squirmed on the floor, reaching past
dead bodies as they crawled in the muck, covered thickly with blood
and twisting among each other like giant fishing worms.
We cleaned out the hooch, evacuated the wounded, washed at
a nearby well, and went back to our war. By the next day this
incident was over, a little piece of history in the long and ugly
journey of a combat tour. But in the coming months as I reflected on
them, the killings at My Loc raised an important distinction, which
has become even more relevant with the media firestorm over Bob
Kerrey's ill-fated SEAL patrol in the Mekong Delta.
Civilians have a terrible time in any war zone -- fully
one-third of the population of Okinawa was killed in 12 weeks of
fighting on that island in 1945. But in a guerrilla war, the support
or control of the local population, rather than the conquest of
territory, is the ultimate objective. Civilians become enmeshed in
the actual fighting, inseparable from it.
They fight among themselves for political dominance of a
local area. They form an infrastructure and quietly support one side
or the other when it moves through their village. They suffer
greatly when battles are fought on top of them, and when emotions
overcome logic and troops snap, as at My Lai. But the villagers of
My Loc and others like them, clearly noncombatants, were killed
purely as a matter of political control, for having met with a South
Vietnamese government official and given some legitimacy to his
authority.
Any American who directed a similar slaughter, or
participated in it, would have been court-martialed. This
distinction was basic to our policy in Vietnam, and it seems to have
been lost by many over the past week. The body language and word
choices of many media commentators indicates clearly that a larger
issue -- how history will judge our involvement in Vietnam -- is
still very much in play, and a big part of that issue is to continue
to demean the American sacrifices in that war.
Words like "atrocity" and "massacre" are routinely being
thrown about, with some even calling for Nuremberg-like trials for
American war crimes in Vietnam. Aggressive reporters have played
"gotcha" with every Kerrey statement. How could he say it was a
moonless night when the charts say it was a half-moon? (Try clouds.
Or canopy. Or vegetation.) Did he take one shot or many shots at the
first outpost? Did he kneel on a guy when his throat was getting
cut?
For many who went through extensive combat in Vietnam, such
parsing brings back an anger caused by memories not of the war but
of the condescending arrogance directed at them upon their return,
principally by people in their own age group who had risked nothing
and yet microscopically judged every action of those who had risked
everything and often lost a great deal. Combat in a guerrilla war
requires constant moral judgments, in an environment with unending
pressure, little sleep, and no second chances for yourself or the
people you are leading when you guess wrong. Were we perfect? No.
Were we worse than Americans in other wars, or our enemy in this
one? Hardly.
Which brings us to the recent attention given the Kerrey
patrol. There is much in the New York Times magazine story to make
one uneasy. The key "witness" from the village where the incident
took place is the wife of a former Viet Cong soldier, who now has
told Time magazine that she did not actually see the killings. She
and the other Vietnamese witness, who was 12 at the time of the
incident, live in a communist state where propaganda regarding
America's "evil" war effort is one of the mainsprings of political
legitimacy -- not the best conditions to produce honesty in cases
with international implications.
The one member of Mr. Kerrey's SEAL team to allege extreme
conduct did not pass the credibility test with Newsweek magazine
when the story was considered there. CBS's "60 Minutes," which
co-sponsored the investigation, seems to have an affinity for
stories about Americans committing atrocities, having rehashed My
Lai as the best way to remember the 30th anniversary of 1968, the
year that brought the worst fighting, and highest American
casualties, of the war.
Most important, to one practiced in both combat and
journalism, a key and possibly determinative piece of information
seems vastly underplayed. According to the Times magazine story,
archive records of Army radio transmissions indicate that two days
after the incident, "an old man from Thanh Phong presented himself
to the district chief's headquarters with claims for retribution for
alleged atrocities committed the night of 25 and 26 February 69.
Thus far it appears 24 people were killed. 13 were women and
children and one old man. 11 were unidentified and assumed to be
VC."
Given the tone of the story, this radio transmission was
probably included because it refers to the Kerrey patrol as having
committed an atrocity. But a closer reading would appear to confirm
the position of Mr. Kerrey and the five others on the patrol that
they took fire and returned it, with the loss of civilian lives an
unfortunate consequence.
This piece of evidence is perhaps the most objective
account available of the results of the Kerrey patrol, coming as it
does from a time near the incident, from a man who was asking for
retribution and thus was hardly trying to cover things up. It also
coincides with Mr. Kerrey's recollection of 13 or 14 dead civilians
in the village before the team left the scene, as any Viet Cong
soldiers would most likely have been on the other side of the
villagers who were killed, perhaps even using them as a screen while
attempting to escape.
As has often been said over the past week, we will never
know the exact details of what occurred. But if a seven-man patrol
operating independently at night far inside enemy territory killed
11 Viet Cong soldiers after coming under fire, it would seem they
hit their assigned target. And the loss of civilian life that
accompanied this brief but brutal firefight adds up not to an
atrocity or a massacre, but to a tragic consequence of a war fought
in the middle of a civilian population.
UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS