A
SPIKED STORY
Back
in 1998, Klann gave a detailed account of the Thanh Phong
massacre to Vistica, a respected defense correspondent
for Newsweek, who had heard it from a commander,
who had heard it from Klann. Vistica's story, originally
intended for Newsweek, was killed by the editors
when Kerrey decided against a presidential run, leading
Howard
Kurtz to opine that "Newsweek's decision almost
seems to suggest that being involved in the wartime killing
of civilians is newsworthy if a man is running for president
but not if he is a United States Senator." A Newsweek
editor is apparently not embarrassed to admit that he
thought the story was "less relevant" once Kerrey had
dropped his White House bid – almost as if they were
blackmailing him on behalf of the Clinton gang, who were
satisfied once Kerrey was no longer a threat to Clinton's
anointed heir. But, then, they wouldn't do that,
now would they?
"HE
WOULDN'T DIE"
Yet
the truth, as they say, will out. Vistica went to the
New York Times Magazine with his story, and this
coming Tuesday [May 1, 1, 9 p.m. ET/PT], Klann will speak
out on CBS's Sixty Minutes II. Vistica's account
is chilling:
"Klann
says he grabbed the man, placed his hand over his mouth
and took him away from the children so they couldn't see
what he was about to do. 'I stuck him here,' he says,
pointing to a spot just below his rib cage. 'Then I did
it again,' pointing to his upper back. The man turned
and grabbed Klann's forearm, the one with the knife, and
pushed it away. 'He wouldn't die. He kept moving, fighting
back.' Klann says he signaled for assistance and, as Ambrose
watched, Kerrey came over and helped push the man to the
ground. Kerrey put his knee on the man's chest, Klann
says, as Klann drew his knife across his neck."
THE
MUGGERS
Let's
be clear. We aren't talking about an armed combatant,
here, but an old Vietnamese man, the grandfather
of the three children cowering behind their grandmother.
American soldiers, heavily armed and on the prowl, jumped
an old man, and knifed him, but "he wouldn't die," testifies
Klann, he kept "fighting back." Yes, this is one of the
many inconveniences that aggressors have had to face throughout
history. It has often been their undoing: their intended
victims, instead of letting themselves be conquered, have
the temerity to fight back. Another inconvenience is that
the truth about the brutality of the conquest – or
attempted conquest, in the case of Vietnam – very
often comes out, in spite of the best efforts to cover
up the truth. This discredits would-be empire-builders
in the eyes of their own subjects, and exposes their policies
to a rigorously critical analysis they otherwise would
not have to endure.
BLOOD
AND GUTS
Kerrey,
incredibly, says he doesn't remember his role in
killing the old man. Is that the sort of thing a man is
likely to forget? But Klann hasn't forgotten: he says
it was Kerrey, and Mike Ambrose, another member
of "Kerrey's Raiders," seems to corroborate Klann's gut-wrenching
story. It was only fifteen minutes after the first series
of murders that "Kerrey's Raiders" committed their second
war crime of the evening. According to Klann, they then
came upon a cluster of thatched hut dwellings, which they
quickly invaded, rounding up 15 or more people –
again, unarmed civilians: women, children and old people
– questioning them as to the whereabouts of their
quarry. They "debated their options," says Klann, and
finally decided that they had to kill them all on the
grounds that, if they let them go, the presence of the
Americans would soon be known to the enemy – a development,
they believed, that would surely be fatal. The results
of this militarized moral calculus translated into a war
crime, as described by Klann via Vistica:
"Klann
says that Kerrey gave the order and the team, standing
between 6 and 10 feet away, started shooting – raking
the group with automatic-weapons fire for about 30 seconds.
They heard moans, Klann says, and began firing again,
for another 30 seconds. There was one final cry, from
a baby. "The baby was the last one alive," Klann says,
fighting back tears. 'There were blood and guts splattering
everywhere.' Klann does not recall the men firing at the
people who, in Kerrey's memory and the after-action reports,
tried to run away after the initial massacre."
"I
NEVER BRAGGED ABOUT IT"
For
this, Kerrey received a Bronze Medal: "I never bragged
about it," he avers, and I suppose for that we ought to
be grateful. The ex-Senator from Nebraska has changed
his story several times, but Klann has been consistent:
he and the rest of "Kerrey's Raiders" committed a war
crime in in Thanh Phong, and this would appear to be legally
as well as morally correct. The rules of warfare acknowledged
by the US absolutely forbid the killing of unarmed
noncombatants, especially prisoners. The irony here is
that, for alleged crimes such as these, Radovan Karadizc
and other Serbian "war criminals" (including Slobodan
Milosevic, the ex-leader of Yugoslavia) have been indicted
by the self-sanctified "International Criminal Tribunal"
for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, and arrest warrants
have been issued. But who will go up to the New School
and slap the handcuffs on Kerrey?
TEARFUL
CONFESSIONS
Kerrey
is naturally trying to wriggle out of it, and deny his
culpability: no doubt that, before this is over, he'll
go on the "Today Show" and cry his eyes out, just like
US Navy commander Scott Waddle of the infamous Ehime
Maru incident, who avoided a court martial proceeding
and got
off with a slap on the wrist and a full pension.
UNHEEDED
WARNINGS
But
the real point to be made here is that the war crimes
committed by "Kerrey's Raiders" were almost inevitable,
given the decisions of US policymakers. The prospect of
a land war in Asia had long been feared by opponents of
US intervention: John T. Flynn, the Old Right radio commentator
and journalist, sounded the alarm bells as early as the
mid-1950s, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower started
giving mostly covert support to Vietnam's French overlords
and their native allies. No less a personage than General
Douglas MacArthur joined Flynn in his forebodings of disaster:
in April 1961, MacArthur warned JFK that it would be a
big mistake to fight in Southeast Asia, and that America's
line of defense ought to be Japan, Formosa, and the Philippines.
General Matthew Ridgway, MacArthur's successor as Army
Chief of Staff, made a similar argument, contending that
a land war in Asia would be a disaster for the US. Another
critic of intervention at the time, General J. Lawton
Collins, said that he did not "know of a single commander
that was in favor of fighting on the land mass of Asia."
RULE
#1: OBEY OR DIE
Fighting
a battle they were bound to lose, the US military –
faced with an impossible situation – recognized no
rules, but rather made them up as they went along. According
to David Marion, then a captain assigned as the senior
American military advisor to the local warlord, Tiet Lun
Duc, the policy in force at the time was to drive out
the Vietcong "by almost any means." Marion cited Duc as
saying: "If you are my friend, you will do fine. You support
me and the government of Vietnam, we get along. You do
not, you're Vietcong, you die." "And those," says Marion,
"were the rules."
SUNDAY
SCHOOL ASSASSINS
These
rules – obey, or die – were enforced to the
hilt by local American commanders, such as Captain Roy
Hoffmann, Kerrey's superior in the chain of command, described
by Vistica as "a cigar-chomping officer who brandished
an M-16 assault rifle and wore a revolver when he visited
troops in the field." Kerrey recalls that "he was the
classic body-count guy. Bunkers destroyed, hooches [houses]
destroyed, sort of [a] scorekeeper." Hoffmann gives the
classic apologia for the massacre at Thanh Phong: "This
was war," Hoffmann said in an interview with Vistica.
"This wasn't Sunday school." And Hoffman was determined
that it would never be mistaken for Sunday school. He
requested, and was granted, a request to higher-ups that
the rules be changed. Up until this point, US troops had
not been allowed to fire unless they were fired upon first:
now, they were allowed to shoot if they "felt threatened."
"I told them you not only have authority, I damned well
expect action. If there were men there and they didn't
kill them or capture them, you'd hear from me."
RULE
#2: KILL EVERYONE
Kill
– or you'd hear from the strutting, cigar-chomping
martinet Hoffmann, and perhaps spend a few weeks in the
brig. So they killed, without compunction, enforcing the
edict of Warlord Duc who decreed most of his Thanh Phu
district to be a "free-fire zone." This policy, which
allowed US forces to destroy "targets of opportunity,"
was the logical (albeit crazed) consequence of a policy
imposed by civilians, which in effect compelled US soldiers
to engage in widespread war crimes. Some of these crimes,
such as the massacre at My Lai, were exposed back then:
more are now coming out, and this should hardly be surprising.
A
MURDEROUS RAGE
What
is baffling, however, is that there remains any
doubt that it was the policymakers who were and are the
real criminals: yes, Kerrey and his comrades committed
war crimes, but the really culpable ones are the civilians
who not only formulated the war policy, but rationalized
it long after its failure was widely recognized. As Marion
points out, Vietnam's peasants were told that they had
to give up their ancestral lands and move to "strategic
hamlets," but "they had been there for generations. They
weren't going to leave, and basically they didn't care
who was in charge." Those who refused to move were considered
"Vietcong sympathizers," and therefore fair game. Eventually,
all of Vietnam – and a good part of Southeast Asia,
including Cambodia and Laos – was turned into a "free-fire
zone," as the frustrated Americans turned to increasingly
desperate measures and were, finally, driven into a murderous
rage.
RULE
#3: EXPECT NO JUSTICE
If
there is any justice in this world, Bob Kerrey will be
placed under arrest, charged with multiple counts of murder,
as well as conspiracy to cover it up, and told that he
has the right to remain silent. That this will never
happen is proof in excess that the idea of justice is
not universally applicable. It bends, and mutates, depending
on the nationality and circumstances of the accused: the
US Justice Department is still pursuing and deporting
Nazi war criminals, but as for our own war criminals,
they not only roam free, but they are in the highest councils
of state, and are even counted among our potential presidential
candidates. As
the Wicked Witch of the West put it, as she was dissolving
under the assault of a pail of water from Dorothy's bucket:
"What a world! What a world!"
UPDATE
I
am speaking on the "The Truth About the Kosovo War," this
Saturday, at San Francisco State, on a panel organized
by "Projected Censored." The panel will take place from
1 – 2:15, pm on campus, in Gym 146. Follow
this link for more information about the event. It
also will be broadcast on the Web. If you're in the
area, you really ought to stop by: it should be fairly
interesting, as this is a meeting of lefties, the kind
of folks who think that "Cuba
leads the world in organic farming" is one of the
top 12 censored stories of the year. Yikes! I can hardly
wait….
Former
Senator Bob Kerrey (D-Nebraska) was a presidential
hopeful and a rising star in the Democratic party
when, for some reason, this January he suddenly decided
to drop out of politics. At the time, his decision
puzzled his friends and supporters: now, they know
why. For he knew that the real story about what happened
"
