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Overview
The Education of Lieutenant Kerrey is an incredible story and a modern morality tale about a man of compassion and promise trapped by a horrible secret.
On the night of February 25, 1969, an inexperienced, 25-year-old lieutenant, Bob Kerrey, led a commando raid on an isolated hamlet called Thanh Phong in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. While witnesses and official records give varying accounts, one thing is certain: around midnight, Kerrey and his men killed nearly two dozen unarmed women and children.
What happened that night and why? It's a terrible secret that Kerrey has borne for more than thirty years. Kerrey went on to do heroic things in Vietnam and later as a politician. Since World War II, he is only Medal of Honor winner to sit as a member of Congress. In many ways, Kerrey's life following that tragic mission has been a struggle for redemption.
So is Bob Kerrey a war hero or war criminal? Gregory L. Vistica, who uncovered the Thanh Phong atrocities in a widely-praised cover story for The New York Times Magazine, searches the entire span of Kerrey's life to answer that question.. From his rural boyhood in Nebraska, to his gut wrenching Navy SEAL training, to his aborted run for President, Kerrey's life will become a vehicle for understanding the Vietnam generation shaped in the 50s and sharpened by the tumultuous 60s.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429981996 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2007 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Education Of Lieutenant Kerrey
By Gregory L. Vistica
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2003 Gregory L. VisticaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-8199-6
CHAPTER 1
It was time to put the grandchildren to bed.
Bui Van Vat and his wife took the three youngsters to a small bunker dug into the earth in the back of their thatched hut. It had been awhile since the Americans, the "devils with green faces," had come brandishing guns and asking a lot of questions. They had shown up out of nowhere, stayed for several hours, then left. There was little reason for Vat or the other villagers to believe they would return to tiny Thanh Phong. But then again, why had they come in the first place? The bunker, hard to see in the blackness of the night, offered some security — just in case the men with guns reappeared.
The grandparents said good night to the children: a boy not yet nine; his sister, who was about a year older; and the eldest girl, who was approaching thirteen. Throughout the hamlet — in the flatland marshes of the Mekong Delta about seventy-five miles south of Saigon — the nightly routines of dousing cooking fires and putting children to bed were underway. In a group of huts not far from Vat's hooch, twelve-year-old Bui Thi Luom and her fifteen relatives — a few women and lots of children — were climbing into their own underground bunker, one big enough to sleep two dozen people.
Perhaps tonight would be quiet again, the way it had been for much of the war.
Thanh Phong lay in an area the generals had decided to call a "secret zone." For this village it was a peculiar name, because there was nothing all that secret about it. "Remote" was a more accurate description. Thanh Phong was about as far away from the war as one could get while still being in it. The only real access was from the South China Sea and then up the Song Co Chien River, past beaches and the sandy dunes that gave way to thickets of mangroves marking the hamlets southern border.
It had been, for the most part, untouched by either war or progress except for the occasional bombs from Phantom jets or shells lobbed in from bigger Navy ships prowling the coast (thus the bunkers). The village was essentially left alone. So impoverished that it didn't get electricity until the late 1980s, there was no real town center, just the simple hooches with thatch for their roofs, where poorly clothed children and their families slept on the hard ground. There was no school and there were no young men of fighting age. They had either left to join the ranks of the Vietcong or fled before being conscripted into the government of South Vietnam's army. The place was populated solely by older men like Bui Van Vat and women and children. They numbered about 150 at most and spent the day tending to their rice crops or eking out a living by fishing or crabbing.
But on this night in February 1969, the war would change Thanh Phong forever. The "devils with green faces" were coming back. They were doing what they did best — hiding in the darkness and waiting for the right moment to strike.
Lieutenant Robert Kerrey sat in the darkness, watching, waiting, and nerving himself for the task that was coming. The SEALs had slipped over the sides of the Swift boat shortly before midnight and quietly and quickly came ashore on the outskirts of Thanh Phong. Their jungle fatigues blended with the brush, as did their faces — painted green with black stripes in various zigzags running down their cheeks and around their eyes and on their noses. Some wore bandanas or stockings pulled tight over their hair and tied in the back. They did look like devils. But underneath the uniforms and warpaint, they were seven boys-next-door who grew up in the suburbs and small towns across America.
They carried a small arsenal with them: antiarmor weapons, grenade launchers, large- and small-caliber automatic rifles, 9mm Smith & Wesson pistols, and nearly 1,500 rounds of ammunition. Knives and hand grenades hung from their belts, including "Willie Peter," phosphorous grenades used to root out or kill people hiding in bunkers or hooches.
It meant they would have the edge in firepower over virtually any opposition they encountered. But this was little comfort to Kerrey. The twenty-five-year-old squad leader "was really frightened, frightened of the unknown. The idea that a man trained in a SEAL team is somehow a cold-blooded killer and doesn't worry about anything, doesn't have any elevated blood pressure and accelerated pulse," Kerrey said, "I think is a false idea." On first impression, Kerrey did not strike a commanding presence. He spoke in a high-pitched tone, and his military-issue fatigues looked as if they didn't fit. His haircut was odd for a military man — long and shaggy on top and very short on the sides. He liked to tell jokes about parrots and told his teammates he dreamed in cartoons. But there was a real toughness under the gentle facade. He and his team had trained hard for moments just like this one. They had to — only two of the seven squad members had seen combat. And one of the greenhorns was their leader. If Kerrey didn't get it right, he could get himself and his men killed.
The squad had practiced this kind of mission hundreds of times during SEAL training back in San Diego and had laid some ambushes since arriving in Vietnam only a few weeks before. (The ambushes, mostly in safe territory, never amounted to anything.) But Thanh Phong was different.
Here they had real intelligence about a real target: a Vietcong political leader who was supposed to be attending a meeting in the village.
Kerrey was told the Communist official would almost certainly have armed guards. That meant a good chance of a fire-fight, a prospect that sent fear running throughout his body. As he sat in the darkness, sweating profusely, he felt as if he was back in high school, slogging through football practice in Lincoln, Nebraska, when his team scrimmaged twice a day in the sticky summer heat.
What worried Kerrey was the prime requirement of command — keeping his men alive. The thought of losing even one of them was too dreadful to dwell on. Lieutenant Kerrey had come to love his men, and they had come to see him as a father figure, even a protector who cared only for their well-being. As they sat waiting to move out, all Kerrey could do was pray that things would go according to plan.
The Swift boat that brought them, under the command of Lieutenant William Garlow, had pushed back off the beach and into the river. It would quietly motor away and await the SEAL team's radio call to extract them, hopefully when their mission was accomplished.
Now the SEALs were all alone. For a while, they sat and waited, letting their eyes adjust to the darkness, and listening for anything that sounded out of place: the bark of a frightened dog or a slight rustling in the brush from someone trying to move undetected.
William Tucker, the rear security man, had heard about these long pauses in a patrol, waiting in enemy territory for a guerrilla to pop out from nowhere, guns blazing. The silence and darkness coupled with fear could play tricks on your mind, Tucker knew, particularly after dropping a few tabs of readily available speed to keep alert. Another SEAL once told him he saw Captain Marvel all dressed up in his comic strip uniform, coming down a canal on a surfboard. Tucker imagined the big leaf next to him was really a Viet-cong fighter.
Certain that their entry had not been observed, Kerrey gave the signal to move out.
Mike Ambrose, a handsome, well-built petty officer from Illinois whom Tucker called "the mouth" for his cockiness, took the lead. Behind him was Gerhard Klann, the best operator in the group. He looked like the quintessential German: a fair-haired blond who stood 6'3", lean at the waist, and broad shouldered. Kerrey and Lloyd "Doc" Schrier, the stoic medic, were right by him. Next came more rookies, a radio man and grenadier, followed by Tucker in the rear. A Vietnamese SEAL tagged along to interpret.
Ambrose crept in the shadows toward the first hooch he could see. His gaze came to a stop on an old, unarmed man sitting outside an isolated hooch.
It was Bui Van Vat.
Ambrose felt a quick rush of adrenaline. The SEALs hadn't planned on anyone in the hamlet being awake at this hour. And this was certainly not the right hooch. There were no guards, nothing that would signify that somebody important was inside. Perhaps the man was a forward sentry, but he carried no weapon.
So far, Kerrey's men hadn't been spotted. They could try to creep past the old man in silence. But eight men carrying weapons and sundry gear were bound to make some noise. Bui Van Vat could wreck the mission.
The SEALs faced a stark choice: Should they kill him and anyone inside the hooch and continue their operation deeper into the village, or should they abort? That would look bad on their first big mission. "To tie them up and leave them in place puts the entire operation at risk," Kerrey said. The SOPs — the standard operating procedures drilled into Kerrey — spelled out exactly what to do. "Kill the people we make contact with or we have to abort," Kerrey said. It was the lieutenant's call.
William Garlow was a meticulous officer who liked a clean and orderly ship. In his spiral-bound calendar, under Tuesday, February 25, 1969, he had jotted down "SEAL insertion." Below that in the same box was "troop insertion," a reference to another operation in the region that night. At about the same time he was moving Kerrey's unit into position, a small fleet of other Swift boats were transporting one hundred Vietnamese troops to a major search-and-destroy mission in An Nohn, a village close to Thanh Phong.
Garlow was queasy about raids to take out villages. Carrying out orders to prosecute the war was one thing. But indiscriminate violence was not something he thought appropriate. The destruction of a family's home pained him, filling him with a sense of injustice. Garlow rationalized it as a necessary part of the war, but he didn't have to like it; he just had to follow orders. Before destroying a village, he did his best to insure that it was empty. Then his boat's gunners would take aim at the hooches and launch a few phosphorous rounds, exploding the homes into balls of fire. As far as he knew, he wasn't killing anybody, and that was just fine by him. Sending a hooch up in flames had become an American calling card. Infantry units that rolled through a suspect village used cigarette lighters to ignite the thatch roofs that quickly engulfed entire homes, usually while helpless families stood by and watched. The practice, caught by television cameras and shown in the living rooms back home, appalled many Americans.
Garlow's calendar was both a ship's log and a reminder of how many days remained before he could return stateside. On the twenty-third of February, two days before he picked up Kerrey's team, he wrote the number "80" and circled it — eighty days in country. This was also the first time he had written the word "SEAL" in his 1969 calendar, but Garlow knew what the commandos were in Vietnam to do — intelligence collection, assassinations, and abductions or, in the euphemism chosen for such deeds, "neutralizations."
The object was to terrorize the civilians and get them to cooperate with the Vietnamese government and quit aiding the enemy Vietcong. "You're not successful in a war unless you do hideous, awful things. It is hell on earth," Kerrey said. "Violence to the maximum for the purpose of trying to get the enemy to surrender." Though the SEALs were few in number, their reputation as fierce warriors, capable of appearing out of nowhere, had spread throughout the Mekong Delta.
It was past midnight when Garlow slowly motored toward the beach to extract the Navy men. While his sailors manned the boat's two .50-caliber machine-guns, the seven SEALs and the Vietnamese interpreter came running out of the shadows and quickly climbed aboard. Garlow revved the engines and pointed the bow out of the river and toward the South China Sea. The SEALs had moved to the stern of the boat, where crewman William O'Mara, an Irishman from the Bronx, eyed them and couldn't help feeling that something was wrong. None of the commandos had been shot or wounded, but they were all oddly subdued. "I knew something was up. They were really quiet. It was eerie," O'Mara recalled. He had heard gunfire and figured they had been in some kind of engagement, but other than that, he couldn't explain their peculiar behavior. SEALs were normally pumped up after a mission. "No way," he said, "not this night they weren't."
Once in open water, Garlow set a course for the Coast Guard cutter Point Comfort, which was standing by to whisk Kerrey and his men some three hundred miles back up the coast to Cam Rahn Bay, where their senior operational commander had his headquarters. Later, Garlow went to the radio room to call in his status. One of the SEALs accompanied him to send his own message, that the mission had been completed with no friendly casualties.
Around 4:30 that morning, Kerrey's team boarded the Point Comfort. As the ship cut through the water, the events of the night began to torment Kerrey. "I knew something really bad had come from me," he said. "I had perpetrated something just terrible. At that moment, you feel like what just happened is you've been possessed by something really evil, and you've acted on it. You've done it. You've let yourself go in a way that you never dreamed possible."
Kerrey hung over the ship's railing, vomiting and "howling like a dog" into the wind.
With terror in his eyes, he screamed, "Jesus, what have we done!"
CHAPTER 2Twenty-eight years later, in May 1997, the telephone rang at my desk in the Washington bureau of Newsweek magazine.
The caller was a retired Navy captain who had spent his entire career in the SEALs. He had done a tour in Vietnam about the same time as Bob Kerrey, commanding a platoon in the Mekong Delta. His last posting was at SEAL headquarters in Coronado, California, a secure oceanside compound on the shores of the azure Pacific and across the bay from San Diego. The job gave him access to a trove of sensitive information, from personal performance records to histories of operations in Vietnam. It made him one of the few people who had a good grasp of the truth about SEAL activities, not the Hollywood-inspired images of warriors laying in wait for a prey, sucking air through thin reeds while hiding in shallow marshy water. He'd heard and seen enough that he grew to show disdain for medals, believing they often ended up pinned to an undeserving chest. He was a realist when it came to retelling stories from Vietnam. War was hell, SEALs did good, SEALs did bad. It was mostly good, but the bad he felt should not be covered up.
He was spending his retirement from the Navy as a combination historian, sleuth, and bounty hunter. He joined several of his retired SEAL colleagues who had created a database with the names of every person who had ever made it into and graduated from Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training. It was a way to organize information for reunions and correspondence. But the real purpose was to root out imposters, the frauds who claimed to be SEALs, often with fictitious decorations, to impress a girlfriend or get a job. When they caught a phony, the confrontation was usually by e-mail, sometimes by telephone, or in a personal visit. It was not at all pleasant. More often than not, coercive language or perhaps even veiled threats of bodily harm were enough to get the job done. At last count, they had outted several thousand charlatans.
I had known the captain well for many years and trusted his information. It is why I left a telephone message which prompted his return call.
"I'm kicking around doing something on Bob Kerrey," I said. "What do you know about him?" I had made the same request of other SEALs I knew, all of whom delivered the same canned response: "Great guy ... a stand-up fellow ... good SEAL ... I liked him very much."
At the time, Kerrey was making rumblings about running for president again, taking on Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 Democratic primaries. During his last campaign, in 1992, he steered as far as he could from the details of his war record, never venturing beyond a cursory description of his Medal of Honor mission and saying "I killed people," which seemed to be a reasonable talking point for a Navy SEAL who saw combat in Vietnam. But after nearly two decades in public life, his war record consisted of little else. There had to be more. What kind of operations had he gone on? If he had indeed killed before, how many times? With a knife or a gun? Did he feel remorse?
The captain did not regard Kerrey as an imposter. But he was troubled by his acceptance of the Medal of Honor.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Education Of Lieutenant Kerrey by Gregory L. Vistica. Copyright © 2003 Gregory L. Vistica. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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