May 18, 2001
Getting
Away With Murder
Bob Kerrey:
the Life and Times
of a Throat-Slitter
By Richard Gibson
Former Senator Robert Kerrey has admitted
that as leader of a Navy Seal unit he participated in the murder
of civilians in Vietnam. The Seal unit was part of an assassination
squad, operating under the guidance of Operation Phoenix which,
in the course of the war, killed more than 30,000 Vietnamese,
using what its leader, William Colby, called a "scatter-gun
approach," in later congressional hearings. Villagers on
the scene say Kerrey's Seals not only shot more than 100 women
and children with automatic fire, but slit the throats of five
people, all judged less than human: Gooks, Slants, Slopes, Cong,
Charlie, VC.
Kerrey's admissions came in
the New York Times Magazine, a story initially quashed by the
television networks and Newsweek. Clearly indictable under existing
war crime statutes, Kerrey participated in a cover-up of his
unit's killings for nearly three decades while he used his claims
to valor to promote his political career.
Following the New York Times
revelations, though, two interesting things happened, both relating
to how history is constructed, not only as a vision of the past,
but as a call to action in the future. In that context, Kerrey's
thinking about his experience in Vietnam, written not too long
afer he returned, is instructive.
As the Times article developed,
Kerrey and his friends first began to commiserate with one another
about the tough times they had, the strain on their consciences,
the difficulty they had in living with dirty secrets, how their
reputations of valor may be imperfect. Besides, what were we
to do when everyone was an enemy? This experience traces the
path of many convicted fascist war criminals in Germany who,
exposed long after WWII closed, said the same thing.
Second, the debate shifted
to whom we shall call heroic. The mainstream outlook is now at
least two-fold: perhaps nobody, or maybe people like Kerrey since
war is hell. Three kinds of heroes are missed altogether.
Certainly those working-class US youth
who found themselves enmeshed in a web that led directly to the
front lines of battle in Vietnam, those of them who refused to
go on burn-all kill-all missions, those who shot their own officers
and blew them up in their tents, creating a new word in the lexicon,
fragging; those who returned to the US, joined the Vietnam Veterans
Against the War, and, denouncing the war, threw their Medals
of Honor back at congress; those young men and women, black
and white, like Bill Marshall and Scott Camil, wounded and decorated
heroes who rejected the war, are mostly unnoticed.
The working class anti-war
movement is almost equally opaque, as if the resistance emanated
from Harvard and Columbia, behind the cavalier lead of rich liberal
children with bombs like Billy Ayers whose contempt for people
sought to substitute explosives for a mass conscious movement.
In fact the blue-collar student movements at Wayne State in
Detroit, San Francisco State, Kent State, and related schools
seriously took up the issues of people who had a lot to lose,
whose draft deferments were not coming from counsel with connected
pals in the medical school, and who could wield real power by
exerting their natural influence in their birth-class.
Often under the leadership of Black and Latin youth, those people
then led the mass sit-down strikes in auto in Detroit, and the
community uprisings throughout the US, while the terrorists hid
in million-dollar homes, returning to academic prominence after
legal wrist slaps a few years laternow rich liberals without
bombs.
Further outside the imperial
gaze, even today, is the heroism of the Vietnamese, not only
those who Kerrey and many other US officers caught up in the
genocidal invasion sought to exterminate, but those who defeated
the empire, politically, militarily, and morally, causing imperial
troops to run away in their helicopters, pushing their allies
off the struts as they ran. Despite every effort to reconstruct
that piece of history, whether through relentless Hollywood endeavors
to recapture the good old days of World War II, or the repositioning
of responsibility to suggest that all US troops in Southeast
Asia were war criminals, and hence none of them were, nothing
ever will be the same. The US has never been able to field a
reliable army ready to fight extended conflicts since the people
won in Vietnam US citizens have never again trusted the tyrants.
There are no Vietnamese on
the Vietnam Wall, yet millions of them died--and changed the
world.
However, for purposes of clarity,
it is worthwhile to look back on what Robert Kerrey wrote after
he returned from Vietnam, more than twelve years ago, perhaps
when his recollections were sharper, less opportunistically censored
by the polish of electoral success. This is what Nebraska's Robert
Kerrey said in the opening paragraph of an article titled, "On
Remembering the Vietnam War:"
"Around the farm, there
is an activity that no one likes to do. Yet it is sometimes necessary.
When a cat gives birth to kittens that aren't needed, the kittens
must be destroyed. And there is a moment when you are holding
the kitten under the water when you know that if you bring that
kitten back above the water it will live, and if you don't bring
it back above in that instant the kitten will be dead. This,
for me, is a perfect metaphor for those dreadful moments in war
when you do not quite do what you previously thought you would
do."*
Such is the choice, drowning cats or
universal solidarity against despotism. CP
*The Vietnam Reader, edited by Walter
Capps, Routledge, New York (1990)
Richard
Gibson is a professor
of Education at San Diego State University.
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