Senator Bob Kerrey's revelations earlier this year about his experiences in Vietnam shocked the nation, but he was not alone in witnessing the brutality of that war. For those who were SEALs like then-Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerrey, their war meant being at the razor's edge of a conflict where the line between civilians and soldiers sometimes was tragically blurred.
Last April, the nation learned of Senator Bob Kerrey's tragic combat operation in 1969, a mission during which a number of Vietnamese civilians were killed in a village called Thanh Phong. As with all breaking media events, the story has gone from big news to old news, and the spotlight has shifted to someone else. But this story has changed Bob Kerrey forever; only time will tell if a lifetime of public service—which included time as governor, U.S. senator, and now college president—will be overshadowed by a 60 Minutes exposition. Bob Kerrey was the focus of this story, but it touched a lot of us.
In the fall of 1970, I led a platoon of Navy SEALs from SEAL Team One into the lower Mekong Delta. About the time we were getting our first taste of combat, Lieutenant junior grade) Bob Kerrey was in a Veterans Administration hospital in Philadelphia. While we busied ourselves with the dangerous business of stalking the Viet Cong on their home ground, Bob Kerrey contemplated the stump that had once been his right foot. He talked about the future with other amputees such as Louis Puller Jr.—what would they do now; what would happen to them? I knew nothing then about the events at Thanh Phong, but I was learning firsthand about combat and the tragedies of war. For those of us who were in the business of sneaking into enemy hamlets with our faces blackened and automatic weapons at the ready, the recent public examination about what may or may not have happened in Thanh Phong that night in February 1969 is especially painful. But there is another side to this war—our war.
One morning my SEAL squad crept to the edge of a Viet Cong village and waited for dawn to make our attack. We were brought to this particular cluster of hooches by one of my Vietnamese scouts. His name was Con, and he had lived in a village a few miles away. Con was a former Viet Cong who joined the South Vietnamese Army and swore allegiance to the Saigon government. Now he worked for us. We knew this hamlet was an active Viet Cong resupply point; we did not know if there were VC in the village that morning. At first light we formed a skirmish line and swept through the area. Were we tense? Ready to shoot at the slightest provocation? You bet! But there were no VC combatants, only VC civilians: women, children, and old men. We took no fire that morning and we ourselves did not shoot.
It is very difficult to describe what goes through a squad leader's mind as he leads men into harm's way. We called them the "what ifs." What if there is a main-force reaction element waiting for us, or nearby and maneuvering to hit us coming out? What if my communications break down and I cannot get helicopter gunships when I need them? What if there are booby traps? What about the bunkers in the hooches? If we take fire among all these civilians, how do we break contact and get away? It usually happens without warning; the shooting starts and suddenly it is all confusion and shouting, the crisscross of tracer rounds, and the explosions from grenades. If it happens now, how do I protect my men? How do we get safely from an area where everyone is the enemy, where some of them carry guns and some do not?
That particular morning we were lucky, or so I thought. We found only water stores and food to feed a whole lot more people than were living in that jungle hamlet. These supplies we quickly destroyed and then we left the area. Once back in the cloak of jungle and mangrove, we felt much better and were able to get to our extraction point and the boat that would take us to safety. Back at our base, I made my after-action report: no enemy killed, no enemy wounded, and no friendly casualties, just some Viet Cong supplies destroyed. Another day in our war.
Two days later I found Con crying. He was sitting on his bunk, which was right next to mine in our SEAL hootch. It seems someone in the hamlet had recognized him and reported it to the local VC militia chief. The VC went to his home village and executed his parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles—all of them publicly. In a single night his entire family simply ceased to exist. Con had committed two unpardonable sins: he supported the noncommunist (albeit corrupt) Saigon government; and he worked with Navy SEALs, the men with black faces. Until that time I had not given much thought to the politics of the war and who was right and who was wrong. I had aspired to become a Navy SEAL, the best of the best, and now I had a convenient war in which to prove myself. Talk about a naive young man. But from that time forward, I knew who the bad guys were and why we were there. This conviction deepened as I learned firsthand that what had happened to Con's family was not some isolated atrocity or the crime of some renegade band of Viet Cong. It was policy; it was part of their population control. We saw this more than once.
I do not know what happened that night Bob Kerrey led his men into Thanh Phong. I do know the tremendous stress he was under; I know about the what-ifs that race through the mind of a combat leader. And noncombatants sometimes were caught in the middle of those brief, vicious nighttime firefights. It did not happen often, but it did happen. And it happened to me. After an engagement where civilians were killed, we felt terrible—ashamed and angry. We were ashamed because we had killed noncombatants, and angry that this was a part of the war—our war. Back at the base, we cleaned our weapons, wiped the black paint from our faces, and we seldom talked about it. Then we went back out the next night and tried to do better. I do know that no SEAL elements in Vietnam went out at night to do their job with cold-blooded murder in their hearts or with the express objective of deliberately killing noncombatants, sympathizers or not. Nor did the fact the Viet Cong did this with some regularity relieve us of the obligation to treat civilians humanely. The Viet Cong guerillas did have good reason to hate and fear us. In most engagements, we took their measure and more.
In light of what Bob Kerrey and his men were purported to have done, I do have one observation. Vietnam still is a police state. The government now may subscribe to a kinder and gentler version of communism, but. it still is an authoritarian regime. They won the war, and the right to tell their history. But they still are the same rulers who publicly executed Con's family and buried them in an unmarked grave. If there were villagers at Thanh Phong who saw something other than an atrocity committed by Navy SEALs, do you think they really would come forward? Of my teammates from SEAL Team One who went into Thanh Phong that night, I personally know only three: Rick Knepper, Lloyd "Doc" Schrier, and Bob Kerrey. I met them long after our days at Team One. I consider them men of character and honor. Their lives have been of value to their communities and their nation. For their contributions while in uniform and after they left naval service, we owe them respect and consideration—not persecution.
At the Vietnam Memorial, there are 12 men on that wall with the name of Couch. Oddly enough, not a single one is named Kerrey. There but for the grace of God.
Dick Couch is a novelist who lives in Ketchum, Idaho. His first nonfiction work, The Warrior Elite, which details modern Navy SEAL training, will be published by Crown Books in the fall of 2001.