And it was a huge story. The news program “60 Minutes” spent a
full hour on it
(granted, 60 Minutes created the stir with its story, and not the other
way around)
and it was front-page news in every paper in the country.
You might remember it. A war hero, Congressional Medal of Honor
and
Silver and Bronze Star, former member of the US Senate and possible
Presidential candidate in 2004, was accused by one of his own men,
among
others, of holding down unarmed old people and children in a Vietnamese
village and slitting their throats, and lining up others and gunning
them down.
Really.
It was in all the papers.
Surely somebody must remember.
Richard Cohen of the New Times did. He wrote a column in which
he
related how he watched the interviews 60 Minutes conducted with both
Kerrey and his accusers very carefully, and came away with a distinctly
uneasy feeling that Kerrey wasn’t telling the truth.
Cohen stated explicitly what my own feelings were. Watching Kerrey,
I
felt he was lying. Watching Gerhard Knapp, his main accuser,
I felt he
was telling the truth. I couldn’t get a firm impression on the
Vietnamese
survivors in the village, since I don’t know how to read the cultural
cues.
But Knapp wore a level gaze, spoke quietly, no trace of whining or
wheedling in his voice. Kerrey didn’t say, “I didn’t do that.”
His answer was often the legalistic, “That incident is not in my memory.”
I found that disturbing.
Kerrey claims that there was gunfire from the village, and they returned
fire,
and upon entering the village to mop up, were horrified to discover
that they
had killed a bunch of civilians. That didn’t stop the Navy from
filing a spurious
report that Kerrey and his group had killed 21 Viet Cong, and giving
him a
Bronze Star for it. If that version of events is true, then Kerrey
committed a
horrible mistake, and the Navy utterly disgraced itself in covering
it up and
lying to the American people about it.
However, Kerrey has been accused by Knapp, and survivors of the village,
of ordering and participating in the slaughter of at least a dozen
unarmed civilians.
That’s a bit different.
It doesn’t matter that it was 30 years ago. The Simon Weisenthal
Center is
conducting world-wide searches for people who are accused of crimes
committed
60 years past, and some of those accusations aren’t nearly as heinous
as those
made against Kerrey. Some crimes cannot be forgiven.
Most Germans feel that they should not be held accountable for acts
perpetrated during the war, for the quite sensible reason that most
Germans were not alive at that time. I was born after world war
two,
and don’t feel personal responsibility for the firebombings of Dresden
and Tokyo. But most Germans allow that war criminals from the
Nazi era
who have not been captured yet should still pay for their crimes, even
after all this time, should they be caught. Some crimes cannot
be forgiven.
Most people realize that in war, horrible things happen, and men are
placed under unendurable pressures, and that firing into a group of
huts
in the mistaken belief that there are enemy combatants within, and
then
learning that it was only old people and children, is one of those
horrible
things that happen to overstressed soldiers. But that’s not the
same as
cold-bloodedly lining unarmed villagers up and summarily executing
them.
Some crimes cannot be forgiven.
Kerry is entitled to a presumption of innocence. The evidence
against him
isn’t particularly solid, and he may well have had substantial and
quite benign
reasons why he seemed so shifty and evasive during the 60 Minutes interview.
But the military and Congress and the public aren’t rushing to presume
Kerrey innocent while they investigate to find out what might have
really happened. What they are doing is hurrying to bury the
story as
fast as they can, and forget it ever happened.
There’s been a lot of that. Captain Waddle of the USS Greeneville
got
off with a reprimand and a forced early retirement after his sub sank
a
Japanese fishing vessel, killing nine. The massacre at No Gun
Ri, Korea,
was swept under the carpet, with the amusing finding that American
troops
were justified in firing at the people crowded in under that bridge
because
enemy North Korean soldiers were concealed among the villagers.
That the shooting continued for three days and not one shot was fired
in return
apparently was deemed irrelevant. The American troops were justified
in
shooting at the masses huddled under that bridge for no other reason
then that
they were American troops, and nobody wanted to make the military look
bad.
My Lai was whitewashed as far as they could go with such a blatant
slaughter,
with Calley and Medina getting slaps on the wrists and becoming heroes
to the neo-fascist right.
And now it looks like we’re seeing more of it with Bob Kerrey.
Even people
who normally would be delighted with a Democratic Senator and potential
Presidential
candidate being touched with a hint of scandal are leaving it alone.
Rush Limbaugh and
all the other pseudo-journalistic gasbags of the far right, who huffed
and moaned and
bellowed for ten solid years over the largely imaginary misdeeds of
Bill Clinton, are
silent on this. They went out like 3 cent light bulbs. Can’t
make the military look bad.
People will question your patriotism.
It’s not limited to the far right. Nobody wants to get into this.
Hell, I don’t want to get into it. But there’s no alternative
that isn’t worse.
It’s not fair. Kerrey deserves a fair investigation and airing
of what happened in that
little village. It may exonerate him, or it may damn him, but
as it now stands he’s damned
anyway, by the private doubts that people will forevermore feel about
him. His political
career is over. And he’ll never be able to meet someone at a party
without seeing a
hesitancy, a doubt, in the eyes of those he meets. Is he a monster,
a mass murderer,
someone who did things worse than what Charlie Manson did?
But more to the point, it’s a deadly, dangerously stupid approach to
take with the military. We’re so used to glorifying the military
and
honoring them that we’ve forgotten that they are a weapon, one that
like
any weapon, must be contained and controlled lest it destroy its owner.
If we can’t address circumstances under which the military lost
control, disgraced itself, murdered innocent people and lied about
it,
then what we will end up with is a military that, more and more often,
will lose control, disgrace itself, murder innocent people and lie
about
it. If you put the military above the law, you end up with a
military
that sees itself as being above the law, and there is nothing more
dangerous in the world than that.
The German army, during WW2, was subject to strict discipline in the
invaded lands of Western Europe. Any German soldier caught raping
and
looting by his command was summarily shot. Soldiers not treating
the
civilian population with at least reasonable courtesy and respect were
shipped off to the Russian front to perish in the cold and mud.
This,
in a country that was in the process of murdering tens of millions
of
people, turning half of Europe into a charnel house and leaving a stain
on the human character that might never be eradicated. The High
Command
of the German Army realized there was one thing worse than Nazism,
and
that was Nazism with an undisciplined military running amok.
It’s a hell of a note, when someone thinks that not restraining and
disciplining your troops might make Nazi Germany WORSE.
If we raise the military above our laws, and above our own morals and
standards, no matter how patriotic and honorable our motives might
be,
we end up with a military that will feel free to murder, and will feel
free to violate customary standards of decency and humanity that,
attenuated as they are in war, might be the only thing standing between
a military action and a genocide. The American military has no
particular claim to superior morals; on that they don’t even compare
well to the German army in WW2. By prete>
The Founders understood the need to have the military answerable to
the
civilian government and its laws. They saw first hand the results
of a military
of a land unwilling to address crimes and atrocities committed by that
military.
We need to stop running away from this. We aren’t doing Kerrey
any favors.
We aren’t doing the military any favors. And we aren’t doing
ourselves any favors.
Investigate Kerrey, and let the chips fall where they may.
--
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because they believe most people are pretty much like themselves.
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they, too, believe most people are pretty much like themselves.
Not dead, in jail, or a slave?
Thank a liberal!
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