By Christopher Bassford

I picked up my paper on Wednesday and soon stumbled across the “Kerrey Killed Civilians in Vietnam” headline. Ah, I thought, here we go again: another round in the press’s never-ending game of Gotcha. The first image that passed through my mind was a scene in Steve Martin’s move The Jerk, in which a deranged sniper opens fire on a hapless gas station attendant, muttering beneath his breath, “Die, you random bastard!”

Of course, Bob Kerrey is not just any random bastard. His somewhat incongruous status as liberal icon cum war hero gave the headline’s  insinuation of “war criminal” a juicy double punch. We’re maybe talking Pulitzer here. And, oh yes, a few destroyed lives and reputations among those foolish enough to have done their nation’s bidding in Vietnam.
 
Stories like this, my gut told me, are the journalistic equivalent of  McNamara’s notorious “body-count” statistical approach to measuring progress in the Indochina War itself. The moral and evidentiary ambiguities of the Vietnam experience offer a particularly rich hunting ground for scandalmongers. And some opportunistic, ladder-climbing journalist had just struck gold.

So much for first thoughts.  While they are not necessarily wrong (I’m still not sure what motivated this story, reported 32 years too late), this tale has forced me into a fair bit of introspective thinking. Like many in my generation, my meandering personal evolution has left me with a set of values that are hard to reconcile with one another.  I was a draft-age anti-Vietnam War activist in the early 1970s, and I haven’t changed my general attitude towards that misbegotten venture. But boredom, residual patriotism, and the Ayatollah made me a volunteer Army combat arms officer myself in the 1980s. I’ve adopted many of the officer corps’ values—and I still automatically get in step with the fellow walking next to me. Later still, I was trained as a historian to be intensely aware of the often insurmountable problems involved in reconstructing such events. Today, I’m the father of children I wouldn’t care to see involved in a like situation, on either side—but my daughter is an Army ROTC cadet I’m damned proud of. I’m also a national security professional, charged with helping my peers think about America’s “national strategy” in a world radically different from the one Kerrey faced in 1969. That strategy may very legitimately require sending my son or my daughters off to face the physical and moral dangers Kerrey faced. But then, I know we could also blunder into the wrong war through sheer chance—and maybe stupidity.

Also, by the way, while I often share the innate dislike and suspicion of “the press” voiced by some of my uniformed colleagues, it turns out that all the real-life journalists I actually know are great folks.

So I’m both wary of the dangers in this story and eager to see its implications thrashed out in public debate. Long protected on distant frontiers by America’s small, socially isolated, professional military, the American public—or its press corps, at least--is increasingly ignorant of the painful, messy realities of combat. Just about any combat veteran can be tarred using the ambiguous wreckage of the past that passes for the historical record. We don’t need to paralyze the nation’s will to fight through moralistic hand-wringing, dark insinuation, and finger-pointing. As a nation, we need to understand that when we send our children into combat, the responsibility for the ensuing carnage is ours, not theirs.

And yet, we need to find that elusive line between supporting the troops and upholding the American moral values that make their sacrifices worthwhile.  Only repeated, vigorous examination of these painful issues can enable us to maintain our bearings as a society.

So, I guess my working outlook on this unfolding story has to be as complex and multifaceted as my outlook on the underlying problem. I guess my position on this issue is something like “Hail to the irritating jerks in the press who make us think about stuff like this.”

As to the controversy itself, there are some nagging questions that need to be resolved. I’d like to know the justification for dredging it up in the first place. I think we’re entitled to know the journalistic motive and to see the responsible publication’s internal debate on the issue. As a proud former soldier, I’d like to see the problems our troops face better understood by the public. But as an ex-soldier who was often outraged by the dishonesty of the military reporting system, I’d like to see our current military leaders reminded of the disastrous cost of hiding the truth from their subordinates and from the nation as a whole. I’d like to know who made “21 VC bodies” out of unarmed civilians. As a historian, I’d like to see this incident fully fleshed out as a case study in what goes wrong in military operations. As a citizen, I’d like to know why Kerrey himself sat on the story for so long, because that might resolve some questions about him as a political figure.

But most of all, as a human being, I’d like to see Kerrey finally work through this experience. It seems clear that bottling it up has cost him a great deal of unnecessary pain. If he can finally make peace with the Vietnam experience, maybe the rest of the nation can too.