Fog of Kerrey

By Bill Steigerwald

Thanks to the confessions of Bob Kerrey, the eternally divisive ghost of Vietnam is back in the news and the media clich? of the day is “The fog of war.”

That apt metaphor of battlefield confusion was overused by a lot of commentators to explain/excuse the conflicting versions of what happened one night in 1969 when Kerrey — future Nebraska senator, future presidential aspirant, future boyfriend of Debra Winger — led a U.S. Navy SEAL death squad into a Vietnam village.

Time magazine also uses “Fog of War” as a headline for its cover package about Kerrey’s nightmarish raid, which everyone agrees left at least 20 unarmed old men, women and children dead.

Was this slaughter of civilians an unavoidable tragedy, an accident occurring in the dark confusion of battle, as Kerrey says? Or was it a deliberate massacre — a cold crime of war ordered by Kerrey and carried out execution-style, as one of his men has claimed?

We’ll never know the truth, as Time’s story — and a similar one in Newsweek about the raid and how it came to public light after 32 years — makes plain. No one has the stomach to investigate.

Kerrey, a war hero who lost part of his leg in Vietnam, is an ambitious politician, which ought to discolor his version of events. But he’s also a politician almost everyone likes and few are rushing to condemn — especially Time’s writers, Johanna McGeary and Karen Tumulty, who in the end make Kerrey another victim of the idiocy that was Vietnam.

Even if we learned the facts of Kerrey’s raid, however, it wouldn’t help much. Like the war itself, the moral ambiguities and extenuating military circumstances of what happened that night could keep the country arguing for decades.

Vietnam was a dirty, ineptly prosecuted war that nearly every hawk and dove have come to despise and criticize for some good moral, political or military reason. As McGeary and Tumulty say, it “has come to define the way we ought not to fight our wars.”

Yet in American Heritage’s May cover story (not online yet), historian Victor Davis Hanson argues that America ultimately won in Vietnam. In his long, informative but sometimes dense essay, “How We Won the Vietnam War,” Hanson says that America’s cause was just and its military efforts in Southeast Asia were effective.

But Hanson is no mindless hawk. He also says that when it came to criticizing the generals for their ineffectual, inhumane and counter-productive tactics and the Washington politicians for their lying, “the American media had it mostly right.”

Hanson debunks several media-propagated myths about Vietnam, including that U.S. troops suffered higher rates of post-traumatic stress syndrome and that Hispanics and blacks served or died disproportionately there. He knows America did in fact lose the war in Vietnam.

But he argues that we ultimately won the peace because we were a freer society whose institutions were able to publicly critique and correct the flaws of the war effort.

We can rightly claim victory, he says, because in the long run the ordeal strengthened America’s model of democracy and capitalism and our reformed military emerged stronger, not weaker. That makes sense, but Kerrey and millions of others whose lives were ruined or wasted in Vietnam would say the cost was way too dear.

Bill Steigerwald

Bill Steigerwald is an associate editor and writer at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He has written a weekly column about magazines for the Los Angeles Times, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Trib since 1987. Read more of Bill Steigerwald's articles here.