Bob Kerrey's culpability: The principle of noncombatant immunity
Marino, Gordon
Gordon Marino KERREY'S CULPABILITY Vietnam & the just-war tradition Hast month," Sixty Minutes II" aired a program in which Gerhard Klann claimed that on February 25,1969, former Senator Bob...
...His ghosts are right...
...Kerrey remembers feeling aghast when he learned that the people he killed were not exactly the Viet Cong fighters that were later registered in the body count...
...Even on Kerrey's own murky account, he did not give a lot of thought at Thanh Phong to the possibility he was endangering the lives of civilians...
...And we owe it to future generations of fighting men and women to consider the possibility that our guiding rules of conduct in that war were immoral...
...Klann, who was the most experienced member of Kerrey's seal team, insists that Kerrey personally helped him slit an old man's throat and then later ordered the killing of women and children...
...Kerrey's defense does a disservice to those soldiers—the vast majority, I suspect— who refused on principle to kill children...
...Apparently, if you were there you can't pass judgment either, as many of those who insist on the special moral circumstances of the Vietnam War seem to believe that everything was legal along the Ho Chi Minh Trail...
...According to Kerrey, "We were instructed not to take prisoners...
...But we cannot, I think, pretend to believe that in fighting such a war it is permissible to regard everyone not in a U.S...
...In certain sectors, they say, it was permissible to regard everyone, infants and grandparents included, as though they were grenade slingers...
...involvement in Vietnam, that tragic conflict has of late drifted into a more peaceful place in our collective memory...
...Its past set down before the soul, And lighted with a match, Perusal to facilitate Of its condensed dispatch...
...But perhaps Aristotle was not Kierkegaardian enough to recognize a distinction between remorse and repentance...
...In his Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas provides the groundwork for much just-war theory...
...Though Kerrey now says that the medal he won for valor at Thanh Phong means nothing to him, he accepted the Bronze Star for his grizzly work...
...According to Kerrey, his team was fired upon and he in turn directed his men to shoot into a hamlet but without any intent to harm noncombatants...
...Gordon Marino KERREY'S CULPABILITY Vietnam & the just-war tradition Hast month," Sixty Minutes II" aired a program in which Gerhard Klann claimed that on February 25,1969, former Senator Bob Kerrey commanded and participated in the systematic murder of civilians at Thanh Phong in Vietnam...
...He should have resisted firing into Thanh Phong...
...is that atrocities against civilians were widespread in Vietnam, and were required by commanders because of the orders they were given by the government in Washington...
...He adds that remorse over the consequences of such an action is evidence of its being involuntary...
...Klann's rendition of the events of that evening has been partially corroborated by two Vietnamese witnesses...
...McCain added that unless you were there, you should not pass judgment on anyone's behavior in Vietnam...
...It is not hard to understand how soldiers fighting in a guerrilla war might come to view civilians in this way...
...another highly decorated Vietnam veteran, proclaimed that Kerrey remained his hero...
...Executing prisoners is also against the laws of war...
...Developed by such thinkers as Grotius, Pufendorf, and in our own time Michael Walzer, this theory provides a moral framework for how soldiers should act in the chaos that is war...
...As Gregory Vistica reports in the New York Times Magazine (April 29), "one thing is certain: around midnight on February 25,1969 (at Thang Phong) Kerrey and his men killed at least thirteen unarmed women and children...
...We owe it to the people buried at Thanh Phong to search our memory again...
...Vaguely defending his actions, Kerrey told a reporter, "There are people on the [Vietnam Memorial] Wall who died because they didn't realize a woman or child could be carrying a gun...
...In his Senate office, Kerrey kept a landscape painting inscribed with these thorny words from Emily Dickinson: Remorse is Memory awake, Her companies astir,-— A presence of departed acts At window and at door...
...But if Kerrey and other commanders were right to think that they were operating in so-called free-fire zones in which there was no distinction to be drawn between friend and foe, they still had an obligation to regard all the defenseless Vietnamese they encountered as prisoners of war, prisoners who possessed pertinent rights and were owed protections...
...The intentional killing of civilians is proscribed, and so are military actions that show a gross disregard for the lives of innocents...
...As William Pfaff has observed {Commonweal, May 18), "The truth that the United States has officially kept secret...
...His remorse did not end there...
...But by that same measure of gallantry, Kerrey did not hew to a standard of courage and moral discernment at Thanh Phong...
...Kerrey has long acknowledged that things happened that night that he cannot exactly remember but would give anything to forget...
...Kerrey was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for a subsequent engagement, one in which he lost most of a leg below the knee...
...Haunted as he claims to have been, Kerrey does not seem 9 to think that he is morally culpable for what happened...
...Kerrey clearly is remorseful...
...Kerrey's Dickinson poem echoes the fact that he has for years wandered back and forth over the events of that night, wondering whether or not he should have done something differently...
...Or again, while we can understand how a soldier might panic and make murderous mistakes, both just-war theory and military manuals prohibit treating everyone in enemy territory as though he or she were attacking you with an AK-47...
...For 'tis His institution,— The complement of Hell...
...Everyone familiar with the just-war tradition agrees that a distinction must be drawn between combatants and noncombatants, for without this distinction war would not differ from terrorism...
...After many years of bitter controversy and division surrounding the U.S...
...Remorse is cureless,—the disease Not even God can heal...
...Perhaps that sense of closure was premature...
...After the Kerrey story broke, indignant vets entered the fray insisting that in Vietnam there was no distinguishing between combatants and noncombatants, especially in Viet Cong strongholds such as Thanh Phong...
...Bob Kerrey does not deserve a medal for what happened at Thanh Phong, but neither does he deserve to be villainized...
...When Kerrey got home, he wept to his mother and his pastor about Thanh Phong...
...uniform as an enemy combatant...
...Aristotle teaches that we are not to be blamed for an action that results from an unavoidable ignorance of particular circumstances...
...Gordon Marino is associate professor of philosophy and director of the Hong/Kierkegaard Library at Saint Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota...
...Justwar theory suggests otherwise...
...We have known for a long time that American troops in Vietnam felt free to kill anything that moved...
...No one has cast doubt on Kerrey's heroism in that instance...
...Writing in the Wall Street Journal (April 27), Senator John McCain (R-Ariz...
Vol. 128 • June 2001 • No. 11
