Senator Bob Kerry

[David]

reprinted from the commentary section of patriotfiles.com


bertetto writes "Gary Parrott and I were in IV Corps in Viet Nam at the same time. While I am no particular supporter of former Senator Kerrey I found Gary's letter to the editors in Commentary Magazine's Nov. 2001 edition enlightening.


TO THE EDITOR:



Gabriel Schoenfeld is rightly skeptical of several aspects of the story told by Gregory L. Vistica in the New York Times Magazine. In February 1969, according to that story, a unit of Navy SEALs led by a young Bob Kerrey loosed 1,200
rounds of ammunition at a group of Vietnamese civilians in the hamlet of Thanh Phong in the Mekong Delta. Kerrey himself has acknowledged the incident, but has said that the shooting took place from a distance, in response to enemy
fire, and was directed at what he thought were Vietcong guerrillas, only later discovering otherwise. But one member of his unit, Gerhard Klann, reported that the shooting was, on the contrary, a deliberate act, committed at close range
against unarmed villagers and intended to facilitate the escape of the SEALs from the area.



Klann?s story is indeed riveting: seven SEALs sneak into a village on a dark night 32 years ago and, finding no enemy, round up all the villagers, form a firing squad, and execute them. The only problem is that what he describes is
impossible.



Like Bob Kerrey, I was a SEAL patrol leader in Vietnam, and I made three back-to-back tours in the Mekong Delta. Kerrey?s platoon came to Vietnam and relieved mine at the end of 1968; the Thanh Phong raid happened a month after I
left.



Thanh Phong lay in the Thanh Phu Secret Zone, one of the most dangerous Vietcong strongholds in the Mekong Delta. On the night of Kerrey?s raid, the SEALs were going after an important Vietcong official who, according to intelligence reports, was to meet with a military commander in the village. As the SEALs would have known, Vietcong officials routinely kept a team of soldiers for protection, and military commanders always traveled with a security element. The SEALs, by contrast, were without the usual cover of nearby helicopter gunships and were out of artillery range; this was an unusually treacherous mission. Total lack of support made them completely reliant on stealth, the element of surprise, and their own ammunition. If anything went wrong, the Vietcong could easily encircle them or cut off their withdrawal. Klann himself made this point to Dan Rather on 60 Minutes when he said that the chances of getting out alive, if the SEALs? mission was compromised, were ?slim to none.?



Now picture again the scene according to Klann. Seven men, deep in an enemy stronghold, with no hope of support or of rescue if their luck were to turn bad, make their way into a village. There, they find no Vietcong. So, with the civilian inhabitants huddled in front of them and all seven SEALs grouped on one side with their backs to the jungle, on Bob Kerrey?s order. . . .



Stop right there. This is the moment that could not have happened. I crept into too many Thanh Phongs on too many terrifying, dark nights not to know what those seven SEALs were thinking as they entered the village. Where were the Vietcong? Were they in the tree line, watching, ready to come swarming down? Were they waiting on the trail leading out? Did they have B-40 rockets? A mortar? Was the whole thing a trap? A thousand such thoughts were possible; ?nobody is home, let?s start shooting? would not have been one of them.



The SEALs had a standard operating procedure for missions like this one. Upon entering a site like Thanh Phong, five of the seven would fan out, taking defensive positions pre-assigned in the day?s briefing. Each man would crouch in the shadows, pointing his weapon toward an approach to the village, providing protection for the two SEALs assigned to search for weapons, documents, prisoners, or anything of intelligence value. If the enemy came swarming out of the jungle, the five were ready to return fire instantly and cover the team?s withdrawal.



To buy Klann?s story you have to imagine, instead, all seven SEALs forgetting about their unseen enemy, turning their backs to the dangers lurking in the spooky tree line, and clustering up in front of a bunch of civilians. Clustering up? Sorry: every SEAL would know that a single grenade, rocket, or well-aimed burst from the tree line could wipe out the squad.



What happened next, in Klann?s version, makes even less sense: seven SEALs blasting away 1,200 precious rounds to execute fifteen villagers. Ammunition was practically the SEALs? only currency of survival, and all they had among
them, as we know from the after-action report routinely filed following every mission, was 2,400 rounds. The weapons carried by SEALs were capable of firing 1,000 rounds per minute; in a fierce firefight, all 2,400 rounds could be shot
in less than a minute. To get home alive, the SEALs husbanded their ammunition carefully.



Klann says they executed the villagers in order to keep them from alerting the Vietcong to the SEALs? presence. Figure that one out. If relative noiseless-ness was the objective, the SEALs could have ordered the civilians back into the bunker from which they had emerged and dropped a grenade down the hatch. Atrocity? Yes, but one muffled ?whump? and the SEALs would be on their way with their ammo intact. The Vietcong would have thought it was a villager fishing with explosives, or an animal stumbling into a booby trap. Alternatively, Klann himself, who had the machine gun, could have accomplished the atrocity he describes with one short burst.



Until the firing, the SEALs had the precious element of surprise. Once they cranked off 1,200 rounds on that deathly-still night, every Vietcong within five miles would have known they were there. Worse, they would have expended half their precious ammunition and might still have had to fight their way back to the river. There was no way a SEAL would pull a trigger in such a situation, unless it were to initiate an assault or, as Kerrey asserted, to return enemy fire.



Finally, Klann claims the squad shot the civilians on Kerrey?s order. Nobody seems to have asked Klann how the order was given, but in a situation like Thanh Phong an impromptu change of plans was next to impossible. It was not simply a matter of calling out in the dark, ?Hey, guys, come in off your positions. There has been a change of plans and I need your massive firepower to kill these unarmed civilians.? Indeed, with five of the SEALs spread out in defensive positions, I cannot imagine how a patrol leader would have effected such a maneuver even had he wanted to. Knowing the men in Kerrey?s squad as I do, I also find it impossible to believe any would have complied with such a patently illegal and tactically preposterous order.



There is an illusion that the Thanh Phong story has now been ?covered? by the media. In fact the media covered only the edited words of Gerhard Klann, fed through Gregory Vistica and Dan Rather together with their own assurances that Klann was a credible witness. But then, surprisingly, Klann vanished and refused calls. When his teammates stepped forward and gently suggested his memories were in error, and when Bob Kerrey subjected himself to full and very painful examination, Klann?s story started to look thin.



At that point, reporters scurried to Vietnam. There, under the stern eyes of Hanoi officials, they held interviews with ex-Vietcong who, predictably, agreed with what Hanoi had already permitted to be said in its government-controlled press, which had publicly convicted Bob Kerrey long ago. No matter: the Washington Post headlined its story, ?Villagers Dispute Kerrey?s Account,? as if the ?villagers? in question were so many Iowa farmers; columnist Mary McGrory was duly moved to call for a tribunal.



Over the decades, the reality that was the Vietnam war has been supplanted by myth. Nothing, it seems, can be allowed to dispel that myth?not even, or especially, the truth.

GARY PARROTT
Belfair, Washington